How to measure the success of your digital onboarding programme

Published by Lily Winslow on June 28, 2022June 28, 2022

How to measure the success of your digital onboarding programme

When your digital onboarding programme has been launched, how do you know if it’s a success? Or what impact it has? How do you know if a digital solution is saving you money, time and effort?

When it comes to designing and implementing digital onboarding solutions, it’s crucial to follow an evidence-based approach; to use methods and systems that work. To know if something has worked, you must measure it. Based on the results, you can see if your programme has been a success, the impact it’s having on new hires and whether it’s saving your business money, time and effort.

Choose your measurement criteria

The first step in effectively measuring the success of your digital onboarding programme is to define the measures of success. Simply, answer the question: “How will I know if this initiative has been a success?”

Maybe success looks like better staff retention, or a reduction in the time is takes to onboard a new hire. Success could be real world behaviour change, or increased employee satisfaction.

Your answer should be tangible — something you can quantify before and after the launch of your digital onboarding programme.

Discover your baseline

To measure the impact of a digital onboarding initiative successfully, you need to know what your baseline is. In other words — where you’re starting from. Ask yourself: what’s the situation before the implementation of the new onboarding programme? Once you’ve got that, you can measure the results against it.

The way you gather baseline data will depend on your measurement criteria. If you’re measuring perception, sentiment, or employee satisfaction, ask for feedback on the existing onboarding programme from new hires, managers, administrators and stakeholders. For quantifiable data, use questions that ask how much…, on a scale…, to what extent..?

If your measurement criteria is ‘the time it takes to onboard a new hire’, you’ll need to get the average time across new hires with your current onboarding programme. Try to get a meaningful spread of data that is representative of how behaviours are carried out on average.

Implement your new digital onboarding programme

Once you’ve got your measurement criteria and you’ve gathered enough baseline data, it’s time to implement your new onboarding programme. This might include a central onboarding portal, digital learning content, checklists, virtual learning and social learning opportunities.

Look at the impact

After a suitable period of time has passed, you should measure against the success criteria you have chosen, using the same metrics as before. The period will depend on what you’re measuring. For example, if you’re measuring employee satisfaction, you could launch a survey asking for feedback on the digital onboarding experience as soon as the first cohort of new hires has completed it. If you’re looking at staff retention, you may have to wait a little longer to get a meaningful reading on any impact.

Compare the data

So, you’ve got your baseline data, you’ve launched your digital onboarding programme and you’ve gathered the results. Now, compare the data from your baseline to your results. This will show what has changed and the impact the launch of your digital onboarding programme launch.

You can quantify the return on investment (ROI) and see the real-life impact on your new hires, managers and business. Even better, if it appears that something needs tweaking or that an element of the onboarding programme still isn’t working, you can move forward with an evidence-based approach.

If you’d like to find out more about the work we do with onboarding programmes, please get in touch.

Time to change…

Why do we behave the way we do? It can be hard to change our less desirable behaviours when they are highly ingrained and have become habits we perform automatically without thinking.

Richenda Sabine April 15, 2024