With your new recruits hired, you’ve got a new challenge:
Having them properly onboarded and ready to contribute to your team as soon as possible.
A well-designed onboarding program goes a long way toward supporting that goal. The program shortens the on-ramp to productivity, enhances employee engagement, and supports talent retention.
In contrast, some companies choose not to invest in onboarding. They risk creating a pool of improperly trained, disengaged employees who are more likely to execute tasks poorly, burden colleagues, trigger financial losses and leave.
Sometimes, onboarding can be very challenging. A big contract or an acquisition may oblige you to integrate a large number of employees into the company.
With the right learning management system, you can manage and carry out your onboarding program so that it’s efficient, fast, and keeps you updated in real time regarding how your recruits are progressing.
Here are six ways your LMS helps you do all that.
1. Centralized training management
Onboarding means orchestrating a slew of training activities: in-person instruction, online study, virtual classes, webinars, shadowing, and so on.
No matter what the activity, the right LMS can manage all your activities from one platform and automate numerous tasks, such as:
- Scheduling
- Enrollment
- Attendance
- Creation and automatic or manual correction of exams
- Compliance confirmation
- Performance tracking, and so on
Moreover, if your company has recruits living in different locations and time zones, your cloud-based LMS enables you to offer effortless access to any employee with a mobile device and Internet service.
2. Standardize the knowledge shared
How do you introduce all recruits to your company culture, procedures, and policies in a timely way? Employee alignment is key!
The right LMS allows you to easily centralize and distribute all the courses, quizzes, and documents related to your onboarding, like employee handbooks, welcome video, rules and regulations, and other company guidelines.
As a result, everyone, no matter what their location, gets trained on the same materials.
3. Personalize the onboarding program
To get higher levels of engagement, personalize your onboarding training with a balance of company-related and role-related materials.
With the right LMS, you can create personalized learning paths and automate the training assignments that enable you to onboard salespeople differently from your shop-floor team.
This personalization makes the content more pertinent and engaging for your recruits.
4. Reduce the stress of information overload
The overwhelming amount of information that new employees must learn about your company can be stressful.
A well-designed onboarding program, supported by an LMS, enables your recruits to learn at their own speed within your deadlines.
Additionally, an intuitive, easy-to-learn LMS lessens the stress on your recruits because the platform interface is not a barrier to learning while providing the flexibility to access the training anytime.
5. Assess strengths, weaknesses, and knowledge
With any hire, an employer is making at best an educated guess about the potential the new employee has to help the company.
That’s where regular assessments during an onboarding program can help you evaluate the learning ability and performance of your recruits.
Your LMS’ questionnaire feature can help you build tests with automatic correction and the option to manually award a mark for an open-ended question.
Additionally, an LMS can categorize your new hires according to criteria you set. Customizable dashboards can provide real-time updates.
Through reporting and analytics options, you can view information on individual and team performances and make any necessary training adjustments.
Given this real-time information, you can take informed decisions and actions and be proactive with your team.
- Make two-way feedback easy
To get the most out of your onboarding program, you want to improve it continuously.
Your recruits can offer you valuable feedback. Your LMS’ survey tool makes it simple and efficient to gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Ask your recruits, what worked? What failed? How can you improve?
In a tight labor market, you always want to put your best foot forward as an employer. With the right LMS and a well-designed onboarding program, you give your company its best chance for creating a long-lasting and productive bond with your new employees.
