What's A Learning Experience Platform And How It Enhances Your Employee Onboarding

What's A Learning Experience Platform And How It Enhances Your Employee Onboarding
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Summary: LXPs are the new hot thing in digital learning. They bring solutions to organizations, and most specifically, for employee onboarding. In this article, discover how to enhance onboarding by implementing a Learning Experience Platform.

Learning Experience Platforms: Boosting Employee Onboarding

Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) are a coming force in digital learning, offering a flexible solution to organisations’ needs. And a key area where they can make an impact is onboarding. So, how can the implementation of an LXP help you address the challenges of onboarding and enhance the onboarding process for new employees?

eBook Release: Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
eBook Release
Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
Bringing the onboarding process into the 21st century with AI-driven LXP technology.

The Need For Effective Onboarding

Recent studies have exposed the critical need for successful onboarding of new hires. Figures suggest that the turnover of new employees can be as high as 20% in the first month and a half. 30% of the working population changes jobs at least once a year. And it’s likely that the average person will now have 5 to 7 jobs in their working lifetime.

With those pressures, the onboarding training process clearly needs to engage and motivate new employees. It must be attentive to their real needs and give them a stake in the new organisation and their new role from the very start. Studies suggest that effective onboarding programmes can not only reduce churn but also increase productivity. It’s been estimated that a good onboarding experience will lead to roughly 70% of employees staying with an organisation for 3 years.

The Challenges Of Onboarding

If the goal is clear—a good, effective onboarding programme—the challenges to providing one are equally evident. Onboarding may be primarily a process by which new people are inducted into an organisation. But there’s also the greater goal of getting people 'on board'. That is, making them feel part of their new working environment and culture. If that doesn’t happen, you risk losing new talent early and for good. And reaping all the extra overheads (recruitment, replacement, retraining—to name a few) and other negative consequences that follow.

Creating a good first impression then is key: both the impression the organisation makes on the new hires and the impression they form of it. The way you structure and implement onboarding training can make or break that first impression. That’s why the actual experience of onboarding training is so important.

And, typically, that experience can be one of being overwhelmed. Remember new employees are busy coming to terms with a new environment, new colleagues and a whole lot of new things to learn—and quickly. Often onboarding training removes takes them away from work for training and is an isolating experience. The content and delivery of onboarding training can also be abstract and seem irrelevant to the job the new hire has been asked to do.

The forced division between training and work makes engagement difficult. How do you know what’s important to know when you haven’t yet properly started your work? How do you acquire the core information you need from the blanket of generic information onboarding produces?

The standard approach to onboarding has been to deliver it as a one-off event and as one-size-fits-all, to be completed successfully with all the boxes ticked before work can properly begin. Onboarding training is frequently forgettable and therefore ineffective.

But onboarding need not be an irrelevant or isolating experience. If it can be brought into the workflow, then the false dichotomy between learning and working is removed.

Onboarding training has to be a continuum, rather than a series of discrete interventions. And that’s where an LXP with its focus on the experience and constant accessibility and availability can transform onboarding.

LXPs Assist Onboarding

LXPs have the potential to address the fundamental challenges of onboarding. Their focus on the experience of learning and the way it’s made accessible allows new employees to learn as they work. That means they feel part of a team, working in a collaborative and social environment from the start.

LXPs stress the importance of and facilitate, the experience of learning. They promote interaction with others. Also, they offer the opportunity for learners to post comments and pose questions. They also enable the uploading of contributions from managers, team leaders, and experienced employees to add to the pool of knowledge. Capturing that experience is key to the successful implementation of an LXP. LXPs cement the idea of shared knowledge. They can be used to establish a learning culture where new hires are encouraged to ask questions to their managers and team leaders. As well as they are given the opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learned. The LXP can then incorporate that feedback into its library of learning assets.

LXPs provide a repository for learning materials ranging from full courses to targeted resources in a variety of formats—text, graphics, animation, audio, video—that can be used, reused and adapted to suit individual learners’ needs. The platform has a look and feel that will be familiar to modern learners who use social media as a source of general information.

LXPs champion the personalisation of learning, so that each learner has the facility to learn what he or she needs to know at the time and place it’s needed. For new employees this is particularly critical as they juggle competing priorities while they’re coming to terms with their new role and new environment. Personalisation also means the organisation avoids the redundancy of teaching people what they already know or don’t need to know yet, which only serves to make onboarding training seem irrelevant.

Not everyone starts at the same place and new hires come with their own unique set of experiences. Personalised learning recognises that learners’ needs and work experiences differ and works to support difference and avoid the generic.

Using LXPs To Onboard

Let’s look in more detail at how the key features of LXPs address the challenges of onboarding.

Making Learning Continuous
LXPs offer a range of learning accessible across devices. This means learners can learn where and when they want and always have access to the training resources they need. In the onboarding phase, this means you can access the necessary information while you’re at work and not just in a training session. Onboarding becomes part of taking up the new role and gives you just what you need for your particular role.

Helping new hires get what they need
LXPs have built-in recommender systems and the option of embedding AI chatbots into the platform. This intelligent component, a fundamental feature of LXPs, can be used in the onboarding phase to serve up relevant information on a need-to-know basis. Notifications and reminders can be queued up for new hires, so that while they’re getting on with their job, L&D is making sure that the relevant stages of onboarding training are still completed, without taking employees away from their work.

Onboarding training that’s easy to digest
Often onboarding is overwhelming leaving the new employee deluged with information, much of it generic and standard. Using an LXP to onboard allows you to make uses of microlearning strategies with bite-size chunks of learning that easily fill gaps in knowledge. Microcontent can also be used to consolidate, and refresh learning quickly. It can be delivered where and when it’s needed to support performance in the workflow.

Putting the learner at the centre
LXPs make learning a 2-way street. New employees can use the powerful LXP search engine or embedded chatbot to look for and query information. This gives them the responsibility for their own onboarding. Moreover, this offers greater ownership of their learning experience. Thus, helping them feel more engaged. And as it’s a 2-way process, chatbots can be used to mentor new hires interacting with and learning from them based on the selections and queries the learners make.

An immersive learning environment
The onboarding process can and should be formative. Get it right and you retain and develop new talents. Get it wrong and that opportunity is lost. The 'new hire' stage needs to be as temporary as possible so that new employees quickly integrate with their colleagues and teams. One advantage of the LXP here is its use of user-generated content which offers the potential to unlock knowledge trapped in the heads of experienced employees. Offering new hires the opportunity to tap into that experience via the LXP makes training both more relevant and immediate.

Self-onboarding with an LXP
In a dynamic business environment, you can’t afford to remove groups of employees away from their work to enrol in training. With onboarding training, it makes sense to allow learners to complete it in their own time, rather than wait around for the next training session. A Learning Experience Platform offers employees the possibility of onboarding themselves while they begin to get to grips with their new working environment. At the same time with the LXP’s recommender, notification and reporting tools, L&D and HR can chart an employee’s progress through the onboarding process.

The Advantages Of Onboarding With An LXP

Using an LXP for onboarding avoids the more formal and remote LMS-based onboarding which emphasises the division between training and work. LXPs provide ways of overcoming the key obstacles of onboarding training by placing the new employees at the centre and allowing them to direct their own onboarding training in their own time and recognising their own needs.

The effect is to maximise employee engagement and improve the ROI from onboarding by retaining and developing productive new hires while getting the most out of the learning resources. LXPs can deliver major enhancements and advancements in onboarding training. 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:

Onboarding: getting new starts off to the right start

The HT2 Labs Guide To Learning Experience Platforms

Employee Onboarding Strategies: Transforming The New Hire Experience