Did you know that about one-third of new hires leave their jobs within the first 12 months? This is a staggering figure, considering that the cost to train a new employee can range from 25% to 200% of their salary. Fortunately, a proper onboarding program can help you get employees fully acquainted with your company culture, as well as build and retain talent over time.
By onboarding program, we refer to the process by which new employees are introduced to their role, their team, and the company culture. It usually includes different activities such as orientation, training, introductions, and follow-ups, and it’s a critical phase given the new hire is most likely to leave or stay in the company during this period.
With the growth of digital technology, many companies have turned to eLearning platforms to deliver training and development programs to their employees, including onboarding. That’s because eLearning onboarding programs are cost-effective, scalable and provide a consistent and standardized experience for all new hires.
In this blog article, we share 6 tips that are essential to designing a successful eLearning onboarding program.
Tips for designing eLearning Onboarding Programs
Think from the perspective of your newly hired employees
Companies need to learn to look at their onboarding programs through the eyes of new hires. An easy way to do this is to conduct a survey on your new hires and ask questions to get them the information you need to build an onboarding plan that fits their specific needs and goals. It could be anything, from learning about your company’s core values, mission, and vision statement, or knowing what’s expected of their respective job roles, and how to fulfill these expectations.
Design a comprehensive eLearning Program.
A comprehensive onboarding plan should contain everything the new employee needs to learn to become acquainted with the organization they’re working for. It should also be structured in a way that enables these new hires to learn at their own pace. Take into consideration diverse learning needs and concentration spans, mainly because not every employee will be able to take in the whole stuff at once. The eLearning content used for the onboarding training should be designed, so these new hires can access them repeatedly.
Enrich your Onboarding Plan with multimedia content
When it comes to onboarding eLearning, you have to make it exciting! Incorporating multimedia content into your program is fundamental to doing so. We mean images, audio, video, game-based assessments, and animations. One or all of these contents will go a long way in enhancing the appeal of the program. If you’re to pick one, we recommend going for videos because they’re usually more engaging. Reading just text can be pretty boring.
Add personalization to your onboarding courses
eLearning personalization is another way to enhance the overall onboarding experience. You can integrate features that optimize your course and provide your employees with different learning experiences. For instance, at the introduction stage of the course, you can use a diagnostic assessment to evaluate the learner’s knowledge of a particular topic and only present them with modules they should learn after evaluating the results
You can also make your content available in different formats. Those with a preference for audio content will probably prefer podcasts, while those that prefer video may be more comfortable watching recordings.
Evaluate onboarding training success
This is where you’ll assess the employees during and at the end of the course to determine if the program has been useful. For instance, the company can place assessments after each module to see how much the learners got from it, as well as a concluding exercise on the entire course. The results from these assessments can help the company know the areas with the best success rate and topics that need to be reinforced in the future.
Remember: Onboarding Training is a journey, not an event
The purpose of an onboarding program is to provide clarity of what’s expected of the employee, why they made the right decision by choosing the company, and to make them see that they have bright career prospects with the firm. All this is done with warmth and a willingness to support with whatever resources are necessary. However, the purpose may not be achieved in a single go. It takes time to convince these new hires. This is why companies must view onboarding as a continuous process, not a one-time thing.