Digital onboarding with eLearning

To be successful in a company, employees have to develop an understanding of it. Your company’s guiding principles, mission, vision, corporate culture, corporate language, and values are important and need to be embedded in the minds of new employees from the outset. An online course on this topic is useful for new employees, but it can also act as a reference source or refresher for existing employees on specific issues; it allows all employees to access this information on a regular basis.

People who work for a company have to understand it, its services, and its products. Employees often embark on a journey of discovery, independently researching various departments. Companies that prepare, present, and explain their services/products on a digital basis can also, for example, provide additional materials, such as links to important documents, to ensure that knowledge of their core business is disseminated throughout the entire company. Once again, this concerns not only new employees, but every employee in the company—everyone needs to be up to date on products and services.

Occupational safety and health, data protection, data security: Some training sessions are compulsory for every employee, and required by law. These are training sessions that employees have to be able to demonstrate they have completed regularly. And this is in itself good reason for companies to deliver compliance training digitally. It cuts costs, facilitates flexible learning, and, once a training session is created, it can be made available to as many participants as desired. These kinds of training courses are also a mandatory part of the onboarding process, and this means that content is doubly useful: As well as new employees, it is relevant for existing employees, who are required by law to undergo regular training on these issues.

Every company has its own internal processes, procedures, structures, and responsibilities. For new employees, this can be a bit of a jungle at first. But here, too, processes can be explained and presented digitally: interactive explanations with practical examples can help employees understand and get to grips with complex issues rapidly. Once again, the principle is that internal company knowledge should be accessible to everyone and can be retrieved by all employees when they need it. In future, reliable answers to questions such as: “Where should I send my health insurance certificate?” “What do I do with invoices?” “Who is the contact for product news?” “Who do I need to approve this?” will be available in the form of rapidly searchable units of digital knowledge.

From one day to the next, your new employees will be working with 50 (or 30 or even 100) new colleagues. And as we all know, getting faces, names, and positions right takes time. However, new employees need to be able to find out who they have just met, what a particular colleague looks like, or whom they should approach on a given issue. And of course, they might also want to learn a little more about the people they will now be dealing with. In the era of remote working in particular, putting faces to names is a good way to make some initial social contact. Digital flashcards can be a fun and relaxed way to learn names, faces, and positions, for example. Personal details, such as how everyone takes their coffee, can loosen people up and engage the emotions in eLearning.

Anyone who can’t explore everything in person right away can simply take the virtual path. This even allows you to include additional information. In offices, this could be about the printer, the copier room, the washroom facilities, or the location of fire extinguishers. In large companies, virtual tours can go far beyond that—especially when it comes to manufacturing. Do office staff in the commercial sector ever enter the warehouse or production hall in real life? How do workers find their way around the factory? Where are the different machines located, what are they used for, and how do they actually work? Virtual tours allow complex knowledge to be acquired bit by bit, with each “stop” on the tour providing even more in-depth information. 

New employees have the right specialist knowledge. But the software their new company uses can be unfamiliar, and completely alien to them. In this context, it’s important to familiarize new employees immediately with the key tools. They need to learn about the software and its application gradually, in appropriate stages, and to be given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the software, trying out what they have just learned. For example, a final task for new employees in training could also be their first practical challenge, enabling them to acquire new knowledge at the same time. P.S.: Specific online training courses on the various software solutions at your company are also a great way of providing existing employees with further qualifications.

You’re bound to be familiar with the scenario, or at least be able to imagine it: Analog induction processes are usually conducted by more than one person. And before you know it, the same information is being communicated twice or even three times. This unnecessary redundancy is time-consuming both for new employees and for their mentors, and thus costs your company valuable resources. Digital onboarding, on the other hand, can be precisely customized so that redundancy does not even arise.

Digital onboarding takes significantly less time—particularly for mentors, but also for new employees. It frees up mentors to focus exclusively on the social aspects of induction, and allows new employees to adapt induction to their schedules and the priorities on their to-do lists. When it comes to onboarding, people are especially highly motivated to take individual courses on the way to work or at home on the sofa—options that are not available with analog onboarding.

While analog onboarding has to be delivered separately to each individual new employee, involving repeated time investment, a digital onboarding process only needs to be created once and can then be reused as often as required. In addition, the digital content acts as a reference guide for anyone who has forgotten something.

Structured digital coaching not only minimizes redundant communication, it also ensures that new employees get absolutely all the information they need—high quality, verifiable, and consistent.

The more quickly employees are inducted into the company, the happier they are, and the more efficient induction is, the faster they can become productive. Professional induction and onboarding also have a positive effect on motivation and employee loyalty.

Employees’ initial impressions of companies and their culture are created within their first four weeks on the job. This short period of time is critical, determining how new employees engage with the company and thus how committed they will be in the future. Comprehensive digital onboarding allows you to take advantage of this “hot phase”, demonstrating how well you look after your employees.

When you take an attentive approach to your employees, word gets around; and of course this will attract new applicants. Because if you know that your employer has effective onboarding, you don’t have to worry about potentially getting off to a bumpy start with your new job.