Is your employee onboarding limited to introduction and assigning responsibilities to new hires? Find out 6 comp
elling reasons why having personalized eLearning onboarding solutions is important and how it can help your employees easily acclimate to their new role, making them feel valued and supported.
Overview
Onboarding is not just an orientation.
It’s a process to teach employees the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to help them effectively fit into their roles in a company.
Onboarding (also known as introduction or induction) primarily involves training and introducing new hires to the company and its structure, culture, vision, and goals.
But, more than an introduction, onboarding is an opportunity to make a good impression, build enthusiasm, and create a sense of belonging among new hires to retain them for the long term.
In fact, 93% of employers believe a well-designed onboarding process can increase the chance of employees staying in the organization.
Therefore, the goal of onboarding should be to get employees excited to be a part of the company and motivated to stay invested in their role and the company’s success.
That’s where making onboarding personalized to each employee can be instrumental.
Personalized onboarding can be an effective way to create tailored experiences to positively impact employee engagement and retention.
In this article, we’ll spell out six reasons why adding a personal touch to employee onboarding solutions can be profitable for your company.
Let’s jump in.
1. Personalization Increases Employee Commitment
Personalization, as it sounds, refers to taking a personal approach to onboarding an employee.
Each employee enters your company with special talent, skillset, and knowledge that contribute to your company’s growth.
This should be acknowledged at the very outset.
Instead of pushing employees to prove their worth, companies should make an effort to make employees feel their choice of working in your company is spot on.
By personalizing the onboarding of new hires, you can help them settle effectively in your company.
Welcoming them with company swag and assigning them a work buddy to turn to whenever they need help are a few ways to create personalized experiences.
These small gestures mean a lot and make employees feel valued.
If done effectively, a robust onboarding process can skyrocket engagement, resulting in an 82% increase in new hire retention and a 70% boost in their productivity.
2. Onboarding Reduces Employee Turnover
Another way companies benefit from personalized onboarding is through a decrease in employee turnover.
For companies, the first few months following the new hiring are critical. During this period, 31% of employees are likely to quit their job, and 68% of them determine within 90 days.
Thus, new hire retention is a grave issue for businesses.
At this point, personalized onboarding can come in handy and help reduce turnovers that happen shortly after new hiring.
With effective onboarding, employees can feel welcomed and engaged from day one. This way, they are more likely to stick around for the long term.
3. Proper Onboarding Helps Better Understand Company Culture
In the first few weeks of their job, most new hires have head-spinning experience.
There’s so much to grasp and remember, such as the company’s brand story, culture, and the specifics of the new role.
That’s why tailoring onboarding to match employee needs is important.
Onboarding can deliver newcomers the required information, train them, organize fun-building activities with other team members, and much more.
This can make their transition to the new position easier and their experience delightful.
Onboarding can also help build trust and a good rapport between supervisors and new hires to foster productive and positive working relationships.
Executing onboarding the right way is key to making employees feel supported and appreciated. These components have a significant impact on job satisfaction.
4. Builds a Lasting Connection with New Hires through Communication
One of the most important facets of onboarding is building employee connections with the managers, teams, and the organization.
Employees who understand the ‘why’ of the company feel more connected, bring more of themselves to work and are more loyal.
But, too often, companies settle for mundane onboarding.
It does sort out routine tasks they need to take on but does not nurture engagement or convey the uniqueness of your company culture.
This is where carefully designing onboarding is the key.
With an engaging onboarding process, you can make that great first impression on new employees and establish the level of trust that makes employees feel at ease.
This will make them believe you have their back so they can go all-in with your company.
5. Employees Learn the Skills They Need to Succeed
As much as 74% of employees fail to reach their full potential due to limited development opportunities.
Many employees join as newbies and expect companies to help them adjust to their new roles.
It’s your job to provide clear direction and training to employees by demonstrating different ways to help them settle in the company.
You can guide employees on how to perform their job and encourage them to seek new ways to do better.
During training, providing clear directions is especially important when demonstrating real job scenarios.
Take an example of a restaurant management training session that requires each trainee to handle a customer complaint.
