The Future Of Onboarding: Hybrid Customized eLearning
Are you deploying new employees effectively?
Onboarding is an important part of any company’s success and budget. Successful short-term success is filling vacant positions or filling new roles as quickly as possible. Bringing useful skills to work on projects is important, but those skills need to come from a new hire who is a good fit with their team and your company.
Integrating these new employees into their roles means more than giving them a manual, shaking hands with management and showing them where the coffeepot is. Overall, companies are losing a lot of junior staff. Some experts have conducted surveys that show that around 30% of job seekers have left a job within the first 90 days, with company culture and daily work that doesn’t live up to expectations as two of the most common reasons for leaving. The loss of one in three recruited employees due to unsuccessful integration can be countered in a targeted manner by improving the onboarding experience.
Aside from the vital need to fill roles and keep projects going, onboarding a new hire can also be an expensive process. The easy-to-determine cost of equipment and the time it takes to recruit and interview don’t say it all. Hidden costs [1]such as lost productivity until the role is mastered, as well as the time the new hire, mentors, and coaches spend, all contribute to a bigger dollar sign attached to a budget item.
Why use custom e-learning when onboarding?
But why should you use a hybrid onboarding system? Before we look at the benefits of integrating custom eLearning into your onboarding plan, let’s look at the benefits of eLearning as a method. eLearning provides access to training materials and tools when the employee needs them, not just when it is convenient for the trainer. The extended availability enables the employee not only to access important information in the initial training phase, but also to use and review it whenever he needs it. This increases the flexibility, commitment and effectiveness of the training.
Microlearning is another major benefit of custom eLearning. Microlearning allows learners to select and use the most appropriate assets for their current needs on any device that is most practical, making the training even more relevant to their work. It can be especially helpful to give your reps access to the tools they need when they need them to help cover the hidden onboarding costs mentioned above.
How to use hybrid learning in onboarding training
But if eLearning is so great, why take a hybrid approach? Looking back at the reasons why 30% of new hires don’t stay, we find an incompatible corporate culture or unfulfilled role expectations at the top of the list. It is a huge benefit to have a real-time mentor who makes the employee’s transition easier. Penn State [2] gives a useful definition of hybrid learning that describes the student’s learning experience and how it could be useful for a company’s onboarding needs.
Put simply, hybrid learning is a combination of face-to-face, traditional teaching with digital distance learning. The reduction of the required learning time, the higher effectiveness and the increased flexibility are advantages that every manager would like to implement for their team.
There is also the advantage of synchronous and asynchronous [2] Instruction. Synchronized face-to-face meetings to facilitate training give the new hire time to ask questions as they arise and help the trainer tailor their teaching to the learner’s needs. This can also be achieved through online chats that the teacher and learner participate in at the same time. Asynchronous teaching enables the trainer to spend their time more effectively creating training material that can be used over and over again for each new setting. Condensing the course and having to create it only once rather than presenting it each time, improving effectiveness and efficiency, and meeting Penn State definition is a big goal.
Bring together
We saw how expensive and important onboarding is for a company. Lower costs through higher employee retention, more effective use of the learning budget, and more effective teaching are the reasons why implementing hybrid learning programs is a great way to be successful. Flexible training tailored to the needs of employees combined with personal mentoring is the reason why hybrid onboarding should be a serious consideration for any company.
References:
[1] Cost of training new employees, including hidden expenses
[2] glossary
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