Employee onboarding lays the foundation for efficient work and job satisfaction. A well-planned onboarding helps the new employee to adapt to their new work environment and improves both the quality and efficiency of their work.
A digital learning platform supports the onboarding by offering a flexible way to learn and all the onboarding material in one place as a clear learning path.
In this blog post, we explore the importance of onboarding and how a digital learning platform can enhance the onboarding experience. We also offer practical tips on how to design and implement onboarding using the Vuolearning platform.
A well-designed onboarding benefits both the employee and the employer.
Good onboarding helps the employee to understand their tasks, work environment, and expectations more quickly, increases their chances of succeeding, safety, and well-being at work, and helps the employee to understand the organization’s practices, values, and culture. A strong onboarding experience helps the employees to feel welcome and capable, increasing their motivation and job satisfaction.
From the employer’s perspective, an employee that receives a good onboarding can start working independently and productively faster. The employees are also generally more satisfied and committed to their work, which improves employee retention. Good onboarding also reduces errors and risks. In addition, good onboarding practices can enhance the employer brand and attract new talents.
A digital learning platform allows learning to happen anytime and anywhere. All onboarding materials are easily accessible in one place and can be revisited when needed.
The platform allows for the creation of diverse onboarding paths, and the learning of the materials can be spread over several months if necessary. This gives the employee a clear path that they can follow and visibility of what is expected of them. Learning can happen at their own pace and it’s motivating to see the progress and what they’ll be learning throughout the process.
The digital learning platform also supports personalized learning needs: learning paths can be tailored by role or even individually. You can offer diverse and engaging learning materials on the platform and take into account the employees' skill levels and preferences.
The learning platform brings clarity to the onboarding process and makes it easy for the employer to distribute onboarding responsibilities for example to supervisors. The platform ensures consistent quality across all onboarding experiences, regardless of who is in charge of the onboarding. Supervisors and HR can track the progress of the employees and assess the impact of the onboarding: where the employee is in the process and how they’re performing.
Planning a good onboarding starts by defining its goals.
Common onboarding goals include familiarizing new employees with the organization, its work culture, their own tasks and team, necessary tools, other staff, and the work environment.
For role- or task-specific goals, a skills-based approach can be used: you can utilize the competencies and competence profiles provided by the platform and define what competencies are required for the role or what the target competence profile should be.
Once the required skills and knowledge are identified, you can start adding content to the onboarding path based on what materials or trainings will provide that knowledge.
It’s worth investing time in planning the content of the onboarding, as well-structured and versatile, interactive material motivates learning and can help manage the initial information overload.
The onboarding content can include general materials for all new hires for example about the company policies, as well as role-specific materials.
When the onboarding is implemented using Vuolearning, utilize the platform’s learning paths and different activity types: courses, calendar events, achievements, milestones, conversation notes, and task lists. With these, you can build a versatile and motivating onboarding path.
Here are some examples of steps that could be added to the onboarding path:
It’s good to set schedules to guide the employees through the onboarding. Vuolearning allows you to set target schedules for each step in the learning path, either a specific date or relative to the user’s start date.
Onboarding can also be structured into stages like pre-onboarding, first day, first week, and the first few months. Each stage can have its own goals and content.
Using a digital learning platform, onboarding can be implemented fully remotely or part online, part in person (blended learning).
In the next example, we’ll give tips on what to do in each stage of the onboarding, what could be the goals of each stage, and what content could be included. The example onboarding has been implemented as blended learning.
Watch this video for instructions on how to create a versatile onboarding path in Vuolearning:
To analyze and improve the onboarding process, gather feedback of the onboarding and monitor the completion rates.
With Vuolearning, you can gather feedback for example by creating surveys. With the activity type conversation notes, you can also have feedback discussions of the onboarding where the supervisor and the employee use a ready-made template to discuss the onboarding process and how well it worked and what could be improved.
You can also add tasks that measure the employee’s knowledge to the onboarding material in order to find out whether the user learns the things taught in the material.
The onboarding process can also be measured by tracking how many of the users complete the onboarding. If there are many who do not finish the onboarding, investigate why: do they receive enough information to use the platform, do they have motivation or time to learn, is the material relevant? Continuously improve the onboarding process based on the feedback received from the employees and the platform’s learning analytics.