What are the best online onboarding best practices?

Published by Andrea Day on February 9, 2022February 9, 2022

What are the best online onboarding best practices?

An effective and thorough onboarding process is always important to provide new employees with the tools and information they need to get started. Without a good onboarding process, it’s easy for them to feel lost, unproductive, and potentially even lead to employee turnover. Online onboarding best practices will ensure you offer the best possible process.

A report from the Work Institute found that 77% of voluntary turnover is preventable. The Harvard Business Review asserts that a consistent, structured onboarding process is essential for retaining talent.

Online onboarding needs to be conducted over multiple, interactive sessions. They should provide an overview of the company and its products or services, and incorporate its values and missions.

There are many advantages to having an effective online onboarding program. You can onboard more quickly, but also ensure that every new hire in your company has a consistent onboarding experience.

Ensure the content you deliver is engaging

The information you want to present may be difficult to understand, or just too long. In that case try video content, interactive quizzes, games, or digital experiences that will keep users engaged.

Communicate

You should take the lead to make things comfortable for the newly hired. They should be open and accessible. You should have different ways to keep the communication going to show you are accessible and welcoming towards the new hires.

Many HR professionals will tell you that the difference between a happy employee and an unhappy one can be as simple as one friend at work. The best way to potentially get your teams to bond is to invest in communication. This is particularly important with the rise in remote working.

Communication won’t just happen. You need to take the time to organise events, facilitate connections and create social opportunities.

Slack’s well known “coffee bot” an app that pairs people together to facilitate the type of water cooler interactions, could be useful here. But whether you use Slack, Teams or something else they all allow you to have social channels where employees can connect and build relationships.

Add gamification

Adding a gamification element is one of our online onboarding best practices. It can make onboarding more enjoyable and engaging for the new employee. Gamification is a technique where the learning is built into a game (or almost game-like) format. This makes learning fun and drives engagement with the training app.

Consider digital experiences

Ongoing training is essential in a person’s career. At the beginning of a new job, however, online training plays a pivotal role in the making or breaking of that person’s success within a company.

Onboarding can sometimes be confused with orientation. Online training, on the other hand, provides them with the knowledge that will allow them to be productive from the offset.

It’s really important that new recruits get a good feel for your company’s culture and core values. They need to understand your company’s vision and mission and how their role will contribute to the company’s success.

At BAD, we provide digital learning tools that can help you communicate with your new employees. Get in touch with us today if you’d like us to shape your online onboarding strategies.