Successful Onboarding Training Program Ingredients

Companies often put a lot of thought, effort, and time into vetting and hiring the best employees—looking for someone with the right skills who’ll be the right fit for the team—only to waste their effort with an ineffective onboarding training program.

All evidence leads to the importance of onboarding in many areas including employee retention and maintaining a healthy bottom line. A 2018 study by Jobvite says three out of 10 or your new hires will leave in the first 90 days. This points to ineffective onboarding. In contrast, after a good onboarding program, new employees are 58% more likely to still be with you three years later.

Successful onboarding courses are invaluable in helping new hires learn the ins and outs of their job, understand the company structure and policies, and make and achieve career goals. This has a positive impact on job satisfaction and commitment, decreasing costly employee turnover.

Key Elements for Successful Onboarding Training

Let’s take a look at some essential elements of successful corporate training programs and how one clothing retailer, Altar’d State, partnered with elearning company AllenComm to create an onboarding program to empower their salesforce.

A Clear Strategy and Objectives

Your new hires want to know how the company works together as a whole and what is expected of them individually. Set written, measurable expectations for your employees first day, week, and month. These should be customized to the employee and their role.

Altar’d State wanted in-store sales associates, or brand representatives, to reach proficiency in a certain set of guest experience skills. An online learning program that included real-world practice simulations helped brand representatives learn and practice customer service skills they use on a daily basis.

Easy to Use

Traditional training sessions in the conference room often bombard new employees with too much information. It can seem boring, overwhelming, out of context, and too much to remember. Online onboarding employee training lets them complete training in easy to manage micro-learning modules that take engagement to new levels. Mobile friendly applications let employees learn wherever they are in whatever time they have.

Altar’d States proactive training and development courses provided online activities that reflected their unique and beautiful brand in look and language and was easy for employees to access anytime. Mobile learning was done in a way that appealed to their sales people mainly composed of Millenial and Generation Z learners. It effectively cut the time spent training new people in half while increasing knowledge retention.

Engaging and Empowering Materials

Cutting out the boring lectures or thick booklets of training materials, web based learning makes the training process interactive and more engaging. It also makes it easy to track progress and offer ongoing support.

Altar’d state used interactive online learning, including gamification, partnered with in-store activities and reflective journaling to help keep employees interest and standardize the training across different store locations. They found new brand ambassadors were immediately given skills and talking points that gave them the confidence to work independently and decreased the number of emails with questions about company practices and policy sent post-training.

Accountability

It’s important to have a way to track your employees’ progress. When they’ve mastered a skill or knowledge set they’ll have the confidence they need to do the job well. If they need additional help, they can get it quickly instead of floundering in confusion. This increases new employees feelings of belonging and job satisfaction.

In the Altar’d State employee training program, different sections of material were marked by different icons. As employees completed the different training sections, they were given a corresponding charm to wear on their special Altar’d State necklace. The necklace serves as a display of their accomplishments and training milestones.

Conclusion

When organizations invest in onboarding, they can reduce costs, create higher levels of engagement with new employees, and establish consistency in onboarding across the organization. More and more companies are seeing the benefits of creating web-based training the delivers clear objectives, increased engagement, and ongoing support to get the most out of employee onboarding.

When training is easier to access, more flexible, and interactive, not only does it increase engagement and satisfaction, it saves time and money by stemming the wave of new employee turnover. You invest time and effort into hiring the best employees. Investing in effective onboarding will help you keep them.