Employee onboarding is a crucial process in every organization. Rapid eLearning can make your employee onboarding truly seamless. Read on to know how.
What’s your employee onboarding strategy? Do you just put them through an hour’s induction, set up their desktop, have them read an employee manual, and ask them to get started with their job? Or, do you make them go through rigorous classroom training that extends over a long period and expect them to be proficient at their job? If your organization aims to improve employee engagement, both these strategies are highly unlikely to work. One strategy that has worked for many organizations is the use of rapid eLearning for employee onboarding as it appeals to Gen X, the millennials, and the latest entrants to the workplace – iGen (Gen Z) alike.
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Table of Contents
- What Is the Importance of an Employee Onboarding Program?
- What Are the Challenges of Using Traditional Training for Onboarding?
- How Rapid eLearning Improves Employee Induction Training?
- How Does Rapid eLearning Reduce Cost in Employee Onboarding?
- What Are the Benefits of Using Rapid eLearning for Employee Onboarding?
- How to Create Effective Rapid eLearning Courses?
What Is the Importance of an Employee Onboarding Program?
A well-designed onboarding program focuses on improving aspects like employee loyalty, retention, and business productivity. These are all very important metrics for an organization.
Here are some detailed reasons why crafting an effective onboarding program is important for organizations:
1. Gives New Employees a Good Headstart and Acclimates Them With The Organization
An effective onboarding program conveys the vision, mission, and objectives of the organization. This gives employees a nice headstart and a chance to get acclimated to the company. It gives new hires an overview of the company culture- how they interact, the working style, career development opportunities, etc. Thus, a well-planned onboarding program is essential to align the employees with their new company.
2. Makes Employees Feel Included
It is quite natural for new hires to feel nervous and stay aloof in the initial few days of their joining. But, it is the organization’s responsibility to make them feel welcomed and valued. Invest some time and resources in developing a smooth, holistic onboarding program for them. Moreover, try to curate a welcoming and positive experience for them. Doing so, will make them feel included and encourage them to give their 100% at work.
Have You Met the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning?
Accelerate Learning and Maximize its Impact With the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning!
4Rs of rapid eLearning:
- Redesign
- Record
- Rebuild
- Republish
3. Makes Employees Engage With The Company
When employees have a clear understanding of the company’s culture, they are more likely to become engaged. An effective onboarding experience demonstrates the organization’s dedication towards the new employee, which in turn, creates a positive impact on them and they become more committed to their new role. It also encourages them to engage with the company- follow the company culture, learn their working style, interact with their colleagues, and maintain decorum. All these make employees perform best at their work and improve the organization’s overall success.
4. Ensures Work Compliance
Compliance training is an important requisite for any organization and it is necessary to convey the same to the new joiner. Maintaining compliance keeps the business protected, and an effective onboarding program ensures the employees are aware of the organization’s compliances: what kind of work conduct is expected, how to interact with colleagues and customers, work discipline, and others.
What Are the Challenges of Using Traditional Training for Employee Onboarding?
1. Inability to Adjust to Time Schedules
New employees face many transitions. They enter a new environment- a new job, new people, new roles, new expectations, and sometimes, even a new city!
In a traditional onboarding session where everyone is required to be present at the same time, and at the same place, new employees might find it difficult to adjust to everyone’s schedule. This can set the new employee up for failure and can have a disastrous effect on the organization. To avoid this, you can develop flexible and efficient eLearning training programs in a quick and easy way. By facilitating concept-specific microlearning modules and interactive storytelling methods, you can train your employees about the company culture, work requirements, and skills needed to perform their best.
2. Information Overload in the Initial Training Days
One of the main challenges of onboarding using traditional learning is the overload of information in the initial days. From pep talks to brochures, new information is shared at every point. While you might be tempted to bring your new employees to speed as soon as they join, this could overwhelm them, and they won’t be able to retain much of this information. With the use of eLearning modules, employees can have access to their training throughout and they can learn and brush up their knowledge whenever they want. This way, eLearning design and development can facilitate continuous learning and give employees time to absorb and retain the information.
3. Lack Of Employee Engagement
Employees often lose interest in the mundane traditional onboarding training programs. This also negatively impacts the relationship between the new joinee and the company in the very beginning. Hence, it is important to focus on instructional design strategies throughout the onboarding process. eLearning allows for an interactive and enjoyable learning experience for the employees. Using different instructional design strategies like microlearning, simulation, guided learning, etc., you can foster active and engaged learning for your employees.
