How e-learning could revamp your onboarding training

Creating the perfect onboarding

Onboarding training is undeniably costly and lengthy. While e-learning can minimize that, it can also create experiences that are replicable, congruent, and significant for all new hires. At the same time, e-learning can offer you ways to track and assist their assimilation.

Effective onboarding and its impact

An Allied Workforce Mobility survey reports that an organization loses up to 25% of its employees within a year due to:

• The need for more than a year for a new hire to function at their maximum capacity (30% of organizations)
• Lack of training in the onboarding program (25% of organizations)
• Lack of goals or milestones for new employees (60% of organizations)

An employee onboarding program that went beyond the distribution of documents, papers and directions to the company website could prove to be much more stimulating and constructive.

One way to maximize the impact of the program on new hires is to employ e-learning methods. Here are five tips for you to design an onboarding training program that will effectively use e-learning and leave a good impression of your organization on your new employees.

1. Do your homework

The first place to start would be to understand how onboarding is done at the moment; to understand the areas people who went through the program liked or disliked and why that was the case. This information can help ensure the success of the current onboarding training that you’re designing.

E-learning authoring tools, such as Easygenerator, incorporate net promoter scoring (NPS) into courses, allowing learners to rate and provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your course.

2. Ask the stakeholders

Speak to employees who went through the onboarding training recently on what they had expected to learn from such a program. Ascertain their fears and insecurities about starting out in a new company. Speak to HR or the Learning and Development Manager to understand the objectives of the program from a business perspective.

Some onboarding best practices would be to structure an onboarding program that:

• Gives new employees a sense of comfort and a promising first impression of the organization
• Lays out the organization’s culture, values, and brand (that is subliminally and continually emphasized throughout the program)
• Details the expectations of an employee, e.g., regulations and compliance
• Describes the fundamental things an employee would need to know in order to thrive in the organization such as the dress code, processes for leave application and where the cafeteria is
• Teaches them where they stand in the organization’s structure
• Shows them how valuable their role is to the organization’s well-being and excites them about it

Get started with our free onboarding template

3. Customize and stagger the program

A good new hire training program teaches an employee what they need to know, and only what they need to know. It doesn’t drown them in a plethora of information that is mostly unnecessary or doesn’t require the employees to know just yet. It is structured around information and research about the new employees, their roles in the organization, and what they need to know with regards to that.

Onboarding best practices would accommodate and allow new hires the freedom to leave and enter the course at times it suits them best. Structuring e-learning components in the program would also empower new hires to learn valuable information at their convenience.

4. Minimize repetitions and add value

Sometimes, information that is presented during an onboarding training can actually be obtained from the organization’s intranet or website, such as the company’s HR policies or organization charts. Yet another onboarding best practice would be to reflect on the key information that needs to be communicated during the program and how it could add value to an employee’s understanding.

An additional benefit of e-learning for onboarding training is that you can personalize and tailor the content to maximize the value it has to your new employee. The new hire only needs to take the modules relevant to them.

5. Share stories

While some information might already be on the organization’s website or intranet like mentioned before, current employees, especially employees who have been around for a long time, have an awareness about the organization and life there that can’t be discerned from the organization’s site.

Online onboarding training can also enable subject matter experts around the business to share their knowledge in certain areas of the business. This gives the new hire a more helpful in-depth insight into the organization, rather than a one-size-fits-all generic overview. Use stories or videos to demonstrate best practices or valuable lessons from such employees.

To kick-start your onboarding program, why not download Easygenerator’s Onboarding Starter Pack.