Essential Features Of An Effective LXP For Employee Onboarding
LXPs offer a range of attractive features that utilise the latest developments in UX design and are enhanced by the application of AI. But if you’re using an LXP for employee onboarding, you need to know not only which features are relevant but also how to deploy them to make onboarding a seamless, efficient, and effective process.
What Are You Trying To Achieve?
In the simplest terms, it is about making people ready for their new working environment. This includes everything from filling out the necessary forms to meeting the team and starting work. New hires need to be well supported during this process and onboarding training needs to be relevant and engaging so that they’re not alienated and isolated.
But what if you could go further and fast track employees through onboarding so that they reach the stage of being onboard quicker and become productive players in their new roles sooner? Making an LXP the centerpiece of training offers to move the onboarding process fully into the workflow. To do this, intelligent and productive use of key features by the organisation and the new employees is required.
Key LXP Features That Facilitate Onboarding
1. Interface Design
LXPs come with impressive and familiar interface design. Remember that LXPs focus on the experience of learning and that means making it easy and attractive. It also means fostering independent and collaborative learning and placing the learner in control. For this to work, you need techniques and features that incentivise learners.
LXPs have borrowed extensively from social media platforms in their interface design. This is a recognition of the way we increasingly access, manipulate, and absorb information. When we interact with social media, we do so independently, motivated by our own interests and goals. If we relate that to onboarding, we can then offer the opportunity for learners to self-onboard. That means they identify their own onboarding needs and progress, based on their own assessment of where they are in the onboarding process, taking account of their prior experience. An attractive, intuitive, innovative interface is crucial for self-directed onboarding. The dynamic interface supports learning acquisition.
2. Power Of AI
If the UX offers the familiarity of a safe and intuitive environment for training, AI features provide back-up support. In the first instance, this means providing ways of navigating the LXP to find what you need. A powerful search engine is essential. The cognitive search uses AI to return more relevant results, meaning less time searching and more rewarding search results. If your LXP doesn’t provide it, learners will just turn to Google instead and abandon the LXP environment.
LXPs offer the facility to embed an AI-enhanced chatbot that can respond to natural language queries, as well as a search engine. The effect is to provide an always-on, always-accessible personal assistant to the learner. This is particularly relevant during onboarding where there’s a lot of pressure to absorb a large amount of information quickly. A chatbot can respond to queries in real-time, allowing new employees to access critical information as and when they need it. And, unlike a search engine, an AI-powered chatbot can learn from interactions allowing it to respond more effectively to users’ requests over time, supporting independent learning as the new hire self-onboards.
The other critical AI element in an LXP is the use of recommender systems. We’re familiar with receiving recommendations in our interactions with Amazon or Netflix. Applied to training purposes, recommender systems deliver personalised learning. Personalisation’s ability to differentiate between learners and their needs helps move onboarding away from the all-encompassing, but scatter-gun approach to onboarding training that leaves new hires wondering just exactly what the point is.
Recommendations can be generated based on preferences and choices made through interactions with the LXP, but they can also be directed at learners in the form of notifications and reminders. This is particularly useful to HR which needs to ensure that new hires, while given the freedom to pursue their own path through onboarding, still meet the relevant milestones and stages of the process.
3. Content
The experience of learning is naturally conditioned by the quality and accessibility of content. An LXP can host content in a wide variety of formats from plain text documents to interactive eLearning. This allows an organisation to deliver its basic learning material in ways that are more engaging and attractive to learners. Most of all, when it comes to onboarding, it allows you to break up, add to, and reuse existing content.
LXPs are most effective in their use of microlearning. Content is broken down into and delivered as easily consumable chunks. So instead of facing a mountain of information thrown at them on their first day in the new job, employees can be directed to a learning environment where information is stored, searchable and easily accessible so they can navigate directly to critical content in a time-sensitive manner.
Organisations can also make use of the LXP’s ability to store, index, and curate content generated by the users themselves to quickly update their onboarding training without reconfiguring the whole content offering. They can also make use of relevant onboarding information that resides with their experienced employees by requiring them to offer tips and advice to new hires in a piece of microlearning, like a short piece of video. Seeing content that’s produced by colleagues enhances the relevance and validity of onboarding training and signals that digital learning is a key part of the organisation’s culture.
4. Analytics
While encouraging independent exploration, the LXP also offers analytics tools that allow an organisation to track usage and therefore make informed interventions and enhancements to the environment. An LXP can be enriched by the addition of a Learning Record Store (LRS) that processes and collects xAPI data on a variety of user interactions, both on and offline. This data can be accessed via a generic and customisable set of reports and easily visualised in dashboards that can also be customised.
The snapshots this data offers help you track progress and performance through onboarding. They can also be analysed to predict behaviours and manage performance. Instead of relying on your employees’ responses to surveys and 'happy sheets' you can have an abundance of hard and fast data recorded at a granular level to provide a view of what’s working and what isn’t—at an individual level. You can then use that knowledge to enhance your training and make adjustments in the LXP environment to improve the onboarding experience.
5. Flexibility
LXPs are accessible on mobile devices allowing you to access content and other features anywhere, on-the-go. This helps new hires set the pace and scope of their onboarding training, but it also provides greater flexibility for HR and the organisation. It means, for example, that onboarding training needn’t be a series of episodic events that everyone needs to attend. Onboarding becomes a more continuous process, albeit one managed and monitored from within the LXP environment.
The removal of barriers—such as material being only available in the classroom and LMS or the need to complete an onboarding task on a given day—means that the notion of onboarding itself can change fundamentally. Instead of being seen as a discrete, potentially forgettable event, it now moves closer to the working environment where it’s actually relevant. LXPs position training in the workflow by allowing learners to learn while they are working. This move cuts onboarding short by allowing new hires to start working sooner and yet at the same time extends it by enabling access to onboarding training indefinitely.
Moving onboarding into the workflow helps address issues such as lack of relevance, motivation, and engagement. It means new hires become part of the team and are exposed to the organisation’s culture quicker. It transforms onboarding from an impediment to an enabler.
The Way Forward For Onboarding
The intelligent use of an LXP’s many features can make your onboarding more effective.
LXPs empower new employees by allowing them to go directly to the information they need when they need it, thus, personalising onboarding. With its social-media like environment, it makes the learning experience more social and encourages new hires to feel part of a team.
The LXP allows HR the time and space to review and assess onboarding and easily upgrade training. LXPs also offer Just-In-Time onboarding that saves on resources, improves retention and fast-tracks new employees into the jobs they were hired to do. 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:
The HT2 Labs Guide To Learning Experience Platforms
Are you experienced? An insight into Learning Experience Platforms
