The first day at work is daunting for everyone. Organizations must take the onboarding process as an opportunity to win their minds and hearts. Whether your new employees become engaged or disengaged is determined by the employee onboarding experience.
Think of onboarding as an imprinting window. The entire experience is going to leave a lasting impression in their minds – possibly throughout their careers.
Instead of overwhelming the new hires with boatloads of information, use this as an opportunity to forge a strong emotional connection with them. In this blog post, you’re going to learn about the benefits of eLearning in the employee onboarding experience.
Problems With Traditional Employee Onboarding Experience
One of the reasons why most organizations experience a high turnover rate is the poor onboarding experience. Research suggests that nearly 25% of new hires exit the company within the first 12 months.
That’s a significant waste of the company’s resources spent on recruitment. According to a survey, the average cost-per-hire is $4,129, and the time taken to fill the position again is 42 days.
Since the time of this survey, the cost has most certainly increased. Onboarding experience gives the first impression of what the person’s life would be like in the organization. And first impressions leave a deep impact.
You can either use it to your advantage or bring a completely undesirable outcome.
This is what a typical onboarding process looks like:
- Employees are provided a handbook which they are required to review and sign
- They spend 30-60 minutes with Human Resources to complete all the paperwork
- An overview of job responsibilities
- No feedback is involved. Employees are left to consult people they just met when they require assistance
As you may observe, the traditional employee onboarding experience is neither positive nor engaging. Unfortunately, that’s the scenario in most enterprises today. It leaves new hires either underwhelmed or overwhelmed with their new role.
Here’s how eLearning can help:
What is eLearning?
As the name suggests, eLearning is education offered through digital mediums such as videos and websites. Most people think in academic contexts when they see or hear the term ‘eLearning.’ However, it’s an extremely important tool for corporate learning as well.
Kytes, for example, is a popular targeted content sharing platform used by organizations to create an engaging onboarding experience for their employees.
Here Are The Top 10 Ways You Can Enhance Your Employee Onboarding Experience:
How Does eLearning Improve the Onboarding Experience?
1. Better Engagement
Instead of overwhelming your employees with a 2-day crash course, you can offer eLearning modules in the form of readable content, videos, games, and quizzes to engage them over a long period of time.
Becoming active learners is way more interesting than reading through a manual of rules and everything related to their job. The onboarding employee experience can be smooth by using the right blend of modern tools and techniques to communicate with the employees and take them through the organisation.
2. Structured Content
As mentioned earlier, a typical employee onboarding experience requires lengthy paperwork and awkward introductions. On the other hand, eLearning modules are more structured while they provide key information in an interactive manner.
Therefore, your new hires won’t have to depend on another team member when they need assistance. Besides, if an eLearning module isn’t relevant to their job profile, you can simply not provide them. You can also take honest feedback on onboarding experience to know the loopholes or the positive aspects of the onboarding. This will help you to better channel your resources and achieve superior perfection the next time.
3. Bite-Size Content Pieces
The comprehensive manual provided at the time of onboarding is a real challenge. Not only does it feel taxing, but it also takes the excitement out of the first day at work.
Instead, you can break the onboarding content into bite-sized pieces that your employees can learn at their own pace. Partnering with a content-sharing platform like Kytes allows them to track their progress through the onboarding eLearning course.
4. Mentorship
With the help of an eLearning onboarding course, the HR, mentor, or boss can complete periodic check-ins to track the performance of new hires.
Based on the performance, they can offer advice, feedback, real-world examples, and solutions to employees’ problems. Hence, by facilitating mentorship, you can greatly improve the employee onboarding experience.
5. Flexibility
Your employees should feel supported throughout their time in the organization. Hence, you don’t have to deliver a boatload of information on the first day itself. Give them enough time to understand your organization’s values, goals, and culture according to their schedule and pace.
On the first day, you can prioritize essential policies and paperwork. During the first 90 days of employment, regular onboarding activities and check-ins should continue.
6. Interactive Videos
Given a choice, new hires would always prefer watching engaging videos over reading onboarding manuals, reports a survey. For example, you can introduce corporate executives through videos that feel direct and personal, but not intimidating.
This is especially effective in remote work scenarios. The onboarding experience of your employees can be enriched and enhances to another level with the help on interactive and interesting videos. The videos make it easy for employees to gauge the technical information and comprehend various aspects of an organization.
7. Analytics
To deliver an impactful employee onboarding experience, you shouldn’t treat it as a one-time thing. Instead, incorporate a loop by making use of employee feedback.
Analytics help you track their progress, identify areas of concern or confusion, and address the challenges head-on. In other words, analytics empower you with actionable data to help you improve employee performance.
8. Mobile-Responsive Onboarding Content
In the mobile-first generation, you need to create an onboarding course that’s compatible with all kinds of devices. Convenience is the key here. You should make it easier for new hires to access just-in-time content when required and just-in-case onboarding content when they want.
And Kytes can create mobile-responsive eLearning content to help you deliver a superior onboarding employee experience.
9. Knowledge-Sharing Environment
One of the best ways to enhance the employee onboarding process is to foster a knowledge-sharing environment. This would allow new hires to learn about company policies from their experienced coworkers.
This strategy is not only useful in onboarding but also helps new employees learn from the failures and successes of their peers. In this regard, investing in a learning management system (LMS) is vital. It would help you formalize your onboarding procedures and practices.
10. Evaluate Onboarding Success
We talked about including a feedback loop and tracking the performance of new joiners. You should ideally take their feedback after 30-90 days. Moreover, to evaluate the success of your onboarding program, you can conduct quizzes.
It will help you determine if the employees have really soaked in all the information. And eLearning content developers can create gamified learning quizzes for your employees.
In Summary
If you want to incorporate an in-depth yet interactive training of new employees, then eLearning is your answer. Not only would it improve their job performance but also foster loyalty to your company.
Your employee onboarding experience should have the maximum impact to create a lasting experience. And you can achieve that by leveraging content sharing platforms like Kytes to convey key information in a persuasive, useful, and succinct manner.
