What To Include In Your New Employee Onboarding Training
The process of onboarding new starters is a fairly common one, although what this entails varies from one organization to the next. It’s important to ensure your workers are given the tools to best prepare them and enable them to succeed within the organization, not only to improve performance, but also to boost their confidence, get them excited about joining the company, and understand the culture and where they fit in.
Many organizations start their employee onboarding training with the best intentions but find it fails to really take off, or stick with new starters. To help you out, we’ve put together this list of activities that we think every onboarding training should include to quickly get your new starters up-to-speed and really excited about joining your company.
1. Develop Point-Of-Need Resources
Your new starters are going to have a lot of questions and concerns during their first few months with the company. It’s, therefore, important to have the tools in place to address these as and when they come up.
Digital resources are a simple way to provide instant support for your workers’ real-life challenges by making answers available on demand. It is critical to understand that your new starters don’t want to be inundated with generic induction content. Instead, focus on giving them information that they can use to understand your organization and their roles within it.
Be creative with your digital resources, create engaging ‘how-to’ tips, produce screen-share instructional videos, adapt your content to address as much of your organization’s priorities and context as possible in an enjoyable, easy-to-digest way.
2. Share Company Culture
Your company’s culture is unique to your organization, and understanding your way of working and ‘how things are done here’ is invaluable to new starters. From the design of the offices, practices and policies and values, your culture is what will give your new starters the sense of belonging to the company.
Your culture is not something that can just be ‘taught’. It is embedded within the organization, therefore something your new starters need to be exposed to straight away if they are to fit into the business. Focus on connecting new starters within the organization, and using technology to answer questions about the company, such as: "How do successful people get things done here?". Or "What makes our customers value us so much?". By aligning your company’s values and culture into the onboarding program, your new starters are much more likely to commit to your organization through being immersed in your culture.
Your employee onboarding training should go beyond just "this is what we expect from you" and also focus on "this is what we stand for and how you fit into that".
3. Connect Your People
Did you know that up to 90% [1] of the knowledge in an organization is locked inside the heads of employees? Utilize this expertise, and use your existing employees’ knowledge to create resources that can be shared with new starters. People love to feel valued so use this to your advantage. After getting a few ‘experts’ on board, you’ll find more and more workers stepping up to share their expertise.
There’s huge value in bringing people together, and even more so during your employee onboarding training. Connect your new starters with each other, and help them develop relationships with other established employees within the company. Before long, you’ll be on track to having a culture of sharing best practices, strengthening the capability, confidence, and engagement levels of your new starters.
4. Ask For Feedback
You should be constantly looking to improve your onboarding process, and there’s no better way to do this than by asking people who recently joined. Your induction process should not just focus on the company’s expectations of the workers, but also their expectations of the role and what they need to succeed within the organization. Find out what they enjoyed and what improvements could be made and use this feedback to continue working on improving your training.
Remember, the better your onboarding program, the more likely you are to have happy workers, low turnover, and higher engagement.
5. Encourage Multi-Device Learning
The delivery of your program is just as important as the activities you include, so you should ensure your employee onboarding training is not limited to just one device or time of the day. We’re living in a digitally-connected world, where answers are always just a simple click away on our devices, therefore it’s important that your learning platform supports this and can support your workers by providing answers and solutions as and when they need them.
You’ll find your workers will be far more engaged with your training when they’re able to self-direct their learning and are not forced to spend hours away from their desk to do it. You’ll also have a far more productive workforce, as they can use your learning platform at their times of need and immediately put their learning into practice.
6. Think Long-Term
Keep these activities in mind, but remember that the journey from new starter to happy team member takes more than just a few days. Many organizations fail to continue supporting their new starters after their first week with the company, and this can lead to workers feeling lost or lacking the confidence they need to really succeed in your organization.
Your onboarding process should have a clear sense of direction and structure that focuses on the long-term goals of your workers as well as just during their initial period. Use feedback to continuously improve your training, and find out what your workers need to really succeed within your company to ensure your digital resources align with both the organization’s goals and the workers’ expectations.
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