The COVID-19 pandemic has raised unique challenges for employers to operate their business practices, especially the onboarding process. It is important to educate new hires about their day-to-day job responsibilities, the company’s culture, the skills required for their position, and other team members. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizations have to train new hires online through a virtual process on a PC or laptop screen instead of face-to-face orientation and onboarding. Using a learning management system for employee onboarding training can help new hires get on board quickly and easily.
Why Is on-Boarding So Important?
The onboarding process is essential to build a healthy and long-term relationship between the employer and the employee. New employees have lots of anxiety and stress when they start a new role in an organization. A robust onboarding process can reduce such levels of stress and anxiety, resulting in happier employees. It helps the new hires to understand their role better and increase their engagement level, leading to increased overall productivity and performance.
The research shows that the first three months of employment are vital for employees to build rapport with the organization, management, and co-workers. The initial three months on a job are a critical time for both new hires and managers, and now it has become more difficult in a virtual working environment. While onboarding employees remotely, the manager and team can create a supportive environment and show the new hires how to do their jobs will generate more positive attitudes of new hires about their job.
Onboarding Employees Remotely: Tactics to Engage Remote Employees
To make the virtual onboarding process easier for employers and employees in the COVID-19 pandemic, here are some tips for onboarding employees remotely to conduct effective training programs.
Create Onboarding Group
With no physical office to welcome and connect the new employees, create cohorts or groups of new employees who can experience onboarding together virtually. Such groups can regularly connect and learn about the company's culture and figure out how the company operates. Assign some onboarding issues like the company’s vision, mission, history, goals, or other related topics to the group to work. This exercise will help to develop a positive relationship between the new hires for a longer time.
Set a Clear Expectation
It is challenging to meet in-person with new hires in remote onboarding programs to communicate about the expectation. However, the employer can connect with the new employees digitally to discuss their goals and responsibilities to achieve those goals. As the employees have joined the organization remotely, setting a clear expectation becomes even more critical. Moreover, only setting goals and expectations is not enough; measuring the performance is also important. To gauge a new hire’s progress, create a one-two-three monthly plans mentioning what the company expects from them at each milestone.
Assign Mentors to New Hires
In this COVID-19 pandemic, the manager can assign remote mentors to newbies to provide enough guidance via the digital communication channel. Such virtual mentorship helps new hires to get familiar with every aspect of the organization and allows for quick learning and growth. The new employee can contact the mentor for all the doubts and questions, resulting in increased confidence.
Frequent One-On-One Video Check-Ins
Work from home can make new employees feel isolated; frequent check-ins will make them feel supported. Schedule a one-on-one call or video chat to make new hires feel like a part of the team and allow them to ask questions. However, make sure that new hires don’t get overwhelmed with too much information as they are working from home can lead to confusion, stress, and frustration.
Virtual Onboarding Checklist
To onboard new employees virtually requires doing the right amount of planning and coordination. Here is a virtual onboarding checklist of everything needed to conduct a successful remote onboarding:
Hardware and Software Tools
The most significant part of the virtual onboarding checklist is to ensure the availability of resources. Create a list of all the necessary tools like hardware, software, and office supplies essential to perform the job. If the organization is going to provide these resources, make sure to order them beforehand, and confirm whether they have received the tools. If the employee is going to arrange all the necessary tools, confirm in advance regarding that too. Most importantly, ensure that they have a good Wi-Fi connection and functioning hardware tools.
Communication Tools and Channels
It is important to communicate with co-workers to clear the dilemmas regarding work and achieve business goals. Inform about communication tools that the organization prefers to use and share information about using those tools. Explain the proper communication channel to go to with queries and how to contact those people. Ensure that the employees must have properly functioning phone, group messaging tools/apps, video conferencing software, email access, and file-sharing tools.
Digital Documentation
The company usually asks a new employee to sign important documents, including employment contracts, employee benefits plans, company policies, and more such documents. To smoothen the documentation process, prepare the list of documents beforehand and send it to new employees digitally. Ask them to sign digitally and share the documents securely.
Educate About Organization’s Culture Virtually
When onboarding employees virtually, the organization must rework on content pieces and digitize the employee handbook. For onboarding presentations, use virtual learning tools, screen sharing options, videos, relevant blogs, resources, etc., that outline the culture. Moreover, users can use virtual eLearning tools like onboarding learning management systems, onboarding employee software, and other online platforms for systematic and hassle-free online training.
