Educating new staff is a more in-deep process than simply handling corporate instructions and a to-do list if you don’t want to lose new members in a short period. Instead, it’s a way to make an excellent first impression and ensure hires both would benefit from partnering. To be precise, it’s worth considering e-learning as a powerful tool for successful employees’ onboarding.
This article narrates how to overcome recruits’ introduction issues and make work in the company engaging and productive from the first days.
7 onboarding challenges that e-learning helps to overcome
Developing e-learning courses for onboarding hires, companies should consider several aspects that will provide easy adapting, educate new talents, and keep them loyal. Research shows that about 82% of employees stay on the job for at least three years after passing through intense training. Moreover, a wisely developed process will help to achieve a high return on the cost of creating an e-learning app. So let’s figure out the main challenges in developing effective support for new workers and increasing retention rates.
Poor quality information
Onboarding training modules should contain comprehensive data on the workers’ responsibilities and companies’ expectations from their hiring, systems and processes descriptions, etc. High-quality e-learning courses will exclude the risks of employees’ misunderstanding and ensure they have chosen the right place to work in.
A lot of materials for a short period
New workers may already be a little frustrated when getting a new job. And giving a significant amount of information too quickly can make things worse. Therefore, it would be better to divide the educational programs into several units. Such an approach won’t overload people and will be more productive. That’s the meaning of e-learning training: create not pressure but opportunities for educating consequentially at a suitable time.
Inadequate content
Opposite to the previous challenge, a content creator can give not enough information to build a complete picture of the working process. As a result, beginners risk losing consistency in the logic chain and asking more questions than finding answers. That’s why entrepreneurs should leave an opportunity to refine content if needed to eliminate the described challenges faced by new employees. Also, it would be a good idea to create a course library so that learners could help themselves fill knowledge gaps in the onboarding process.
Lack of engagement
Dry and monotonous text pages can be pretty dull for readers. Moreover, such trainings are usually hard to keep in mind and require more processing time. Thankfully, employee onboarding through e-learning allows entrepreneurs to create exciting materials and use additional features to raise engagement. Thus, content makers may use storytelling or animated details as helpful methods to attract people’s attention. The other approach lies in course gamification, allowing to present data simpler and reward learners with badges or rating scores.
Guidance and support
Connection with the management or responsible colleague is essential for new hires at the beginning of their corporate journey. You may have an excellent onboarding e-learning example but a lack of feedback. It can cause problems with applying workers’ theoretical knowledge in practice. So it’s better to provide a possibility for adding comments in the courses and define time to support a new team member.
A single form of learning
Utilizing just one way to represent content may be less effective than using multiple forms, such as tests, practical tasks, repetition, videos, etc. The same material can be learned faster if performed in several views.
Lack of information about brands’ culture
During the onboarding course, a new worker should first know the brand's values and goals. You can add the company's story, technological process videos, business partners, and customers’ reviews. Such content will help employees to understand their role in a single organism and emphasize the need to follow the corporate rules and traditions.
Addressing the above issues is a good place to start, but let’s figure out what further steps you can obtain to get the best outcome from your courses.
Virtual Classroom Learning: Educational High-Tech Frontier within Your Reach
Re-think your onboarding with e-learning practices
Gartner, an IT research and consultancy company, states that around 38% of new employees regret their choice of work and are unsure if they suit the company's needs. A well-designed onboarding employee software can increase confidence in their skills and save money on hiring another person.
Successful e-learning courses provide more exciting and memorable onboarding to make your new team members fill themselves at the right time and place. That’s why you should change your idea of adapting individuals at their workplaces from simple documents and instructions reading to a more engaging educational process.
Pay more attention to personality
Organizing a warm welcome is essential to arrange new hires from the first minute. Make the employees feel they are the people whom you are looking for. Try to provide a good impression about your company, explaining its value, culture, and brand attributes. It is an example of onboarding best practices.
Help recruits feel enthusiastic about their new job but don’t forget to draw your expectations. For example, you can add real stories of other employees' successful career advancements and describe how individuals can upgrade their skills and qualifications working with you.
You shouldn’t neglect such issues, like where the cafeteria or restroom is. It will help to contribute to the workers’ physical orientation in their first weeks. To create more personalized learning, think of valuable information from the workers’ point of view. You can also ask other company members about their virtual onboarding challenges and determine content pros and cons. In fact, such reviews should become an essential part of analyzing your content performance.
Don’t reinvent the wheels and use the digital resources you have
In most cases, companies already have the majority of data for creating an exciting onboarding app. For example, entrepreneurs can use content from their websites but add some value or emphasize essential factors of brands’ work. The only thing you should do is present materials engagingly, e.g., through animated pictures. For example, you can create an immersive scenario to show the production line or focus on company policy or customer support. This approach will be more visible than simply repeating the website pages.
The new hires' adaptation is a huge topic, but we’ve tried to extract the most valuable information for our readers. The next chapter will give you some insights on how to make your training stay out of the crowd and measure its implementation performance.
Tips and tricks for creating an extraordinary onboarding e-learning
We’ve already described some principles to develop a successful e-learning-onboarding combination advantageous for entrepreneurs and their new staff. Still, there is a lot of space for creativity. So you can improve your content presentation more and achieve even better results with such approaches:
- Use videos as a part of an educational program. Around 69% of correspondents find this way of content presentation more effective than reading text canvas.
- Make your courses available at customers’ fingertips by creating a progressive web application (PWA) accessible from any browser or device or implementing blockchain in e-learning.
- Help employees speak your language. Every industry has specific terms, which may be frustrating for new hires. So you’d better think of a glossary to help workers get up to speed with the brand.
- Celebrate small wins. Creating some kind of digital reward, like gamified badges, will help your employees feel included and face their progress in digital onboarding.
You won’t know whether your training materials are good enough for successful staff adaptation without doing research. There are four key steps to check a key performance indicator (KPI) and side effects of e-learning courses, be it old materials or newly created ones:
- Reaction. Monitor how learners mark the educational content. If they are irritated rather than satisfied, that should signal you to find program bottlenecks and fix them.
- Assimilation. Explore the e-learning effect on onboarding by providing periodical testing. Quizzes are the most effective way to check how employees understand courses and keep their knowledge.
- Behavior. That's not the same as the reaction. You should analyze how people act in a long view after going through your onboarding training modules to see if they apply new skills to practice.
- Outcome. Here we talk not about individual results but about the impact of learning courses on the company's effectiveness. You should examine whether your business makes more sales and increase conversion and revenue after staff education.
