There are several ways to go about doing this but undoubtedly, making a lasting impression on employees from the beginning of their time in your business is essential. In addition to making them feel genuinely welcome in their new roles, implementing an effective onboarding strategy is vital. It should encourage, motivate, excite and equip employees with the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs well and make a valuable contribution to their organization.
The training that new employees receive during onboarding is what sets them up for success. Here are four effective tips to help you make the most of your onboarding strategy.
1. Establish a Formalized New Hire Training Plan
Have a formal training plan in place for new hires. This enables you to start the onboarding process can on day one. Placing new hires in their roles, too spend a week or two ‘working it out for themselves’ before receiving any formal training can be deflating and potentially damaging to their self-confidence.
Regardless of the nature of your business, hiring new employees at some point is a certainty. Make sure you’re prepared for this; have a formal system in place to make successful onboarding an integral part of taking on new staff. Your plan should include clear onboarding objectives, scheduled performance reviews and employee development plans.
2. Choose Effective Methods of New Hire Training
Training tactics and methodologies are plentiful. And with new technologies that have emerged in recent times, engaging methods of training new hires are abundant. Elearning, mobile learning, classroom training and blended learning are all very popular and effective methods of delivering training to new hires and indeed existing employees also.
Remember that the training you choose should be dictated to some degree by the type of the role the employee is being hired for and the nature of the company they will be working for. For example, if their role is very technical and they will be primarily working in the field, an initial classroom training program blended with mobile learning modules that can be accessed on the job, could be a great way to ensure your new hires adapt to their roles with relative ease.
Read Onboarding and New Hire Training Programs: Taking a Blended Approach to learn more about blended learning and other methods training that could really benefit your onboarding programs.
3. Tailor Training to Suit Their Needs
Some new hires may be starting out in their careers, others could be seasoned employees with a lot of experience. It’s essential, therefore, that you tailor the training accordingly and allow learners to accelerate through what they know already. There’s nothing more frustrating or more disheartening than being forced to absorb material that’s overly simplistic for the individual. By allowing learners to quickly get to the information they don’t already know (but need to know), the faster they’ll be in a position to start working and contributing to your business.
4. Assess, Review and Evaluate!
The importance of assessing knowledge and ability to perform in the job once the onboarding process has ended cannot be overlooked. The training you provide during onboarding should ideally incorporate quizzes, competitions and mini challenges which test new hires as they move through their training.
Follow up in the form of post-training assessments is also a good way to determine how the training has impacted on new hires.
Questionnaires or surveys that ask the new hires about the overall quality of the onboarding experience, how they feel they benefited from it and how it could be improved are excellent ways to evaluate the performance of your onboarding strategy also.
There are many tactics you can use to develop an onboarding strategy that produces positive results for your organization. Those that are highlighted here are a key part of the process however. Furthermore, implementing a framework on continuous support for new hires for any assistance new hires may need in their jobs, particularly in those early stages, is critical.
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