It goes without saying that every business needs to have a solid onboarding program in place when they are hiring a new employee. An appropriate onboarding process will allow the employee to contribute value in his/her new responsibility as quickly as possible, and will reduce the risk of turnover within the first year of hire.
Now, the pertinent question that employers need to ask here is how can we as employers provide effective onboarding in order to achieve a return on our investment (ROI) as early as possible?
Clearly, a successful onboarding program for new employees is critical to ensuring a company is obtaining a fast ROI without the added costs of a failed new hire.
onboarding tips for SMBs for maximising ROI
1. Plan properly when selecting your onboarding LMS
You may not require a robust system now, but you need to think ahead when you hire a set of new employees next year to meet the increasing demand. While investing in your onboarding LMS, plan ahead to save considerable time and expenditure of selecting a new tool in the near future.
Keep a close watch on the needs and objectives, and also check which features are important for you and how many users you must include to your plan. There are some incredible LMS tools that you can consider, this case. These tools are, TalentLMS, Adobe Captivate Prime, Docebo, iSpring Learn, etc.
If you consider Adobe Captivate Prime, you’ll experience the following features.
• Intuitive user interface
• Can be accessed online, offline, and from mobile
• Ease of set up and management for both online learners and facilitators
2. Elevate the quality and speed of the onboarding process
Begin with the onboarding process earlier to get a nice head start. You need to always be prepared for new recruits and ensure they have everything they need to hit the ground running in their new job role. This process should include providing all necessary training as soon as possible.
One way the onboarding process can be increased is by integrating new employees to their role in a phased approach. Try warming them up with simple tasks in the beginning that they can master fast, and then gradually amp up the complexity over time. This way, the onboarding expenses stay limited and ROI is achieved sooner.
3. Pre-assess to custom tailor your online training content
Carry out pre-assessments to check what your new recruits are already aware of and what they need to cover in their onboarding online training. In this case, qualitative assessments are the best option to consider, as they test
practical application.
For instance, a simulation process allows you to understand if a new employee can implement their communication skills to resolve a consumer issue. Or, if they’re able to use their product knowledge to upsell a consumer. Then you can apply the data to customise their learning process and make targeted recommendations. That way, you’ll be improving online resource allocation and onboarding ROI for your small business.
4. Consider the persisting problems and solutions
Understand what kind of problems and opportunities your business comes with and how training allows you to address them. These have to be high-impact points, which means these have a direct impact on the business. Once you have clarity about the issues and opportunities, you can start thinking about the learning experience for your staff members.
For example, you are expanding your workforce and the nature of your organisation’s work requires highly qualified staff. Now if you notice new employees are already highly qualified yet take a considerable time to understand your company culture, ways of functioning and working processes. This eventually results in errors and it takes time for newcomers to move towards full proficiency in tasks. Both of which results in lost productivity (even financially).
In this case, we can sum up the problem, the solution and the metrics to monitor as:
• Problem: Underprepared staff take longer to perform
• Solution: Onboarding online programme to support new employees acquire invaluable skills and workplace processes faster
• Metrics and indicators to check: Productivity loss, time-to-performance, Impact and number of errors, expense onboarding programme
5. Make advanced reporting a priority
Small or medium businesses may not have as many data to sift through, but you still require employee onboarding training software with advanced reporting features, like reports that allows you to understand which employees are falling behind and which are the promising candidates. Or, the metrics that demonstrate the most common retention points so that you can fine-tune your online training content accordingly.
Data visualisations are another must-haves because you can identify patterns that result in meaningful change, like tracing an outbreak of low evaluation scores back to the source. Or understanding why your latest online training tutorial isn’t with new hires and assisting to reduce compliance violations.
6. Enhance employee experience with empowering performance management tools
After the preliminary onboarding period, it’s significant to keep investing in your employees to increase ROI long term. You can allow the employee and their supervisors to use the tools to take control of their performance and take it to new level of efficiency. The employees today wish for self-led tools to manage their own performance and growth. Some of the performance management tools include Workday, BambooHR, Engagedly, etc.
Some of the features of the advanced performance management tools that helps the employees in this process, include-
• Goal setting and tracking,
• Continuous feedback tools,
• Instant performance reports.
These tools help new hires feel instantly more engaged and in-control of their role.
Similarly, managers and leaders in the business require opportunities to communicate with their new team members. They can also have real-time visibility to monitor if there are any early issues that need to be dealt with.
Regular check-ins allows the leaders to learn from their new hire how they’re settling. Other than that, these
tools provide keyword analysis and sentiment analysis to gather deeper insights on the underlying emotional tone.
7. Offer real-world training opportunities
One essential selling point that makes onboarding training software a feasible investment for SMBs is the real-world experience-buiding. It exposes the new recruits to situations and challenges they’ll need to face in the workplace. Thereby, reducing risks and enabling them to benefit from their mistakes.
Many of the platforms even feature built-in templates and online training resources to help you create real-world activities. For example, you can create a serious game with minimal programming or graphic design experience. You can also consider a rapid authoring tool for online training material development, with a vast online library to minimise costs and speed up the development timeline.
SMBs must see to it that their recruits have all the skills and knowledge they require to fulfill their new job responsibilities. Training software is no longer preferred only by big companies with resources to spare. Smaller companies have the scope to improve workplace performance and minimise the new hire learning curve with an LMS, even if when functioning on a limited budget and implementation timeline.
8. Creating a virtual workforce
Many organisations are finding that their employees can produce high-quality work and finish their day-to-day activities without the trouble of coming into the office. Employees can co-ordinate virtually through different platforms like Skype, conference calls and more.
Preparing a business model that facilitates telecommuting (working from home) also helps businesses to hire top talent beyond the limitations of their office locations. The organisation can then grow without needing to construct more offices or buy out the whole floor to make room for employees.
Now, the implementation of a virtual workforce, with growing personnel and new recruits, will work if these new hires are properly brought onboard. Otherwise, possible miscommunication, fragmentation, and reduced productivity could affect the ROI. Effective, precise onboarding that truly strengthens the company’s mission, values and goals propel the business towards growth.
9. Initiate a peer-based training program
Online onboarding also offers you the ability to tap into peer-based knowledge sharing. Introduce a peer-centric coaching program that enables the organisation to use more experienced team members to show new hires how to perform tasks and improve performance. Even if they are thousands of miles apart.
They can use built-in video conferencing tools to hold weekly or monthly meetings and catch up. As well as offer advice on how to address emerging gaps and offer personalized praise to boost motivation.
