10 Do's And Don'ts On Designing An Effective Employee Onboarding Experience
Studies show how good onboarding can make the difference between new hires staying and not. But often onboarding is simply ineffectual—no more than a box-ticking exercise. But badly handled it can make a new employee feel isolated.
To avoid these negative outcomes, you need to design a good onboarding, learning experience that has a long-lasting impact, that sets the standard and the expectation while also realising the new hires’ needs and expectations. As an organisation you then protect your investment and prevent costly churn.
Adding An LXP To Onboarding
LXPs offer an array of resources and features that support HR and new hires through onboarding. The LXP can set and meet new hires’ learning expectations and also reflect the organisation’s structure and culture in a way that goes beyond typical onboarding programmes.
But it’s not enough just to install and implement an LXP. How the LXP integrates into the onboarding process and how it can drive it requires planning and design. It needs the buy-in of HR, L&D, and management to ensure that the experience you give new employees during onboarding and beyond is the best you can make it.
Let’s look at some key do’s and don’t’s that will help make onboarding with an LXP an engaging, memorable and successful experience.
5 Things To Avoid
1. Don't Leave Onboarding To Chance
This is perhaps the key message. Employees often feel neglected and isolated when they join a new organisation. Promises made during hiring may ring hollow when they’re kept apart in an onboarding training process. Always at hand, the LXP offers a range of supporting services from critical resources to a search engine and chatbot to allow new employees to discover information for themselves in a time-sensitive manner. Notifications and recommendations help guide the new employee through the process.
But don’t assume an LXP can do all the work out of the box. You need to make sure that the LXP environment contains the right resources. Just as you have e-learning designers, you’ll also need people who understand the vision and features of the LXP who work on configuring it to provide a safe, effective onboarding environment and an experience that makes the right impression.
2. Don't Overwhelm With Information
This is another common error with onboarding: you deluge your new hires with information that is undigestible and, at the time, often irrelevant. An LXP makes accessing information easier and at the time of a user’s choosing. It’s accessible across a range of platforms and on mobile devices.
LXPs work best when you adopt a microlearning approach that breaks down, reconfigures and repurposes information in a variety of digital formats from plain text to multimedia video. LXPs can also be used to curate learner-generated content so that you can incorporate the knowledge and advice of experienced employees into your onboarding process.
3. Don't Isolate New Hires
Onboarding training frequently involves taking new employees away from their new working environment and new colleagues. They’re moved into the training room or left at their desks to study. An LXP, with its always-on accessibility, can get new hires into work quickly. It can be used to train while you’re starting your new role. It’s not exclusively the preserve of HR and onboarding so using it will expose the new employee to other areas of learning and aspects of the organisation. It provides a way to quickly understand the new environment and culture.
4. Don't Leave Them To Sink Or Swim
LXPs encourage self-sufficient and independent learners. The temptation then is to hand over all aspects of onboarding to the LXP. But that can be a disorienting and dispiriting experience if there are no parameters. So, use the LXP’s recommender and notification systems to set and record goals and milestones. Add badges to help motivate new hires to complete onboarding tasks. Encourage them to use the LXP chatbot as a personal mentor as they navigate the various stages of onboarding. The LXP also provides rich data on all user interactions which HR and learners can monitor via dashboards and reports to keep them on track.
5. Don't Rush Onboarding
There’s a difference between coming to the end of onboarding training and feeling a sense of being ‘on board’ the new organisation. Don’t regard onboarding as a one-off training event. A key premise of LXPs is that training and learning are a continuous process that shouldn’t be artificially curtailed. The onboarding finish line can come at different times for different employees.
Use the accessibility and always on features of LXPs to extend onboarding and run it simultaneously with introducing new hires to the working environment. That way information that might be ignored in the first flush of onboarding can appear in context and take on real relevance as learners pull information rather than have it pushed at them.
5 Tips You Should Follow
1. Personalise Onboarding
One of the reasons onboarding programmes don’t succeed is that they fail to recognise not all new hires start from the same place or have the same needs. The failure to differentiate new hires’ real needs can lead to frustration and a sense that onboarding is irrelevant.
LXPs expand the potential for the personalisation of learning by allowing learners to take control and access what they need to know when they need to know it and how it best helps them.
The way information is accessed in an LXP allows learners to build their own learning paths. The LXP recognises that there are different routes through onboarding and that new employees can select the one that suits and motivates them best.
2. Facilitate Self-Onboarding
LXPs allow new employees greater control over their own onboarding experience. The LXP’s interface, based on social media platform design, encourages and supports independent learning. That means you can hand over much of the onboarding training to new hires themselves providing you ensure the range, availability, and format of content.
The advantage of self-onboarding is that it encourages new hires to engage directly with their new environment aided by the immersive experience provided by the LXP.
3. Encourage Onboarding While Working
Most new employees want the chance to impress. Onboarding can get in the way as it takes them away from working and participating in their new teams until they’re deemed ready to do so. An LXP offers the flexibility and connectivity that enable them to work and learn at the same time.
This means onboarding can happen according to individuals’ needs and pace. Onboarding can occur at the same time as the individual becomes part of the team, which is itself a key goal and priority of onboarding training.
4. Use LXPs As Learning Guides
LXPs come with recommender and notification systems as part of the learner support mechanism they offer. These features allow you to tailor a learning experience for an individual learner. This enables the onboarding process to differentiate between new hires, but equally, ensure that they all achieve onboarding. Some will onboard quicker than others, but it needn’t be a sprint. The benefit of the LXP is that you provide more effective onboarding training for more employees by identifying and catering to their individual needs and job roles.
Promote the organisation’s learning culture. Onboarding is not an end; it’s just the start. The LXP can become the basic instrument of all the organisation’s learning and training processes. An LXP can be readily customised and configured to reflect an organisation’s identity. By introducing new hires to the LXP during onboarding you effectively expose them to the organisation’s wider learning culture. As they learn to navigate through the LXP’s features and resources they’re also learning about the organisation and fulfilling another key objective of onboarding.
Affecting Onboarding
LXPs make onboarding easier. They extend and strengthen it. They provide for a better onboarding experience, making it inclusive, engaging and immersive while avoiding information overload and the sense of being overwhelmed and isolated.
Taking time to design an LXP-based onboarding experience can ensure that your LXP delivers effective training to get your new hires off to the best possible start. Download the eBook Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP) to discover more about the topic, and join the webinar for supplementary insights.
Sources:
