So, like many other companies, you’re investing in online employee onboarding and training. You plan to give new hires all the resources and support they need to reach their potential – and fast. To do this, you’ll need a powerful learning management system (LMS).
We’ll explore the benefits and criteria of an effective LMS soon. But first, let’s find out what you need to include when onboarding new staff.
What to include in your online employee onboarding process
Developing an engaging employee onboarding program can be daunting. Truthfully, you’ll need time and iteration to create the perfect training, and the perfect results. In the meantime, though, start with a list of essentials.
Here are the top 3 training topics that the best employee onboarding experiences include.
Job and technical training
Every employee is hired for a purpose: to do their job and do it well. This is how they move the company towards its goals. The sooner employees understand their roles and responsibilities, and how to excel at them, the sooner the company benefits from its newest members.
So, be sure to include technical job training in your new employee onboarding plan. This should teach new hires about their job tasks and expectations, the tools they’ll need to use, and how their performance will be measured.
For example, onboarding for a new traffic manager might include training about the clients they’ll be assigned to, a course on how to use Asana and Slack, and information about the performance indicators for their role.
Culture training
Employees need to be good at their jobs – that’s a no-brainer. But staff need to align to company culture, too. They need to understand and live the values, vision, and mission. This is what separates your company from the competition. If staff don’t align, they’re more likely to be unhappy, unproductive, and disengaged (which is bad for business).
So, start the first day of new hire onboarding training with an introduction to culture. Include a video of a senior leader explaining the company’s vision and strategic goals, how each employee can contribute to the company’s success, and the values that all employees should embody.
Real examples of values in action can be effective, too. For example, include an infographic or video that shows how employees appreciate honest feedback, or engage in continuous learning. Just be sure to make these examples relevant to your specific values.
Policies and procedures
Sure, this probably isn’t the most exciting part of new hire onboarding training, but every employee must have a good understanding of company policies and procedures. After all, if employees don’t know what the rules are, they can’t be expected to play by them. Right?
With an LMS that offers employee onboarding gamification features, you can create online courses that make even the driest of topics feel engaging. Think compliance, health and safety, and even procedures for leave and pay. Forget about thousands of printed pages, because this onboarding topic just became fun. All you need is the right employee onboarding training software.
Signs that you need employee onboarding training software
You might already have great training content, but you’ve realised that it’s not enough on its own. You also need employees to engage with it, you need to measure that engagement, and you need to do all of this in a way that makes business sense. In other words, you need one of the most important employee onboarding tools: an LMS.
How did you know it was time to take your new hire onboarding online? You probably started experiencing one or more of the following onboarding issues.
Your onboarding process is taking too much time
Getting new employees up to speed on the job, culture, and company is critical. But it’s also time-consuming. The manual approach of printing, emailing, following up and filing can take hours – and we won’t even mention classroom-based training. Plus, the more new hires you have, the more time it takes. And time is money.
You don’t need to take the manual approach, though. Adopting a powerful LMS means that you get all the benefits of employee onboarding automation. New hires will receive prompts to read and sign forms, take training, and complete their onboarding. All the while, you’ll be able to track their progress and performance using the reporting features on your LMS. How’s that for efficiency?
Your industry is big on compliance
If you’re in the healthcare, construction, manufacturing, financial or retail industries, then there’s a good chance your company needs to follow strict compliance laws. The thing is, your company isn’t a person, it’s a bunch of people. Your weakest link? The employee who doesn’t know compliance regulations, or how to follow them.
So, how do you ensure that every new hire doesn’t just complete compliance training, but actually learns from it? By leveraging an employee onboarding platform that makes training interesting, convenient and measurable.
With a well-featured LMS, you can incorporate exciting staff onboarding training videos, graphics and discussion forums that make employees want to learn about compliance. You can also prompt them to repeat modules when they perform poorly in quizzes. This way, you’ll always be on top of compliance, and never worry about new staff putting the company at risk.
Your workforce is dispersed
If your employees work from different stores, branches, cities, or even countries, you’re not alone. In fact, some companies, like Automattic, are entirely remote and have employees all over the world. It’s a reality of the 21st Century. But it can also make new-hire onboarding a challenge. Well, not if you train them online!
Online courses enable employees to learn anytime, anywhere. Even better if your LMS offers mobile learning features, so that you can deliver employee onboarding via a mobile app. Whether they’re on the train or at home, your employees will be able to engage in onboarding training.
Employee turnover is higher than you’d like
Employees cost time and money to train and integrate into the company. When they leave, you not only lose what was invested in their training, you need to reinvest in their replacement, too.
Luckily, research has found a solution. A strong new hire onboarding process improves retention by more than 80%, and productivity by more than 70%.
What exactly is a strong onboarding process? One that includes all of the essential onboarding training topics, delivered via a convenient, user-friendly, fully-featured LMS.
Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. But it’s a great indication of some common issues that can be solved with the right new hire onboarding software. Could we be talking about eFront?
How eFront can help you create the best onboarding for your employees
Many companies view onboarding as simply offloading information to new hires. But a better approach is to treat it as its own special type of employee training. This approach, combined with a powerful LMS like eFront, will give you the best results.
So, what exactly does eFront offer?
Automation
With eFront, your online employee onboarding process flow becomes a well-oiled machine. Automate all training and documentation from start to finish, all while keeping close track as employees progress through each module or course. Plus, with email setup, calendars, and push notifications, training is always top of mind for new hires.
Content features
eFront makes content upload and management a breeze. It offers built-in support for rich HTML5 content creation, and an advanced importing engine that turns anything from documents to videos into fully web-compatible course content.
You can also leverage eFront’s easy content reuse and authoring capabilities to create simplified versions of training content for new hires.
Assessments and surveys
Employee onboarding activities require time and resources. And like anything a business invests in, you need to measure its return. With eFront, you can easily incorporate quizzes into your courses to test how much new hires have learned. The best part is that quiz feedback can be automated, so manual grading is something you can scratch off your to-do list, too.
Using eFront’s survey functionalities, you can also ask new staff for feedback about the learning platform, course structure and content, assessments, and more. Then, leverage this insight to develop new-hire onboarding best practices that guarantee the best results.
Learning design
Your ability to design a highly engaging course depends on the features of your employee onboarding system. Luckily, eFront supports a host of interactive and collaborative activities, like branching scenarios, discussion forums, and video conferencing. You can also allocate courses to staff in a specific order. So when it comes to learning design, the world is your oyster.
Certification and gamification
Developing an employee onboarding program with eFront means that you get access to a wide range of gamification features. Points, badges, and leaderboards are a great way to encourage learning. Certificates are a great way to recognize employees who complete their training.
Conclusion
Strong online employee onboarding helps new hires to become productive, compliant, and happy – quickly. Plus, delivering your training through a platform like eFront means that you get the benefits of automation, gamification and reporting – all at the push of a button.
Yup. Onboarding just became a whole lot simpler.