Onboarding a new employee is one of the crucial processes for any organization. If onboarding is rushed, it may lead to the new hire with confusion, uncertainty, lower productivity, poor engagement, and a lot more issues.
Organizations have realized that a well-structured onboarding process is essential for new employees to succeed. But onboarding methods involve tedious and lengthy manuals, in-person training that could be lengthy, and presentations that can be repetitive and boring. All of these inconsistent methods lead to the need for a solution that could be more efficient, scalable, and engaging.
This is where eLearning comes in. Onboarding with eLearning is a game-changer, as now you can leverage eLearning tools and strategies to make your onboarding process less tedious and more engaging.
What is Onboarding?
Onboarding is a process used by organizations to integrate new employees into their environment. It includes familiarizing the employee with the organization’s culture, policies, tools, roles, and responsibilities. New hires are trained and helped to become productive and comfortable in their position quickly.
Why should you use eLearning for Onboarding?
Consistent and Standardized Content
eLearning allows you to create standard content and recycle it with additional improvements. This ensures that every new employee receives the same information uniformly by eliminating inconsistencies in face-to-face training sessions.
Cost-Effective
In a traditional onboarding setup, you will need an instructor to train your employees. The number of instructors may grow as the number of new employees, and this will significantly increase your cost. By incorporating eLearning in your onboarding process, you can reduce the cost per learner significantly. eLearning-based onboarding would require initial investment to create eLearning content and set up the eLearning platform and environment. It will reduce the cost as you won’t need printed materials and you won’t have to increase the number of instructors for the growing number of learners.
Flexibility and Accessibility
If you have remote employees in different time zones, they may have to face difficulty attending scheduled training. eLearning-based onboarding allows them to access learning content anywhere, anytime, on any device. This flexibility supports remote and hybrid work environments and allows new hires to progress at their own pace.
Better Assessment, Tracking, and Improvement
The Traditional Onboarding process required offline, face-to-face training sessions, and assessment would only tell what learners still haven’t learned yet, but what about the training itself? eLearning-based training allows you to track learner interaction with each part of the training, and it allows you to analyze both the learners and the training itself, which can help you improve the parts of the training where you find learners struggling.
Room for lots of strategy and technique
eLearning is an umbrella term that includes a whole lot of science, strategies, tools, and techniques for one to create successful elearning content. Everyone prefers a different strategy or technique for eLearning content creation, and sometimes, people opt for multiple strategies. eLearning allows you to incorporate strategies like adaptive learning, microlearning, and gamification and utilize tools like a Learning Management system, Learning Record Store, Authoring tools, and more.
Key elements of an effective eLearning Onboarding Program
Using eLearning for the onboarding process doesn’t only mean turning your training into video and materials into pdfs. Doing so will worsen the result as you are going to turn an active training process into non-interactive and boring digital content. To fix these issues, you will have to include some of the strategic elements into your e-learning content. Let’s look at them.
Interactive Content
Instead of creating content with just video and text, you should use interactive videos, quizzes, and simulations for an engaging onboarding experience. You can use authoring tools like Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate to create interactive eLearning content.
Microlearning
Microlearning is a technique where learning content is delivered in small chunks. Each lesson covers only one small topic and provides only relevant information to understand that small topic. This ensures that learners are not overwhelmed with too much information at the same time. Learners can learn one concept completely in a short time, and as a result, there won’t be any cognitive overload.
Gamification
When you use game-like elements in your eLearning content, it is called gamification. Rewarding learners with points and badges can motivate them to complete more lessons, whereas a leaderboard creates a sense of competition, and due to it, learners improve their performances.
Mobile Learning
Making mobile learning content provides learners an opportunity to learn on the go. Sometimes, people think about the stuff they learned, and suddenly, they find that they have forgotten few important information. In such scenarios, if they have instant access to the learning content and they see those information at the exact moment, this process reinforces the learning. Now, they are more likely to retain the information for a longer time.
Feedback
Feedback is a very important part of eLearning. Providing learners with constructive feedback allows them to understand what their knowledge retention has been, and it also gives them an idea of whether they need to adjust their learning process. To include feedback, you can use interactive videos, quizzes, or other interactive assessment elements from authoring tools.
eLearning Onboarding Design Best Practices
A Welcome Module
A warm and informative welcome module is crucial as it makes the first impression. It helps new employee feel valued and excited about their role while reducing the first day anxiety by providing a clear understanding about company culture and what to expect.