A poor onboarding program can inhibit workplace efficiency and set up new employees for failure. To overcome these challenges and create a seamless learning experience for new employees, organizations have started shifting to eLearning for onboarding training.
Have You Met the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning?
Accelerate Learning and Maximize its Impact With the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning!
4Rs of rapid eLearning:
- Redesign
- Record
- Rebuild
- Republish
How Does Rapid eLearning Improve Employee Induction Training?
As seen in the last section, eLearning plays a vital role in increasing the productivity of your new hires and sets the tone for this during their onboarding training. It holds great potential as it ensures consistent and flexible delivery of information to new employees. However, traditional eLearning development takes a lot of time and involves multiple resources. On the other hand, rapid eLearning design and development results in a significant reduction in time and resources.
Here’s what rapid eLearning can offer employee induction training programs:
- Can be designed to meet the organization’s requirements in new hire training
- Decreases eLearning development time
- Increases ROI on training
- Costs less to develop and manage a rapid eLearning program
How Does Rapid eLearning Reduce Cost in Employee Onboarding?
The advantage of using rapid eLearning design and development for employee onboarding programs is that it can leverage predesigned templates offered by eLearning authoring tools. You can share and reuse these templates to save time. For instance, you can have an entire curriculum of courses that are useful for new hires, and you might want to follow a particular visual or communication style for these courses. With authoring tools such as iSpring or Storyline 360 that offer a variety of templates, course development is quick.
eLearning courses developed on topics like employee policies, reporting procedures, rules and regulations, etc., used in employee onboarding might require updates. Predesigned templates are very useful to facilitate quick updates. Rapid authoring tools with an easy learning curve can be utilized by your in-house team to make quick changes in course content when required.
What Are the Benefits of Using Rapid eLearning for Employee Onboarding?
Smooth Employee Onboarding Leads to Happy Employees!
Rapid eLearning plays a part in seamless employee onboarding. Here’s how:
- Acclimatize new hires quickly
- Cut down classroom training time
- Get new hires up the learning curve quickly
- Provide rapid custom eLearning for functional training
1. Acclimatize New Hires Quickly
When you’re hiring a pool of talented employees, trying to cram lots of information in employee orientation programs that stretch over 2 to 3 days of classroom training could be detrimental. Amy Hirsh Robinson, principal of the Interchange Group, a consulting firm in Los Angeles rightly terms this disorganized onboarding process as ‘death by orientation’.
The process of onboarding can actually start before the new hires enter the workplace. Try microlearning to give them a warm welcome. It could be something as simple as a video message from the CEO welcoming new employees. You could let new hires know what’s expected of them on the first day – the point of contact, the paperwork to be completed, and the dress code to be followed. It helps new employees to be aware of this information even before they step in. You could leverage rapid eLearning for employee onboarding and give new hires a virtual tour of the workplace. It’s a great way to get newcomers familiar with the workplace.
You might explain the company’s vision, goals, and culture in the employee orientation session. But you cannot expect new hires to retain that information. Rapid eLearning courses can be used to cover this information, and this gives new hires an opportunity to look up this information whenever they need to.
2. Cut Down Classroom Training Time with Rapid eLearning
New hires only have a limited time to prove themselves in a job. So, the sooner they feel prepared for their role at the workplace, the faster they will be able to contribute to organizational growth. That could be one of the reasons an increasing number of organizations are turning to blended learning for employee onboarding. You could consider using rapid eLearning programs as part of your blended learning strategy for employee onboarding, and cut down the time and cost involved in onboarding new hires.
Watch this insightful video to get tips on how to design impactful employee onboarding training programs.
In blended learning programs for onboarding, rapid eLearning can be used in various stages of the onboarding process. Here’s a visual representation of the various stages involved in onboarding.
3. Get New Hires Up the Learning Curve Quickly
There are 4 Cs that form the building blocks of employee onboarding programs.
| 4 Cs | How Does Rapid eLearning Fit? |
| Compliance | Mandatory compliance training programs to teach employees legal as well as policy related rules and regulations. |
| Clarification | Training that clarifies employee roles within the organization. |
| Culture | Workplace culture is what makes your company unique and is determined by the company’s values, attitude, and behavior. Online training on company culture as part of your onboarding strategy can help new hires. |
| Connection | New hires need to build interpersonal relationships and connect with information networks – usually happens on the job and may not require a training program. But an introductory program to create awareness on social learning can help. |
Rapid eLearning as part of employee onboarding can be leveraged for training related to the 4 Cs in onboarding. The advantage offered by online training is that it’s available on demand for new hires whenever they need to refresh their knowledge. This helps new employees move up the learning curve quickly.
