Overcoming the Challenges of Employee Onboarding with a Learning Management System

A study by SHRM revealed that new employees that attended a structured orientation program were 69% more likely to remain at the company up to three years. Providing a meaningful start to new hires can be the first step to helping them connect to the business while ensuring a speedy learning curve to gain full job proficiency in their roles and functions.

As an important stakeholder in your company, you need to make sure your workforce is motivated right from the get-go to seek the best out of them. To that end, you will need to develop an engaging and effective employee onboarding learning program that will maximize impact, instil a sense of belonging, and help the new hires integrate with business workflow in less time.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a powerful tool to streamline and automate the onboarding process that will maximize efficiency and will get your new hires off the ground sooner. In this article, we explore the benefits of using an LMS for employee onboarding and training.

Building a Consistent Corporate Culture with Unified Onboarding Material:
Multiple employees get onboarded on different days. There’s a strong possibility that Human Resource professionals accidentally distribute different onboarding material to different new hires. For example, few employees might be presented with an old version of the material without covering the recent topics. Whereas, other employees will be taken through a revised version of the material.

This can cause an inconsistent knowledge share and messaging, leaving the employees confused when they begin their jobs. With an LMS, HR professionals can upload all the standard and latest versions of the learning material and assign it to the new recruits thus gaining control over delivering a unified message. An LMS can help you inculcate a standard, unified message about the organization’s goals and values in each new hire.

Providing Job-Specific Training to Employees with Various Roles and Responsibilities:
Having a skilled workforce that can contribute to organizational success and profits is an asset to have. In order to help new hires build and hone the skill set needed to perform at their jobs, you would want to assign specific, role-based training materials. For example, sales training assigned to your sales professionals isn't relevant to your HR staff.

An LMS can help to streamline training by creating personalized learning paths specific to the role or function of the new recruits.

Tracking the Learner Progress and Effectiveness of Your Onboarding Training Program:
What good are your training programs that you spend hours in formulating if you are unable to determine if learners are actually gaining and implementing the knowledge? You can show your new hires endless videos or PowerPoint presentations. However, you won’t be able to deduce if they have assimilated the information unless you employ some form of assessments.

An LMS helps you to easily create quizzes, assessments in any form, assign them, track the responses, completions, and calculate the scores. With this, you can easily determine if each employee has grasped the learning content aptly and also help you identify ineffective training material and make any course corrections, if needed. Irrespective of how robust your employee onboarding program is, you will need stringent evaluation criteria to determine if your new hires are ready to take on the real world.

The LMS can generate reports and advanced analytics to provide you with the insights needed to keep a track of how well each new employee is performing while undertaking their respective training and address any difficulties they might face pertaining to certain topics.

Branding Your Training
Creating a strong corporate identity by harnessing the power of your brand through your onboarding training programs can be a way to instil a sense of pride in the new hires. Your LMS can be an excellent tool to achieve this. You can brand your onboarding material by having your own URL, customizing welcome screens, displaying your company logo and name, and even branding specific courses within the LMS.

This will enable you to truly own your onboarding training material and customize it to your brand identity.

Keeping Learners Updated with Current Regulations and Compliance Best Practices:
One of the important aspects of employee onboarding training is to make the new hires aware of the company policies, process, and compliance information early on to avoid any penalties. It is crucial that employees have all the information pertaining to the code of conduct, policies regarding the ethics, sexual harassments, and so on.

With remote work coming into effect, new hires must also be aware of the new regulations. With an LMS, you can update and share the latest information on your industry regulations and make use of analytics to track if learners are staying up-to-date with the changes.

Saving Learning Time and Costs:
Employing ineffective methods of delivering onboarding training programs can incur unnecessary costs and result in wastage of time put in by learning content creators. Having to repeat the same ineffective investment year on year for new employees can not only put a huge dent in finances but also culminate into having dissatisfied and poorly trained employees.

An LMS can help you create effective training in the form of microlearning, reduce the costs of physical training sessions, and optimize the finances of content production and other logistics.

In Conclusion:
An LMS is an extremely useful tool to realize the goals of employee onboarding training. Employing a robust, feature-rich LMS can automate and expedite the process of training while ensuring all the new employees are equipped with the necessary corporate culture, information about the company’s product or service, and any compliance related data.