Building an Effective & Engaging Onboarding Experience
Enable New Hires to Perform Faster With Only Half a Day Training!
Having an onboarding program for new hires in your organisation is important as it is where new employees learn the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective long-term employees. When new employees learn the mission, vision, and values in the early stage, it allows them to envision themselves a future with the organisation. Needless to say, a successful onboarding program determines a higher employee engagement and retention.
The 3Es
Nevertheless HRs and managers alike struggle in juggling to improve the time efficiency, cost effectiveness, and learning effectiveness - the 3Es, of their onboarding process. For companies that have a high rate of employee turnover, they find themselves retraining and repeating the onboarding process countless times. These companies are typically from the industry of retail, customer service, construction, trade and utilities, and hospitality. These types of employers are inevitable to hiring part-timers for the job, or to require a specific skill set and handle stressful environments at the same time. When the industry environment is as such, employers have to think of ways to make their onboarding program more effective and engaging or purposeful at the same time, by applying the best practices there is.
1st E - Time Efficiency
Onboarding new employees is time consuming, it could take up to a month to get them to be well acquainted and skills trained in order to meet expectations of their job and organisation. But some employers require their employees to start performing as soon as possible to keep up with productivity of the business operation.
The period of the onboarding program should be adequate, run it too short and the new hires may not take the job seriously; stretch it too long will take the company longer to see their return on investment. HR and managers have reduced the time to retrain these employees through online methods. Learners can access the information again and again at any pace without having the trainers spend one-on-one time or repeats on new employees. Technology has been very resourceful in tracking the progress of new hires completing their trainings online. But it’s not easy to cover a variety of important topics in the shortest amount of time. Despite the ease of technology, the content delivery has to be designed in the most engaging way for employees to learn. We will touch on this more in learning effectiveness.
2nd E - Cost Effectiveness
Retraining new employees is a very costly process. If a new employee resigns in six months, it would cost the company half of their annual salary, let’s not leave out the cost put into recruitment, onboarding materials, administration work, and valuable talent they are losing. Unfortunately, the employment condition in Malaysia hasn’t been in favour. With the Malaysian economy facing tough challenges in the depreciation of the Ringgit currency, the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and declining commodity prices, businesses are forced to reallocate budgets in their finances. This means onboarding budgets are affected. Employers are figuring out how to do more with less, and apply onboarding best practices out there.
3rd E - Learning Effectiveness
The content delivery to new hires is essential for the effectiveness of their learning development. Often, the onboarding content cover topics like company compliances, factual information about the company, managerial and supervisory skills, processes and procedures, which can be a lot to take in for some. Not every individual could retain what they learned or stay motivated long enough to complete their trainings.
According to a new study conducted by Microsoft Corp., people who were born after the digital era in 2000 have shorter attention spans. They lose concentration after 8 seconds, which is quicker than the attention span of a goldfish of 9 seconds! The heavy screen lifestyle have made it more easily to distract people with information. The increase in information and availability of knowledge has become so crowded that every piece of information screams for attention. By 2025, millennials will become 75% of the global workforce, so it is important we pay attention to their learning abilities. As of today, Malaysian employers are looking into integrating mobile learning and bite-sized learning to improve the effectiveness of their training.
The latest and arguably the most exciting approach is using gamification strategies. It incorporates motivation in employees to complete their training with a better sense of purpose and accomplishment. While top global companies like Microsoft, Google, and Deloitte are already applying gamification designs in their workplace, Malaysian organisations are in the early stage of adoption and catching up with the knowledge on how gamification works.
Building an Engaging Onboarding Experience
The best new employee onboarding training there is out there today are usually approached by blended-learning, meaning there is a mixture of online and classroom training as different individuals have different learning capacities. Employers are tapping into mobile learning as well since people have grown very attached to their smartphones.
To go along with on-the-go individuals, for example, in upper management that don’t have the time to sit in a classroom training for two straight days, mobile learning in a form of an app as the training platform can be a more effective way for them to complete their training, and possibly in just half a day!
Since online training can cover all the required topics faster than classroom training, the classroom component can be modified to allow discussions and practical application. It also allows a better communication between managers and new hires. Not only will new hires learn how to do their job accordingly, they learn what is expected of them to behave too. It’s a hybrid approach that allows all types of learners to excel.
Our Approach: Accelerated Time to Perform
Remember a successful onboarding program is one that allows new hires to start performing faster and it determines a higher employee engagement and retention rate. The Accelerated Time To Perform (ATTP) program is a new employee onboarding process that can reduce your cost and time in training new hires, yet highly effective in creating employee engagement.
It incorporates bite-size learning contents, on-the-go accessibility, measurable progress and performance outcomes, and gamification mechanics too. The onboarding program can be customized to at least half a day in training. It has embraced technology to simplify the learning process. With gamification mechanics, employers could easily identify weaker performing individuals or disengaged learners and take the necessary steps to help them. Both employers and employees could also receive continuous feedback to make improvements in the onboarding program. ATTP can effectively ease your onboarding process so that your employees can start being efficient and productive members of the organisation.
Contact us today to inquire about ATTP and our soft skills training such as leadership skills, communication skills, team building skills and much more!
