How To Improve Your Onboarding Strategy
Onboarding? Hiring the right candidate for any position within your organization is just the beginning when it comes getting to know each other and building mutual professional respect and trust.
During this probationary period—lasting from the first day throughout the six-month mark, at least—your organization has the golden opportunity to develop the necessary bonds with your new hire, so you can both achieve your respective goals throughout their employment.
Onboarding allows you to shore up your collaboration in just many important ways, including the following:
- Define a series of tasks and requirements
- Offer helpful and meaningful training regimens
- Provide vital information resources
- Extend welcoming socialization opportunities
While you are very likely familiar with onboarding, and more likely even have your own strategy in place, it's an area many companies can easily improve. Many enterprises are competing to hold onto talented employees and reduce the staggering cost of employee turnover whilst improving productivity and maintaining a competitive edge.
The Cost Of Poorly Orchestrated Or Inadequate Onboarding Training Is Often High
Onboarding has increasingly become a dynamic tool to help secure a new employee’s success. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) shared the results of a 2009 study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, which found that employees generally decided whether they would stay with a company for the long-term within the first 6 months of employment.
Both you and your newly hired staff member must take care of many crucial tasks during the first few months of their employment to achieve a strong professional relationship and long-term success. At the same time, you both have your position-specific responsibilities to attend to. With a high-impact onboarding training program, you can provide the necessary engagement tools for a mutually successful relationship for many years to come. Consider a few key ways that you can enhance your organization’s onboarding training.
You Might Want To Take A Few Of The Most Important Aspects Of Onboarding Into Account
- Onboarding differs from training.
While onboarding certainly includes training as a vital component, onboarding is not strictly a training phase, according to Forbes. It is a time where you can provide multiple and multidirectional opportunities for your new employee to build rapport with his or her manager and colleagues through training sessions and the opportunity to learn and fully understand company policies and procedures. - Onboarding is a time to introduce and reinforce your organization’s mission, vision, and corporate culture.
Altogether, these values are truly the heart and soul of employee retention in the 21st century. Even more importantly during onboarding, you can help your new hire understand his or her important role in helping you achieve these values and much more.
How Might eLearning Enhance Your Current Onboarding Training Strategy And Encourage Strong Employee Engagement?
If you are looking for ways to improve your business’s onboarding program, a focused eLearning program can enhance it in the following ways:
- Link a Learning Management System (LMS) to your HR system
Don’t leave the success of your onboarding program to each individual manager. A Learning Management System allows you to easily and effectively automate the enrolment and delivery of training sessions, and policies regardless of the size of your organization. - Policies and procedures compliance enforcement
Employees’ learning, understanding, and agreement to company policies and procedures are essential to their becoming comfortable and fitting in. Top eLearning programs help to ensure that all employees have read, understood and signed all practices, policies, and procedures regarding issues of health and safety, technology all tracked and recorded with a digital audit trail. - Fully-editable training courses
Topics such as those involving Health and Safety are extremely important to the onboarding process, so you must ensure that your training manual includes the most up-to-date information. With the right eLearning program, you can make quick removals and additions to your training manuals to accurately reflect the latest standards per Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) or the UK’s HSE. - Easy to deploy and manage risk assessments
Ever wondered if there were simple ways to improve employee wellbeing and keep them engaged? you might consider people-based risk assessments. By grouping, prioritizing and managing assessments, you can more easily identify and resolve urgent issues such as poor Ergonomics and Stress. If tackled quickly, reducing these issues can improve both health and productivity and retention in the workplace.
EssentialSkillz, the content creation brand behind WorkWize, offers 40+ eLearning courses that cover areas like Health and Safety, Business Protection and many others. We can help reinforce and support superior learning through testing, and if needed, actionable Risk Assessments.
WorkWize offers solutions for organizations committed to improving employee engagement and compliance by distributing training and policies that employees understand and buy into from day one.