How eLearning Helps Drive a Sustainable Onboarding Program
Onboarding your employees correctly is key to creating and sustaining a strong safety culture.
To do so requires looking at onboarding with fresh eyes: Think of it, not just as training new or existing employees must undergo for a few days. Instead, creating a sustainable onboarding program requires looking at onboarding as an evolution — from the day the employee starts at the organization to the day he or she leaves.
Onboarding needs to start by the company articulating to employees their purpose, highlighting their opportunities to contribute, and showing them how much they are appreciated. It’s vital to establish trust through transparency and communicating the “why” to employees, so they understand how their role makes a difference and how they matter in the big picture.
Onboarding as a Journey
Onboarding never stops. It evolves, from introducing the employee to the organization, to new capability training and reinforcement of best practices.
Keeping workers engaged, trained on new technology, and ultimately safe, is a continual process that, when done correctly, makes workers feel valued, engaged, protected, and reluctant to search for new opportunities with competitors. After all, according to CareerBuilder, 93% of employers believe a good onboarding experience influences a new hire’s decision to stay with the company.
Yet many organizations are doing it wrong. Sapling HR reports that 58% of organizations focus their onboarding mainly on process and paperwork.2 To make onboarding a journey — and not a checklist exercise — requires the full commitment, and engagement, of managers and other senior leaders.
eLearning Can Help
A strong onboarding program creates and helps sustain a strong safety culture. Any robust training program will include components such as peer-to-peer learning, self-directed learning, and instructorled training. Experts at dss+ offer the full gamut of training to create a fully holistic experience for new and existing employees.
One strategic component of the larger onboarding program is eLearning.
The power of eLearning via a robust Learning Management System (LMS) is important to foster a sustainable onboarding experience. Incorporating eLearning into your onboarding can build the capabilities of your workforce over time, promote safety awareness, and support a reduction in serious injuries and fatalities.
An eLearning program that is customizable, features a robust content library, is loaded with the latest performance support tools, and enables tracking gives organizations greater capability to making their onboarding a holistic and relevant journey. In doing so, organizations gain:
Seamless knowledge transfer. eLearning makes it easy to transfer critical knowledge —best practices, documenting procedures, etc. — from experienced employees to new hires. By preserving historic knowledge online, eLearning should always provide easy access to relevant information.
Cultural integration. eLearning should be designed for inclusivity so that all employees are made to feel welcome, not just on the first day, but as long as they remain at the company. To do so may involve activities such as cultural awareness training, mentorship programs, and team-building exercises to facilitate effective integration into the culture.
Ongoing relevancy. Through performance support tools like job aids, checklists, and reference materials, employees will always have immediate access to information they may need anytime. This ongoing support keeps learning fresh and sustainable.
Customization. Every organization has its own values, culture, policies, procedures, and other ways of operating. An effective eLearning program will complement the organizational training and create a comprehensive suite of content — from modules to videos to presentations — that is aligned to their safety programs and other specific needs.
Feedback. Through surveys and other assessment tools provided by the eLearning program, organizations can gather feedback to identify gaps, target areas for enhancement, and strengthen the onboarding experience, so it becomes more relevant and effective for future employees.
Let dss+ Deepen Your Onboarding
A structured onboarding journey is an ongoing process that lasts beyond the first week of employment. Based on our experience, ongoing interactions should support this journey, including training, coaching, and mentoring. To support organizations dss+:
- Assists in structuring onboarding journeys.
- Trains onboarding leaders and those who will assist in the journey.
- Provides customizable ILT, eLearning, microlearning, coaching tools, and content to support journey implementation.
- Delivers a customizable LMS in Litmos to structure, track, and manage onboarding and all organizational learning.
Contact dss+ for more information. Learn about how our capabilities will help make your onboarding program sustainable and ultimately more effective. Through a range of services and expertise, we can help ensure that your new employees receive the necessary knowledge, skills, and support to sync with your organization’s culture — not just on their first week, but throughout their entire journey with the organization.