A strategic onboarding program is critical to retain new employees and decrease their time-to-value. Onboarding best practices ensure your employees feel equipped for their jobs and ensures a smooth transition that provides minimal distraction to your company’s daily operations.
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When onboarding new employees, a learning management system reduces administrative labor and ensures your organization is compliant with regulatory and required training.
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You may want to look at an employee onboarding program template from other companies in your industry, or through a eLearning vendor.
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There are several challenges that must be dealt with to ensure your onboarding process is relevant and effective.
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Developing a strong onboarding process is essential for a company’s continued success.
Onboarding new employees can be a complicated process and often important information falls through the cracks. You may end up with a new staff member who isn’t fully oriented to the company culture or trained on their job. Developing a strong onboarding process is essential for a company’s continued success.
One of the most important tasks for hiring employees is creating an adequate process for the onboarding process. You must have a system in place that orients your new staff to the company and their roles within the company.
Onboarding best practices ensure your employees feel equipped for their jobs and ensures a smooth transition that provides minimal impact to customers. It is time-consuming and expensive to continue training new employees, especially if you work in an industry with a high turnover rate.
You may want to look at an employee onboarding program template from other companies in your industry. Consider what information is relevant to every employee and create a training program that addresses those topics. You’ll also need to think about what information may be necessary by department for new hires.
For instance, everyone needs to know the company rules. They will need to know about benefits and other subjects that impact staff across the board. Much of this information is important to the success of new staff and to the improvement in retention. However, it’s also often overwhelming to someone new to the company to try to learn everything presented to them in their first days. There are numerous obstacles in the onboarding process, and these must be addressed.
Hiring new employees seems like a simple enough task. However, if you look at statistics for many companies on turnover and employee dissatisfaction, you’ll see that it’s not quite as straightforward as you might expect. There are several challenges that must be dealt with to ensure your onboarding process is relevant and effective.
First, there’s the problem of overwhelm for new employees. A lot of information is presented in a short amount of time. Whether it’s details on the paid-time-off policy or the process of responding to customer complaints, new hires receive more information than they can process in the first week of being hired. To counteract this problem, a learning management system would allow you to create documents with important information and access for the new employee to review on their own time. They could refer back to the documents and you can create tests to ensure adequate understanding of important data.A second problem is missed information. If you attempt to provide training without a tracking and reporting process or system, it can be easy to overlook certain documents for some employees. When onboarding new employees, a learning management system enables you to use the same training documents for everyone. You can track who has completed what and even test new employees. Everyone receives the same information, ensuring they have the same training to follow company standards and onboarding best practices.A third issue with hiring new staff is that some information may not be relevant right away. Instead of trying to cram everything in within the first week or two of hire, you can spread some of the information out over time without worrying about when it gets completed. An LMS allows you to set up a lit of documents and classes for each new hire. Each item can be checked off as it’s completed. You can set deadlines for the employees which allows them to spread it out over two or three weeks, 30 or 60 days. You can create reports to see what has been completed and what is still outstanding. If someone misses a deadline, you receive an alert. You can require them to complete the training before they are eligible to continue working.
How to Create a Smooth Onboarding Process for Your Business
Use a learning management system to create an effective, efficient employee onboarding process. You can use this system to create new training, add in-person and online training from other sources and track it through reports and deadlines.
When you develop this type of hiring process for your company, you improve employee retention because staff members feel better equipped and more knowledgeable about their jobs and the business as a whole. You also show staff that you care about their success by helping them start out “on the right foot.”
Not only does the onboarding process help new hires, it improves customer service. When a person is trained correctly from their first day, they provide a smooth transition for customers. They will do the job the same way as the last employee, following the same rules and guidelines. In fact, in some jobs, the customer may not even realize a change has taken place.
Another benefit is that you aren’t constantly trying to find someone to do all the training. If you have a person in the department create training for new hires, it will be more in-depth and accurate than if you’re trying to scramble to train someone after the former employee has left. Consistency in training is key to happy employees and customers. It helps you retain customers and staff members because they know what to expect and are trained for what they are hired to do.
Infopro Learning teams up with businesses in various industries to provide a program for onboarding new employees that grows with your company. When you onboard new employees in the right way, you reduce costs of hiring and ensure everyone begins making a valuable contribution to the company right from the start.
