A New Hire Onboarding Process For The Modern Age
Successful new hire onboarding continues to be critical to a company’s long-term success. According to Glassdoor, companies that delivered a strong onboarding experience saw an 82% increase in new hire retention. L&D professionals in particular know that onboarding is the foundation of an effective learning culture and the right onboarding solutions will set your employees up for a positive company experience.
With the rising demand for remote work flexibility, organizations count on their learning management system (LMS) for onboarding excellence and consistent training experiences. Here are the ways an LMS can deliver accelerated onboarding for the modern workforce.
Bringing Your Onboarding Training Into The Digital Era
While remote work flexibility is most assuredly on the rise, we can’t forget that some organizations will be going back into the office at some point. Consideration needs to be given to both the virtual and in-person onboarding experience—it may even be a blend of both!
For remote workers, their first impression is digital, and it's important for organizations to get it right. The first day on the job can be nerve wracking but also exciting. Normally, new employees are meeting their coworkers, being shown around the office and going through a new hire onboarding process. Consider: what does an ideal virtual experience look like? Using an LMS, you could:
- Create videos of fellow team members introducing themselves while virtual calls are being scheduled for a face-to-face introduction.
- Provide a virtual walk through of your digital tools and software via a custom course covering areas such as the company Intranet, Sharepoint, online tools, etc.
- Create a source of truth for important information to know such as org charts, SOPs, important technology and support details.
- Assign new hire documents and software training courses to get them up to speed quickly.
For those who will be onboarding in the office, creating a blended in-person and virtual onboarding experience may help improve the overall process. For example, team introductions and the office walk through can be done in person, while new hire documentation and business software training can be done virtually. It all depends on the goals for your organization’s onboarding program. As always, keep a pulse on how well received this new hire onboarding process is and make changes if necessary.
Personalized Onboarding Through Diverse Content
Every individual absorbs new information differently. According to LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report, over three-quarters of each generation of learners (including Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers) value receiving personalized course recommendations based on their career goals and skills gaps.
Most L&D professionals recognize this and strive to create onboarding solutions that are as personalized and engaging as possible. Luckily, an LMS provides the ability to diversify your instruction format. Rather than solely sending a virtual stack of documents, it’s helpful to employ various media types to reach your learners and engage them in the format they enjoy most. A suitable LMS for onboarding should offer many instruction methods, including:
Video
These course modules can vary in length, with shorter microlearning videos preferred for this type of training.
Documents
Send out helpful guides and instructions that your learners can save and review anytime they need a refresher.
Webinars
Look for an LMS that can integrate with a web conferencing solution so you can give your new hires live, interactive instruction.
Gamification And Social Learning
Social learning is another powerful way to encourage engagement and elevate new hire onboarding. Find an LMS that offers gamification features like badges, leaderboards, polls and social media feeds.
Discussion forums
Provide opportunities for new hires to ask questions while also engaging with their new coworkers.
The more content diversity incorporated into your onboarding solutions, the more likely your learners are to engage with and retain the information. And the more your new hires retain their training, the more likely you are to retain them.
The New Hire Onboarding Process: Scalable Onboarding Solutions To Grow With You
We can’t talk about reinventing new hire onboarding without zooming out and mentioning how growth and scaling can affect it. For example, some companies might decide to save on overhead expenses by moving online and create room in the budget to expand hiring to more locations. For situations like this, it’s important to find a platform that can grow and change with you. So what should you look for to give you the most scalability in an LMS for onboarding?
Global Access and Regionalization
As you grow, this may mean expanding into regions across the world and the right LMS will allow you to do this easily. You’ll likely need to support training in multiple languages; be able to group learners under different regions, locations and departments; and account for regional regulations and requirements.
User and Data Management
With growth comes an increase in employees, users, partners, customers and more. If you plan on supporting these different groups through an LMS you’ll need to make sure it can handle the user capacity and data without delays or becoming overloaded.
Integrations
It’s natural that as your company grows your tech stack will too. In cases such as these, you need an LMS that offers not only turnkey integrations but can accommodate custom integrations through an API. This allows data transfer between your tools in an effort to build a unified learning ecosystem.
Automation
As a small operation, processing training or in-person events could have been done manually, but scaling requires automation in order to efficiently manage resources and processes. The right LMS will be able to take the majority if not all of your typical tasks and make them happen automatically. This could be user creation, course enrollments, recurring certifications and even administrative tasks.
Finally, check for upgrade frequency when you are considering onboarding solutions. Suppose the LMS you choose rarely updates or adds new features. In that case, you may quickly outgrow the software or be left behind as competing platforms work to regularly offer more advanced learning capabilities that keep up with industry trends.
Conclusion
As their first look into what it’ll be like working for a new organization, learners should have an outstanding onboarding experience. Keep these tips and considerations in mind as you look to optimize and ultimately scale the program.
Looking for ways to not only build a thriving onboarding program but an engaging learning culture? Download our eBook Lifelong L&D: How To Develop A Continuous Learning Culture To Support Modern Work Environments for strategic tips, evolving L&D trends and best practices to support your modern learners through a learning management system.