Organizations can be at different levels in the onboarding strategy – passive, high potential, or proactive – depending on how well they integrate the 4 Cs in employee onboarding.
At the passive level, compliance training is covered as part of onboarding and some part of role clarification. But culture and connection awareness is skipped. So, if your organization is in the passive or high potential level of onboarding, you can consider integrating rapid eLearning in the employee onboarding strategy to move up the onboarding level and implement proactive onboarding.
4. Provide Rapid Custom eLearning for Functional Training
New hires in your organization can belong to different functional units or departments. While your onboarding program in the classroom can give new hires an overview of different departments, it’s not feasible to conduct classroom training to impart role-based training, especially when you’re onboarding a mix of employees from various departments.
Rapid custom eLearning as part of the employee onboarding strategy can be used to deliver training that’s customized according to the department or role of the new employee. A case example is a role-based training we designed for employees of different roles working on a document management system – each employee depending on whether he/she held the role of an author, reviewer, or approver went through the relevant role-specific training. So, although your new hires belong to different departments, they go through training that’s relevant to tasks they are expected to complete at the workplace.
Role-based training delivered in new hire training offers the following benefits:
- Training delivered is aligned to a specific business process
- New hires gain deeper knowledge of the department/functional unit they’ll be part of
- Training delivered is relevant to roles new hires are expected to take up – so they can apply it on the job
Have You Met the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning?
Accelerate Learning and Maximize its Impact With the 4 Rs of Rapid eLearning!
4Rs of rapid eLearning:
- Redesign
- Record
- Rebuild
- Republish
How to Create Effective Rapid eLearning Courses?
1. Create A User-Friendly Course Interface
One of the benefits of using rapid eLearning for corporate training is that you can create interactive and immersive learning for employee onboarding programs. For example, you can have a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) and let your learners interact while learning. They can explore more about your organization, departments, leadership team, etc., using flowcharts and animations. This way, they can learn all the necessary information without depending on anyone.
2. Use Guided Learning To Explain Roles And Responsibilities
Guided learning is a popular instructional strategy that uses interactive characters or avatars to facilitate eLearning. Be it a personified animated object or a person of authority- it facilitates the perfect onboarding training as it provides the necessary handholding to new employees through a virtual environment. This can help new hires understand their work requirements and the roles & responsibilities that they are supposed to take up. It also helps them get acquainted with the products and services of the business, thereby improving their knowledge and enhancing their work potential.
3. Use Game-Based Learning
Onboarding training includes information on compliance, safety, code of conduct, information security, business culture, and so on. Using rapid eLearning courses to drill down this information to new hires can be more engaging for them. Using gamification and its elements like rewards, achievements, badges, and leaderboards, provides a fun and engaging twist to the mundane training courses.
Gamified learning also motivates new hires to acquire the skills and knowledge they need for their job and aims at encouraging unfathomable growth for your organization.
4. Engage Employees Using Multimedia
Rapid eLearning modules facilitate a media-rich learning experience for new employees. By including various elements like infographics, videos, animations, audio, etc., rapid eLearning breaks the monotony of text-only learning and provides learners with an opportunity for active learning. Hence, incorporating multimedia elements and eLearning interactivities into your onboarding training enables an engaging learning experience for the employees.
With rapid eLearning content, new employees will be well-prepared and confident to perform their jobs. This in turn will lead to improved job satisfaction and keep them motivated throughout their tenure with the organization.
Wrapping Up
Rapid eLearning is a great way to prime your new employees with the needs and objectives of the organization. While traditional learning often dictates knowledge upon the employees, rapid eLearning development allows them to participate freely and actively learn what they want. Thus, it is a powerful tool that organizations can leverage to provide convenient, consistent, and engaging onboarding training to new hires. Wondering what makes rapid eLearning so powerful and effective? 4 Rs of rapid eLearning definitely deserve attention. Learn more about them in our eBook below and gain a holistic understanding of rapid eLearning for maximum gains.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on August 28, 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
