When you spend so much to hire new people, you don’t want them eyeing the exits within months of their employment.
During their first days and weeks on the job, you have a great opportunity to win their long-term loyalty. In fact, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years or more if they experience a well-thought-out and managed onboarding. On the other hand, nearly one-third of all new hires quit their jobs within the first six months.
A good onboarding plan is very advantageous for a company. It allows your employees to retain information better, be productive sooner, and perform better. So how do you make new hires feel welcomed and prepared for success?
First, you need to nurture key relationships between them and your other employees. Your HR and management teams can devise programs to foster this relationship-building.
Second, you must share knowledge effectively. That’s where the right learning management system (LMS) can dramatically streamline your knowledge-sharing in seven key ways, by enabling you to:
1. Manage all training centrally
Off-site, onsite, online, instructor-led, or through virtual classes ⎯⎯ whatever form your training takes, the right LMS can accompany you and even automate certain tasks like scheduling, enrollment to training, attendance, creation and correction of exams, compliance confirmation, performance tracking, etc.
And no matter how many offices you have, you can manage all your training with one LMS.
2. Facilitate remote onboarding
You may have new-hires living in different cities and time zones, with wildly varying scheduling availability. In fact, some organizations may have to onboard thousands of new employees in a short period to respond to a big business opportunity, such as a new customer or contract.
How would you introduce all these recruits to your company culture, procedures, and policies, and do so in a timely way, on budget?
Working with the right LMS, you can manage the whole onboarding process with powerful automation that increases your administrative efficiency immensely. Moreover, all new hires can be assigned specific onboarding training, and you can track their progress.
3. Standardize the knowledge shared
The right LMS will deliver to all new hires an identical introduction to your culture, policies, and ways of doing, anywhere your people are, on any device. Training activities can be built with multiple steps, barriers, exams, and so on to create a structured syllabus. Furthermore, you can award badges and certificates to acknowledge their understanding of a certain topic and ensure compliance.
4. Lower the stress of onboarding
New hires can be stressed by the overwhelming amount of information they have to absorb about your business. Supported by an LMS, a well-designed onboarding program can offer recruits individualized learning paths that give them the freedom to learn at their pace within your timelines.
Moreover, a simple-to-use, easy-to-learn LMS reduces the stress of your recruits because they won’t spend hours learning the system, or be put off by using it.
5. Maximize engagement while onboarding
To engage your recruits during training, the content needs to be thoughtfully designed: when learners snooze, everybody loses.
So you can’t simply record someone talking over their PowerPoint deck or deliver a huge pile of documents to be read. As your team invests time and energy in creating this engaging content, the right LMS supports your efforts by making content creation and delivery easy and by offering fun gamification features.
The latter boosts engagement and motivation by adding game-like elements, such as goal-setting, progress-tracking, competition-setting, and rewards (e.g., badges and certifications) for achievement.
6. Track your recruits’ progress
No learning experience is complete without testing the acquisition of new information. The questionnaire feature in the uxpertise platform allows you to create exams with automatic correction and the possibility to manually assign a grade for open-ended questions.
Moreover, an LMS can group your new employees into segments based on your criteria. Through reporting and analytics features, you can view data on individual and team performances and make any training adjustments necessary. Customizable dashboards can keep you up-to-date in real time.
7. Make two-way feedback easy
Learning is a two-way street. To continuously fine-tune your onboarding activities, you want feedback from your recruits: What worked? What didn’t? How can you do better? The survey tool of a well-designed LMS enables you to collect that feedback effortlessly.
We’ve all heard the saying that we only get one chance to make a good first impression. That truth certainly applies when your new hires “encounter” your organization through your onboarding program.
By effectively using all the tools of the right LMS, you’ll plant the seeds for a long and fruitful working relationship with your new employees.
Are you looking for the right LMS? Uxpertise is our all-in-one cloud-based LMS platform. To learn more, click here or request a free demo.