The idea behind this role-playing is to help employees learn practical ways to handle customer complaints. Employees can better understand what it takes to succeed in managing complaints.
When employees grasp clear directions during onboarding, it can boost their confidence to apply their skills in real-time.
6. Personalized Onboarding using eLearning Increases Efficiency
Instead of arranging in-person training sessions, you can take an online approach to onboard employees.
Online learning (aka eLearning) creates consistency and efficiency in delivering training and saves time. You can pre-record training sessions and upload them on a learning management system (LMS).
Employees can tune in anytime and quickly watch the lessons they need to.
Not just that, onboarding via eLearning offers you a wide range of other benefits, such as:
- Employees don’t need to rely on training schedules. They can access content anytime they need to.
- You can deliver a consistent message to all employees regardless of when and where they join.
- eLearning makes updates a piece of cake, so the content always stays relevant.
- It saves ongoing or recurring costs for venues, facilitators, travel, and equipment.
And it doesn’t stop there!
Take stock of the number of employees you train each year- individually or in cohorts- and the number of locations and time zones you cater to.
It is certainly a lot to handle.
This is where switching to eLearning makes good sense. eLearning can help you deliver onboarding learning modules to any time zone. Employees can access them at their disposal.
In addition to that, tapping into eLearning is a great way to design exciting and memorable teaching experiences for new hires.
Now that you know why eLearning is a promising option, let’s dig a little deeper and learn how you can design onboarding with an eLearning platform.
How to Design Employee Onboarding with eLearning?
1. Break down your training material into bite-sized pieces
It’s easy for onboarding to become overwhelming for new employees. By breaking up onboarding content into smaller parts, you can make it easy to digest.
With a custom employee LMS development, you can even design quick, short modules covering one topic at a time, making learning even more engaging.
2. Make your onboarding learning program flexible
Onboarding eLearning courses don’t have to be taken all at once. In the first few days, talk about essential policies and paperwork in training. Later, mix it with ongoing onboarding activities as new employees take on their regular responsibilities.
Making training adaptable and continuous can help employees believe your company is ready to support them throughout their journey, not just in the first few days of their joining.
3. Use videos to make employees feel more connected
Employees tend to learn more quickly by watching videos than by reading manuals. In fact, 69% of employees prefer videos as a better medium for learning.
Videos can be a more effective way to introduce new employees to corporate executives to build a more personal and direct connection.
4. Personalize communication to create a sense of inclusion
While it’s important to keep learning content standardized across your company, personalizing learning for each employee is just as vital.
Modular onboarding solutions allow you to create a separate module for each aspect of an issue. This way, employees can only cover modules they find relevant to them.
5. Don’t forget to incorporate your brand story
Onboarding is not just about setting expectations for new hires and assigning them responsibilities.
Regardless of their job role, each employee is a representative of your company. So, they should understand your company and its unique standing point, mission, and values.
6. Use online quizzes to evaluate training success
Incorporating quizzes in onboarding has many benefits.
Most obviously, they help evaluate learner progress and verify that they have absorbed the knowledge. Virtual quizzes also serve as clear demarcations between one module and another.
Remember quizzes don’t have to be simple surveys or questionnaires. You can make them as creative and engaging as possible.
7. Dive into analytics to find what needs review
There are more ways to track employee progress than quizzes only.
Analytics offers more profound insight. Data analytics tools in your custom employee LMS development can help you track key metrics to evaluate content views, frequency, and completion rates.
With this data, you can identify areas that need improvement and collect employee feedback on the issues they face. This can help you review and revise the content to align it with your eLearning goals.
Key Takeaways
Personalized onboarding can transform how your company manages human capital.
Employees treated with a personal approach during onboarding can no longer feel they are working for someone else. Instead, they feel more connected and motivated to put their best efforts to help the company grow.
Using eLearning onboarding solutions can bring the much-needed personal touch to your onboarding programs. With a custom employee LMS development, you can even design quizzes, fun activities, video sessions, discussion forums, and more to make onboarding a pleasant and effective learning experience.
Since the LMS makes onboarding online, you can continue using it beyond new hires and expand it to provide organization-wide training.