When you hire someone, you want the same things from that person that every organization wants from their new hires: You want them to integrate into the culture, close knowledge gaps, assimilate into a team, and get productive as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, this process isn’t as smooth as your new hires would like it to be. Research from Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report shows that just 12% of employees strongly agree their employers do a great job of onboarding new employees.
The reason for this is that, after your new hire accepts your offer, onboarding becomes an HR activity rather than a learning and development activity. Successfully onboarding a modern employee requires a modern approach to learning.
There are four ways learning helps you onboard your new people.
Learning helps your new hire understand your tools and processes.
Most white-collar employees today use many tools throughout their workday: email, web browsers, instant messaging, document storage, project and task management, phones, video conferencing, and on and on.
New hires are unfamiliar with many of these tools, or at least how your organization uses them. For example, most people know how to use email and instant messaging apps. But do they know that your organization reserves critical conversations for only email, while using the chat apps for most of the daily discussion? Surely people know how to use document storage services, but do they know the naming conventions or file structures within your team’s particular drive?
A modern learning approach accounts for these nuances within your organization, building the skills new hires need to be successful with the tools and the processes to use them.
Learning closes skill gaps for your new hire.
Speaking of skills, you know your business loses money when the ramp-up period for new hires can take anywhere from six months to a year, or even two years, to reach full productivity due to a lack of necessary skills. Learning and development (L&D) can help close those gaps more quickly than traditional HR processes can.
Modern learning systems allow an organization’s newest hires to increase their competence and productivity in their earliest days. This not only increases revenue but also retention.
Increasing retention is crucial in the first few days of onboarding. A survey by Digitate, an IT automation company, revealed that employees with a bad new-hire experience are twice as likely to look elsewhere for job opportunities. In other words, great learning increases productivity, and thus business results.
Why is that?
The answer lies in my next point.
Learning increases confidence and ability in those critical early days.
The earliest days of an employee’s experience in your organization are potentially the most important because they set the tone for the rest of a new hire’s work experience.
A recent ServiceNow survey on the employee experience notes that, although 85% of employees are enthusiastic about their new positions and companies, only 72% feel the first few weeks were a positive experience.
Ironically, HR’s top concerns surround a lack of critical skills for their workforce. Mercer pointed out in its 2018 Global Talent Trends Survey that only 30% of HR professionals think improving the onboarding experience is a top priority. That’s ironic, because onboarding is an essential part of learning those critical skills to be able to increase employee confidence and the ability of new hires, and thus their experience.
Employees want to feel as though they can master their craft. That’s a human thing, not just a work thing. Studies in self-determination theory have discovered that everyone wants to feel like they have autonomy, relatedness, and mastery in their lives. The last of these — mastery — speaks to an employee’s desire to excel at their jobs. This increases a new hire’s confidence and contentedness in their new role.
Again, a solid L&D program can enhance a new hire’s experience, and thus their productivity and retention.
Learning helps your new hire integrate with the rest of the team.
When you onboard a new employee, it’s not just the employee you’re onboarding — you’re indirectly onboarding a newly redefined team — the people they’ll work most closely with starting from Day 1. Your new hire is being onboarded into a pack with its own microculture, quirks, and relationships.
Here’s why that’s so critical to onboarding: The future of work is done in teams.
According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, 31% of HR leaders believe all or most work is done in teams, and 74% believe shifting to a team-based model of work improves performance. Additionally, Gallup also believes relationships at work strongly affect performance and the employee’s experience.
L&D-focused onboarding gives new employees the chance to meet their new teams and what makes them unique and productive as a unit. Modern learning management systems (LMS) allow users and admins to tap into the collective wisdom of the group. With a few clicks you can upload videos, documents, articles, and more to create a repository of best practices for your team, so you can grow more efficient and productive as time goes on.
To be successful in the future of work, organizations need to enable L&D teams and systems to support the onboarding process as much as possible as early as possible. Doing so helps your new hires understand your tools and processes, close skills gaps, feel confident in their new roles, and integrate with their new teams. It’s all possible with a modern approach to learning.
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- 4 Reasons Onboarding Is A Learning Activity - December 17, 2019
