Tips for a Successful Collaboration to Develop Your Employee Onboarding Training

Could your company use an onboarding experience that shortens training time to improve productivity? What about a customer service employee onboarding that improves performance, scales up to meet organizational needs, and provides the right onboarding program in less time?

As an experienced training consultant and onboarding company that works with Fortune 500 companies across industries, we’ve accomplished exactly those goals for our clients – and much more. (You can read some of our case studies here.) Our team of experts know that when it comes time to reinvest in creating the right employee onboarding training, it can be a big job. You’ll want to make the best use of your available resources to generate ROI and aim to meet your highest objectives for new employee onboarding training, even if you’re simply updating content or digitizing your existing onboarding training.

For that reason, it is often wise to bring in an onboarding company or consultant to help you create the right onboarding experience. It’s often the best way to augment your own internal team with the technical, artistic, and project management skills to get the job done right.

When your team is ready to update your employee onboarding, here are the most essential ways to ensure that you work well with the learning consultant you choose.

The Ideal Start to Develop Employee Onboarding Training

First, have your team collectively get organized in advance of your first meeting with the consultant or onboarding company. Ideally, you’ll have collected your onboarding training materials and done an audit to determine what (if anything) is still useful. You should also plan to have documented which new skills and processes should be included in your training.

Plan ahead, you say. This all sounds a bit like common sense, right? But also consider the logistics and access points your consultants will need. What passwords will be needed? Are there access points to your system they will need? Legacy systems that could cause issues? Will there a person designated to be their point of contact, or a team to work with? Try to collect and organize your information (content included) to make it possible to jump into the project directly and save time in the process.

Next, be ready to sit down and explain your company’s “big picture” and vision. What is your organizational culture? What are your needs, and what do you ideally want to accomplish? This is the time for a high-level discussion to really help your training company understand you and your goals for the employee onboarding training. This isn’t about skills, only. It’s about the mindset you want for your employees and performance needs. It’s about communicating your company’s values, mission, core identity, and building confidence. This information should inform the tone of your training.

Also, consider your ideal communication process. Do you have a team that your training consultant must work with? Subject matter experts to consult? Will you have a single point of contact, or a few? What are you expecting from your consultant? These are all significant points to organize your process, create favorable conditions for collaboration, and reduce confusion and delay.

Finally, have you gotten buy in from your stakeholders? What will you do if the project needs change in scope? These are all important items to consider.

What to Look for In an Onboarding Training Development Consultant

It also helps to select the right onboarding company. You have to do your homework. You can use the list above to get a sense of what it takes, but you should also look for the following things.

In general, we’d recommend the following:

• Learning should be their core business, and they should have experience
• Depth of expertise in their team, with technical, graphic design, and project management experience as well as instructional designers
• A track record of success, with a portfolio, reviews and testimonials, case studies, and awards
• Human-centered learning design, as shown in their work samples and philosophies

If you’d like more information about how to select the right vendor, please visit our blog here.

Reach out to us to speak with someone who can provide more information on how we’ll meet your needs for an onboarding company that will improve your business, provide you with solid change management tools, and meet your objectives to train your team and maximize their performance.