Employee Onboarding Experience: The Benefits of Doing It Right

First impressions matter. Employees will judge whether they made the right or wrong decision to join your company based on their employee onboarding experience.

If you do it wrong, you’ll likely make them question their decision but, if you do it right you’ll have a loyal employee who will likely show you their best on the job.

Where the Employee Onboarding Experience Falls Short

In a recent study, the Brandon Hall Group discovered that the majority of companies continue to provide traditional employee onboarding. These traditional employee onboarding experiences include policy and procedure training, welcome letters and lunches with new colleagues, or orientation sessions on company culture and values.

While these employee onboarding experience activities may be helpful, today’s employees come to your company with expectations of a more consumer-like training experience. Specifically, they’re looking for employee onboarding experiences that they can pick and choose based on what their job will be like. Employees want to feel confident that, once they are on the job, they’ll have easy access to the resources and training they need to perform and succeed.

Deliver a Modern Learning Experience Instead

These consumer-like modern learning experiences that today’s employees are looking for reflect the technology experiences they have in the flow of everyday life. Information is available anywhere and everywhere, and answers are always on hand in whatever form suits us.

Not surprisingly, these societal behaviors have spilled over into the workplace. Rather than ingest a bunch of information in one session during onboarding, employees want continuous learning that happens exactly when it’s needed while on the job. Learning is viewed as a natural part of the workday, not a one-off activity. When new employees engage in active learning, on the job, they get instruction and then immediately apply what they have learned. When we look at modern learning vs. traditional learning, a modern learning experience helps learners retain up to 90% of what they have learned instead of only 20-30% with traditional learning.

This is all to say that you must provide a modern digital learning environment during employee onboarding (and beyond) where employees have on-demand access to critical information at all times. Discovering answers should be quick and easy through self-paced learning experiences that come from a single source of truth.

Providing an employee onboarding experience that enables you to set expectations early, instill confidence, and demonstrate to new employees that they will always have access to the learning and training they need to be successful.

Contact or chat with us today to learn more about how Inkling can help your employee onboarding experience process and set up your new hires for ongoing success.