In the welcome module, you can include a welcome message from the CEO or the team leader expressing their enthusiasm about the new employee. You can talk about the company’s mission, core values, and history to make the new employee emotionally connect with the company and align with its vision.
You can include essential policies such as a code of conduct, security practices, data privacy, and last but not least, always add tips to help the new employee navigate their first few weeks, such as key contacts, communication channels, and expectations.
Role Specific Training Module
Generic onboarding generally includes things we talked about in the welcome module, which isn’t enough for a successful onboarding. When the onboarding process lacks role-specific training, it leaves new employee overwhelmed or under-prepared sometimes.
This module should include lessons for precise skills, tools, and pieces of information a new employee would need to excel in their position. Adding practical scenarios is always crucial in this module, It challenges new employees by putting them into the real-life situations like simulation. It will train them for decision making and problem solving skills as they have already practiced situation that them may face in their role.
Use of Social Learning
Social Learning makes the onboarding process more interactive and less isolating. New employees are more likely to retain the information if they discuss the learning content with their peers. You can divide the new employee into multiple groups and give each group a different task to make them collaborate.
Measure and Improve
Completion rate
Measuring completion rate tells you how well new employee are interacting with your content. It tells whether your onboarding content is accessible, engaging, and manageable for learners or not.
If you see a high drop-off rate among learners, it means that your content needs improvement. It may have issues like module being too long, dense, boring, irrelevant, or sometimes there might be technical barriers such as complicated navigation or slow-loading modules.
You can fix these issues by incorporating strategies like microlearning, gamification, and branching scenarios and UI optimization.
Assessment Score
As we can learn about content performance by analyzing completion rate, similarly assessment scores help us know about the learners as well as the content. By assessing quizzes, case studies, and practical tasks, you can get valuable insights about how well learners are learning from your content.
If the learners aren’t scoring well, this indicates gaps in knowledge delivery and retention. To fix this, always provide immediate feedback after each quiz, and include scenario-based questions that will help learners understand the application of the of the knowledge in the real world.
eLearning Onboarding Tools and Platforms
Learning Management System (LMS)
LMS works as a centralized platform between the instructor and the learners. It helps to manage, deliver, and track eLearning courses. You can upload your digital learning content into LMS and create a course with the uploaded content. It presents the course to learners with easy navigation and provides an enrollment option.
Some of the Popular LMSs are:
- LearnDash: It is a WordPress LMS that allows you to create drip-feed content to release lessons gradually. Provides advanced quiz options such as timed quizzes, question bank, etc.
- Moodle: It’s an open-source LMS. It is highly customizable with numerous plugins. It is equipped with robust assessment options, such as quizzes, assignments, and forums. And it has a strong community.
Learning Record Store (LRS)
An LRS, as its extended form suggests, is a storage for Learning Records. These learning records are learners’ experience data or, in better words, tracked data of learners’ interactions with your content.
LRS allows organizations to track and analyze detailed learner interaction beyond the LMS. The key features of an LRS are:
- It follows the xAPI standard and stores xAPI statements.
- It has advanced reporting capabilities, these reports provide deeper insights about the learners as well as the content.
- It supports real-time data transfer, so its data can be used for other eLearning strategies like adaptive learning.
You can use tools like GrassBlade LRS and drive your eLearning content toward success.
Authoring Tools
Authoring Tools are used to create interactive and media-rich learning content. It provide you with interactive elements such as drag-and-drop, matching, hotspot reveal, branching scenarios, and more, which you can use to make your lessons interactive. You can export content with it for xAPI standard and track and analyze every little interaction with the help of an LRS.
Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, and iSpring Suite are some of the popular authoring tools.
Conclusion
Modern eLearning technologies, strategies, and tools have changed onboarding from a time-consuming and dull process to a streamlined, engaging, and data-driven process. You can accelerate the training and productivity of the new employee by incorporating techniques like interactive content, gamification, and analytics, and tools like LMS, LRS, and Authoring tools can help you achieve that.
When new employees go through a well-designed onboarding process, they feel prepared, less confused, and confident. They align with the company’s goals, values, and ethics. They know their role and have a good productivity.