What are the advantages of online onboarding?

What’s onboarding?

If you ask the Cambridge Dictionary, it is “the process in which new employees gain the knowledge and skills they need to become effective members of an organization.” 

From the SHRM perspective, onboarding can mean “handing a new employee a pile of forms and having a supervisor or HR professional walk the employee around the premises, making introductions on an ad hoc basis”, but this is not effective on the long run and it might turn into a huge employee turnover. However, when done well, “it lays a foundation for long-term success for the employee and the employer; it can improve productivity, build loyalty and engagement, and help employees become successful early in their careers with the new organization”. (source)

But what exactly does onboarding done well means? “Addressing development during onboarding increases satisfaction by 3.5x”, according to statistics. Thus, people need to feel valued and to make sure they are working in an environment that contributes to their long term development, and an effective onboarding process can lead to the achievement of this goal. Also, studies say that “56% of new hires prefer having a mentor or buddy to help them through”, which highlights the importance of collaborative learning in the workplace even from the very beginning. 

And what are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to conducting effective onboarding processes? Based on the opinion of HR professionals, “36% of HR executives said that the lack of technology prevents them from automating and organizing onboarding programs”, which implies that even if technology has hugely evolved during years, there are still areas of work where it is underutilized. 

Summarizing these statistics, a good onboarding experience would involve the use of technology, collaborative learning and continuous learning opportunities, which can all be done with a learning management system. 

Online onboarding & LMS 

Why would you use an LMS for the onboarding process? Well, it cuts training costs down, it provides a centralized location for learning resources, which fosters training accessibility, it initiates learning paths, offering the possibility of onboarding customization for every employee based on their role, or it can respond to the needs of multiple learning audiences at once, depending on the training objectives and plans of every company. 

Basically, an eLearning platform keeps the new employees on track when it comes to their onboarding process, as it enables them to find the exact information they need, when they need it and at their own pace, reducing the pressure and the confusion which are specific to every professional beginning. We have all been there, starting a new job, being confused about all the new information coming towards us, feeling the pressure of not being familiar with anything. 

Moreover, the onboarding process does not apply only to new hires, but it is also a must when it comes to onboarding customers or partners, and a learning management system makes the process smoother and  more efficiently organized. 

Case study

A few years ago, we started working with Adecco Romania, a world leading provider of custom HR services, with over 31.000 employees and more than 5000 branches, in more than 60 countries. In Romania, Adecco has an in-depth understanding of the Romanian market and they have a great flow of new hires. 

When they contacted us, they needed an efficient onboarding training to acclimate individuals who were newly hired or transferred from within to new positions, with the purpose of developing within them the necessary skills, knowledge and behaviors to become effective contributors to the organization, and they decided that the way to achieve all of these was eLearning. 

Thus, Knolyx provided them with an effective learning environment for their newly hired employees, tools to manage the onboarding process better, and tools that foster flexibility when it comes to digesting the information, in an engaging way and in accordance with everyone’s pace. 

To sum it up, onboarding is a must, it has always been and it will always be, but the ways in which it can be delivered to the newly hired employees has changed, and there are more efficient, interactive and accessible ways to do so.