If you've ever had a beloved and valuable member of your team unexpectedly leave, you know how important an efficient employee onboarding process is. While it might take years to fill the hole in your heart, you'll need to fill that empty desk and get your new hire producing ASAP. A learning management system (LMS) is your express pass for doing just that.
What is Onboarding?
Before we dive into how an LMS will accelerate onboarding, let's make sure everyone's on the same page regarding its definition. Onboarding is a series of training and learning exercises designed to let employees know how to succeed at their job. It's a little different from orientation—which can be a part of onboarding—in that it's typically more than a single-day affair and is mostly role-specific. Think of it as your way of getting new hires to a place where they're able to show you what they've got. After all, that's why you hired them, right?
How an LMS will Accelerate Employee Onboarding
While a comprehensive employee onboarding program is always a worthwhile investment, it'll pay serious dividends, and do so almost immediately, when accelerated by an LMS. Regardless of how dire your staffing straits, there's unquestionable value in bringing new hires up to speed and getting them producing as efficiently as possible. An LMS is loaded with features to elevate the consistency, quality and speed of your onboarding efforts. Let's take a closer look at some of them.
1. Progress Tracking
If you've ever spent time on a treadmill, you know how important—and motivating—progress tracking can be. The same applies to your employee training software. Not only will your staff know exactly where they are in their onboarding process, but so will you. With a few clicks, you'll be able to see whether they're on track, or could use a hand keeping things moving.
2. Personalized Learning Paths
Other than having the required experience and being a good culture fit, new hires are going to come to you with diverse skill sets and backgrounds. An LMS makes it easy to customize each new hire's onboarding to cater to their specific needs. You'll be able to hook them up with the eLearning they need and omit the courses they won't. Just as no two employees will arrive with the same skillsets, no two will have the same career trajectory either. While onboarding is usually associated with new hires, employees moving up the ranks often need a little onboarding too. Online learning is the perfect way to connect their previous training with the learning they'll need to stay productive moving forward.
3. Diverse Content Delivery
It's no secret that there are different learning styles and what works for one person may not work for another. How information is presented will have a significant impact on your team's ability to retain and recall what they've learned. A learning management system provides diverse options for delivering your learning materials. Engage employees with content that incorporates traditional text, video, audio, online collaboration, social media, quizzes, games and more. Further, optimize busy schedules with micro-learning (short courses) that can be completed in brief bursts. Diverse content delivery also helps improve the accessibility of your onboarding, fostering a more inclusive work environment. An LMS makes it easy to give employees the information they need in a way that works best for them, enabling everyone on your team to get up to speed and hard at work without barriers.
4. Consistency as You Scale
Gone are the days when the senior members of your team have time to oversee the training each new hire. Maybe it's because they're busier, or perhaps it's because your company is growing too fast for them to keep up. Either way, do yourself a solid and use an LMS to secure training consistency. It'll turn "your way" into a tried and true method for onboarding that's both repeatable and scalable. As long as you update your training to keep it fresh, you'll never have to worry about how efficiently your employees reach productivity. Proper onboarding is the best way to make sure that your employees have everything needed to hit the ground running. An LMS doesn't just improve the quality of your employee onboarding, it accelerates it. As the rock-solid data in our infographic "The Fast Track to Productivity" shows, there's no faster path to ROI than to tap employee training software. Whether you're just starting to build your onboarding program or you're ready to fine-tune it, Absorb LMS is the way to go. The features highlighted here are just the tip of the iceberg of what it can do. Go see Absorb live to learn even more.
