Image 3Are you a training professional who is satisfied with the success of their training programme so far? Great. It’s time to think about onboarding.

Onboarding can be seen as a luxury, but it can actually play a vital part towards ensuring that you develop productive teams, whilst encouraging new recruits to ‘stick it out’. Onboarding is often the responsibility of hiring managers and HR, though as the YUDU team have been developing our onboarding app, we have seen lots of crossover with the training department too.

In our last blog post we talked about 7 ways to reboot a flagging training programme. This blog post assumes that your training programme is in top condition, and perhaps it’s time to reach out to those new starters who could benefit from learning sooner, rather than later.

To be clear, onboarding isn’t only about training – it does include HR documentation and meet-and-greet. However, as a training professional you can use this initiation period to introduce new starters to your Learning Mangement System and give them access to important documentation, before the workload starts to pile up – with no backlog of work to do yet, there’ll be no excuse for not getting stuck into the latest training materials.

Implementing a well-thought-out successful onboarding programme early has very real effects: according to The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “half of all senior hires fail within 18 months in a new position, and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days.” By taking onboarding as seriously as training older hires, your company can progress with fewer transitions.

We often learn our habits within the first few weeks of starting something new. Why not show new recruits how they can access their learning dashboards daily? Recent research from the Wynhurst Group shows that new employees are 58% more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they experience a structured orientation programme. And apparently, as a result of the research, it turns out that the No.1 thing new hires want in their first week isn’t what you’d imagine. Fancy perks and free food is not top of their list – it’s on-the-job training, followed by a review of company policies that they desire the most.

In the context of onboarding, we have come up with three ways that a training app could be used to welcome new starters.

  1. As a document library

It might be too early to introduce a full training programme, and starters might be working across different departments so this might prove impractical. However, we all need access to documents, and your handy Intranet might not be so useful for those who would really like to do their reading on their device whilst on the move. By giving new recruits an app to download on the fly, you are demonstrating early on that you are flexible to employees’ needs.

  1. To deliver live feeds

New starters might be too shy to participate in the latest Yammer debates. However, timely up-to-date feeds which can be accessed on mobile can really help with initial integration. An app with live feeds can showcase the latest from your Enterprise Social Network, or alternatively your customer-facing social media feeds – both of which can help the newbies to acclimatise to business matters and feel connected to their new workplace.

  1. Something to watch?

With all the reading your new employees need to do, in order to learn about your business, it might be handy to give them access to videos and podcasts which sum up different areas of the business. These might be from press releases, sales pitches, internal training or something bespoke which has been created specifically for onboarding. Again, this content can be hosted in an app environment and delivered to employees on the move, in their own time.

New hires aren’t as shallow as you might think. They know that in order to get ahead, they need to get up to speed on the running of the business. Onboarding is a great initiative that not only decreases staff turnover rates but also helps prepare employees for further training by getting them used to different eLearning delivery methods.

You can read more about YUDU Training Apps here or arrange to meet us at World of Learning (stand A180).