Get Your Own Employee Onboarding & Training Software Solution!
Onboarding employee training solution commonly referred to as a learning management system for onboarding enhances the onboarding process by offering a seamless experience to both the manager and new hires. It helps the manager to train the new employee quickly and efficiently without too much administrative and paperwork. The benefits of using an onboarding learning management system don’t end here; it also provides various following advantages
Onboarding Employee training solution streamlines the process onto one digital platform and comes up with some incredible features that help track each hire’s progress as they move through onboarding stages.
The learning management system for onboarding enables organizations to provide compliance training easily. The training needs to be updated regularly for the industries with strict compliance requirements and ever-changing rules. The onboarding employee training solution allows users to create courses and content in accordance with predefined standards, laws, and policies.
It has the flexibility to offer remote access to the learning materials. The single-sign-on feature centralizes important information into one secure location. Video conferencing integration with employee training software can facilitate online events, online classes, webinars, and more to make the training session more informative.
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urge to use employee training software solutions. However, the question arises of choosing the best employee onboarding training software solution. Here is some useful information to consider to make the best decision for the organization.
Define the objective: Define a clear plan and goals before buying the learning management system for onboarding. The objective may be to slash the costs or speed up the onboarding process or saving more time. Whatever the aim is, make sure it should meet through employee onboarding training software investment decisions.
Easy to use: Avoid the software which complicates the onboarding process and look for those which are user friendly and can simplify the whole process. Ask for a free trial and demo to the vendor to check for any problems that could arise further down the line.
Quick installation: The installation part is depending on the size of the organization. If it is a large organization, the vendors may provide a dedicated implementation consultant to deliver a fast, efficient roll-out of the platform. The vendor can also offer cloud-based solutions for self-implementation, so it is good to select a cloud-based onboarding employee training software installed and implemented quickly.
Security factors: The best onboarding software provides multiple security layers that are regularly updated. Please read the privacy policies carefully and ensure that the vendors will not share sensitive information with other parties.
Customizable: It should offer tailor-made features and user interference according to the organization's training needs. The customized employee onboarding software can help meet the exact business needs. It has some flexible features like customizable UI, branding, reports, learning paths, certifications, and more that can provide a tremendous learning experience.
Advanced Reports: A detailed report on employee’s performance will help the organizations to develop new strategies for the new hires to achieve the goal. Employee onboarding training software with advanced reporting features can track, access, monitor learner progress level, and generate standard as well as custom reports in a few clicks. A detailed report can be sent via email to learners on a scheduled date and time using a scheduling report feature.
Gamification: This is one of the most crucial criteria while selecting the employee onboarding training software. A gamified onboarding platform can make the training program interesting and engaging by applying a game mechanism. Create an attention-grabbing training program and encourage healthy competition by using gaming elements like leaderboards, badges, and achievements, rewards, redeem points, and more. For gamified training content, all you need is the right onboarding employee training software to quickly incorporate gaming elements into training programs.
Learning path: With this feature of employee training software, the trainer can add structure to training programs. The new hires usually have to enroll in particular courses in a prescribed period for onboarding training. Employee onboarding training software can also automatically enroll the trainees in all the courses. As the learner completes each course, it gives access to the next course in a sequenced learning path option. Learning paths with learner choice is a more flexible option where learners can complete the course in the order they want to take it. The learning paths can make the training process smooth and engaging.
Integrations: The best onboarding employee training software must provide valuable integration with other virtual platforms to create a better user experience and reduce the stress of navigating between multiple systems. Some of the useful integrations like SSO, ERP, CRM, Salesforce, eCommerce, Social Media, HRIS, and more such integrations can save time, reduce manual tasks, and offer detailed reports.
The Bottom Line
The COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging and unique time for new hires as they have to communicate and learn virtually instead of going to the office to meet their newbies and other co-workers. For employers, it is the biggest challenge to onboard the new employees remotely. Since there is uncertainty about joining the offices in-person, it is very important to provide a seamless virtual onboard experience to the new hires. Using a digital platform like onboarding employee training software can help to create an interactive onboarding experience. So is it the right time to invest in employee onboarding training software? The answer to the question is Yes! Investment in the right technology or software can contribute to the organization’s success. So, get your custom solution made now by the best software developers.
