9 Tips to Engaging Your Employees in Onboarding and Training
How many of your employees are fully engaged? How many would you describe as being under-performers?
Many companies struggle with keeping their employees engaged and happy, leading to a lack of productivity, decreased employee morale, and wasted resources.
There are many different factors that affect engagement and productivity in the workplace, but one of the biggest factors is training and onboarding your employees properly.
This eLearning tutorial takes a look at some of the best ways to engage your employees in effective onboarding and training programs that will keep them happy and productive throughout their employment with your company.
1) Create Great Elearning Content That Keeps Employees Engaged
Companies that want to engage their employees with onboarding and training must create great eLearning content. Investing in eLearning programs, manuals, or other learning tools is a good way to do so. The content needs to be engaging—so that it is easy for workers to learn new skills on their own time—and relevant so that employees can quickly access the information they need. Great elearning content increases engagement and creates a more efficient training environment for your business.
eLearning allows companies to better train all employees, regardless of how much time is available during traditional working hours. This provides a streamlined process, which saves money and gets everyone up to speed more quickly. Creating excellent eLearning content also ensures employee safety during work hours; if they know how to perform tasks correctly ahead of time, then accidents are less likely (or at least less severe).
In addition, accurate processes reduce risk as well as downtime costs; efficiency gives businesses a competitive edge over organizations without such systems in place. Even when people have solid knowledge about what you’re selling or providing them with, provide additional resources for them by displaying some materials about your products that might interest them.
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2) A Bigger Tent
Making employees feel like they’re part of a bigger team makes them more willing to buy into your onboarding and training programs. Make them as inclusive as possible by collaborating with other departments—and encouraging participation from all levels of staff.
For example, enlist managers from different departments to serve on your team—no one wants a remote boss or an invisible manager! Doing so will build camaraderie between departments, increasing overall productivity.
If you can keep training fun and actionable, it doesn’t hurt to throw in some prizes either! Team members want to feel involved, not bored. By keeping an open dialogue about what is being taught, you make it clear that their participation matters. Involving them in your programs will also help eliminate any fears of change: When people know why something is happening and what it means for them personally, they are more likely to understand why change must happen (even if it seems overwhelming). Consider hosting office hours each week for anyone who wants additional help after going through training materials.
3) Show, Don’t Tell When Engaging Your Employees in Onboarding and Training
It’s easy for new hires to fall through a company’s cracks, especially if there are already 100 other things on your plate. Making sure you’re giving your new employees all of their onboarding and training materials is crucial, but it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. When developing onboarding materials, remember that tell them, show them works best with employees.
Videos are an excellent way to demonstrate what is expected of your team members (instead of having a series of text-heavy PowerPoint slides), not only saving you precious time but also creating a more engaging eLearning experience for new hires.
If you haven’t incorporated video into your employee onboarding yet, now is a great time to start!
A good place to start is by using eLearning software like TheLearning LAB. TheLearning LAB has gamified learning experiences that can help illustrate how employees can quickly master subjects they need information about. New hires who know exactly how they should interact at work can be incredibly valuable employees – get ahead of yours today!
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4) Get Their Attention During Onboarding and Training
You’ve got to get your employees’ attention if you want them to listen. According to a study, 67% of workers are daydreaming at work. At a time when companies need new hires up-to-speed faster than ever, it makes sense that training would move out of classrooms and online eLearning courses into real-life experiences that engage workers from beginning to end.
As long as you plan well, real-life training can be engaging for participants and provide immediate results for your business. You don’t have to wait until someone is already bored or disengaged; instead, look for ways you can immediately boost their interest when they start working with you—whether that means something small like giving a team member a pet name or making changes around your office.
To effectively onboard and train your employees, you’ll need to first figure out how to connect with them on a personal level. One great way to do that is through an icebreaker activity or game. The goal of an icebreaker game isn’t just bonding among coworkers but also getting everyone used to teamwork.
Fun activities give people a break from staring at screens, too—and let us humanize our colleagues.
5) Keep your onboarding and Elearning sessions short
A long, drawn-out orientation will not make anyone more excited or enthusiastic about joining your team. Instead, try keeping your onboarding sessions as short and focused as possible, which means cutting out anything unnecessary. It also means being very clear about what’s expected of new hires right off the bat—otherwise, they won’t know what you want from them. Lastly, keep these sessions positive! People are likely going through a lot of change already during onboarding, so try not to overwhelm them with negative information at first. Save it for later when you feel like their bearings have been set and they’re doing well on their own.
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6) Always Test Your Elearning Contents
In today’s fast-paced world, your employees need a robust, high-quality training program that fits their needs. And it needs to be easy for you to develop with minimal cost or overhead. That’s why we suggest always be testing—make sure what you have is not only working for your employees but is also simple for them to learn and easy for you as an employer or manager. You don’t want anything complex standing between you, your employees, and success! No matter how good your training program looks on paper, it should evolve over time as new strategies emerge and target audiences change.
7) Make your onboarding and elearning sessions fun
The first few weeks at a new job can be pretty awkward, but if you don’t make an effort to have fun, they’ll drag on forever. Let your employees know that they can have fun while getting settled by turning training into a game or competition. Make things less stiff by incorporating some humor and light-heartedness into training—by hosting an ice cream social or office happy hour, for example. If you take some time during orientation to build camaraderie early on, it will set a positive tone for future interactions. When training is going well, let your team members help each other out—it lets them build rapport and learn from one another in addition to you; always having all of the answers might feel good temporarily, but without any give-and-take with students (especially professional students), they’re more likely to tune out later on down the line. This applies to any type of interaction between teachers and learners: when everyone has something to say (even if it's just praise), there's no one person who feels as though he or she has nothing left to contribute.
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8) Incorporate Team-Building Exercises in Elearning
New employees shouldn’t be left to sink or swim; rather, they should be encouraged to find ways to get help if needed. Make sure your employees know that I don’t know how I do my job without knowing how you do yours is an acceptable response if someone doesn't understand something immediately. This way, no one is afraid to ask questions and learn how to work together effectively.
9) Use Performance Reviews To Communicate With Employees
Everyone knows employee performance reviews are important (for both sides), but many workers dread receiving bad news because it's uncomfortable. If you can take away some of that pain by communicating with your employees before handing down harsh feedback, everyone wins. As part of new employee training programs, there should always be time dedicated to explaining how performance reviews work and why they're important in ensuring a better working environment for everyone involved.
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New employees are your best ambassadors. If they are not happy with their jobs, chances are, they won’t be very effective as your ambassadors.
Because you can’t be there every step of their journey, it is important that these new employees understand what is expected of them.
That’s where onboarding and elearning training comes into play. However, new employees aren’t too excited about hearing from yet another HR executive or even from you directly! They want to get on with it – so if you make it elearning training sessions quick, interesting, and interactive, then that will help keep them engaged through onboarding.