id you know that 88% of companies don’t onboard well? According to Zippia, just 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.
That statistic only gets more wince-inducing when you match it with a few more statistics:
- A negative onboarding experience doubles the chances of an employee seeking a new role.
- The cost to hire a new employee is approximately $4000.
- A good onboarding program can increase the number of employees who stay 3+ years at the organization by 69%.
The picture is clear; many companies need to improve their onboarding, and doing so can be extremely beneficial.
Free onboarding checklist. The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding.
The challenges of onboarding
Unfortunately for businesses, particularly smaller ones, knowing where to start can be challenging.
For many businesses, their current onboarding process involves a myriad of documents, policies and programs, with managers too busy to hand-hold and itching to see full productivity immediately.
The result for employees is an overwhelming number of tasks, and overwhelming pressure. No wonder 1 in 5 leave in their first 45 days!
One of the easiest ways to start improving your organization’s onboarding is by consolidating the process with online courses.
Why use online training courses for onboarding?
Using online training courses for onboarding can reduce the number of documents and tasks for employees, streamline and automate the process for managers, and turn boring necessities into engaging experiences.
Online training courses (also known as eLearning courses) are interactive, web-based learning experiences that allow you to combine information, media, documents, activities and assessments. Online training courses are three times faster to complete than face-to-face training sessions, and offer a consistent, scalable training experience for employees.
Even better, they’re ideal for onboarding employees working remotely, who might otherwise be required to sit through hours and hours of exhausting video meetings to learn the same content. Instead, they can take a break to socially rest and recharge, while continuing to learn and move through the onboarding process.
Essential onboarding training courses
If you’ve never created an eLearning course before, the process can seem a little daunting. Fortunately, we’ve broken it down into simple steps to get started.
Another solution is to purchase eLearning courses “off-the-shelf”. These “ready-to-go” courses contain learning content that is broadly applicable to businesses, and can be a quick solution to covering important safety and compliance topics.
With an eLearning platform like HowToo, you can create courses from scratch and tap into ready-to-go courses, and even customize ready-to-go courses to better suit your organization.
However you choose to start, here are five essential training courses to include in your employee onboarding process.
- Meet the team
- Company values and culture
- Code of conduct
- Cyber security
- Wellbeing in the workplace
Meet the team
A “Meet the team” course introduces new team members to important individuals within the organization. It can also explain the purpose and relationship between key departments in the organization.
This information can be invaluable for a new recruit attempting to get their head around who’s who in the organization.
While small businesses often rely on meet-and-greets and first-day lunches to introduce the team, these can be overwhelming and difficult to remember for recruits experiencing the whirlwind of their first few days.
By creating a short course and including photos, videos and audio snippets, your new employees have an engaging, easily referenced way to learn and double-check important profiles. You can even include activities matching photos to names and roles, or departments to descriptions.
Company values and culture
Communicating your organization’s values and culture to your new hires is an essential early component of onboarding.
Why? Setting the right framework from the first few days will help your new employee to adopt and champion these values moving forward. Employees who are invested in the company’s values and culture are more likely to be engaged and productive in their work.
A course on company values and culture can invite your employees to submit reflections on how they can act out these values day-to-day, or identify behaviors that embody the values of the organization.
Code of conduct
Policies are an avoidable part of onboarding. But do they have to be boring? No!
Most companies email their policy documents directly to new hires in a great big stack and no apologies for the exceptionally dry but mandated reading.
By introducing policies through training courses, you can transform them into enjoyable and interesting experiences that capture attention and evoke engagement.
At HowToo, we use our ready-to-go Code of Conduct course to introduce new employees to our expectations for behavior in and out of the workplace.
This course uses a scenario-based approach to learning where learners spot red flags in common situations, and identify more appropriate behaviors instead. This approach makes the code of conduct more relatable for employees, and demonstrates the importance of knowing the content of the policy.
Cyber security
Information incidents and data breaches can cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars and severely damage their reputation. Ensuring every employee in your business takes cyber security seriously should be non-negotiable.
For workers in non-technical roles, cyber security practices can seem like tedious impediments to getting their work done. These attitudes and misunderstandings can lead to costly mistakes or even outright negligence.
With a training course on cyber security as a component of your onboarding process, you can use creative storytelling approaches to show the importance and impacts of cyber security. You can also assess your new hires to check their understanding of key concepts and practices.
Wellbeing in the workplace
Already a popular topic prior, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the need for organizational approaches to employee wellbeing into sharp focus as cases of depression and anxiety rose by over 25% each.
With many workers now remote or hybrid, using face-to-face sessions for wellbeing training has become more challenging than ever. An online wellbeing course can allow workers to learn tactics to improve their wellbeing any time, any where.
A wellbeing training course can also reduce misinformation and assist team members to start positive conversations around mental and other forms of health in the workplace.
Start creating online training courses for free
Ready to start improving your onboarding process? Why not start with a free HowToo Starter plan? Create courses from scratch, or explore the template and ready-to-go course libraries. Then, when you’re ready to share your course creations with your business, you can upgrade to our Growth plan for complete access to all our ready-to-go courses, as well as distribution, tracking and reporting features.
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