Employee onboarding is the “process of helping new hires adjust to social and performance aspects of their new jobs quickly and smoothly, and learn the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to function effectively within an organization,” according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Whether it’s for job-specific training, benefits enrollment, or communicating company culture, an effective, comprehensive onboarding process is a critical part of every organization’s new hire plan. Successful employee onboarding results in higher employee retention and satisfaction, better business outcomes, and a more positive company culture.

 

5 Strategies to Optimize and Accelerate Onboarding

Discover how to boost engagement at scale with asynchronous video and measure the impact of your onboarding program.

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In this guide, you will learn

• How to Effectively Onboard New Employees
• What is Asynchronous Employee Onboarding?
• How Does Video Improve the Onboarding Experience?
• The Essential Tools for Virtual Employee Onboarding
• How to Develop a Video Onboarding Process that Works

 

How to Effectively Onboard New Employees

Employee onboarding contains training tasks to welcome an employee to a company and make sure new hires are prepared to succeed in their roles. The employee onboarding process is designed to bring new talent up to speed as quickly as possible to begin to productively contribute to the business. Good employee onboarding practices lead to higher job satisfaction, better job performance, and employees with a stronger commitment to their organizations. To remain competitive, learning and development (L&D) decision-makers must standardize, optimize, and accelerate employee onboarding and training so that new hires become productive and add value as soon as possible.

So how do L&D leaders effectively onboard new employees?

An effective employee onboarding program accomplishes two things:

• Acclimates the new hire to the company culture and enables them to begin building connections that will keep them engaged and productive
• Provides the training and coaching they need to start producing and contributing to company objectives

Onboarding programs may include in-person training reviewing day-to-day tasks, handouts highlighting company culture, and maybe some non-company specific videos reviewing topics like security practices. But as companies and cultures advance, employee training programs are changing to include a mix of new technologies and processes to increase efficiency and scalability – such as asynchronous employee onboarding.

 

💡 Optimizing your onboarding process can help reduce early turnover by as much as 25% and save the nearly $11,000 it costs to fill a new vacancy.

 

What is Asynchronous Employee Onboarding?

With the increase of remote and hybrid work environments, L&D teams have evolved in order to maintain communications with new employees. Many companies are adopting asynchronous employee onboarding – in other words, onboarding that is available on demand as opposed to via live sessions.

Asynchronous communications are back-and-forth exchanges with a delay between messages or one-way communications that can be received by an audience at their convenience. Utilizing asynchronous communications in onboarding programs means that new employees are primarily trained through previously created mediums, whether that be emails, recorded meetings, or on-demand video messages. Rather than one-off live meetings or video conferences, asynchronous onboarding empowers employees to engage with material in the time, place, and manner that’s most useful for them – and it’s highly effective.

 

 

How Does Video Improve the Onboarding Experience?

A secure, internal video learning library enables forward-thinking companies to deliver engaging, effective onboarding programs at scale. Benefits of video employee onboarding include:

• Reduced training costs: As it stands, employee onboarding is an expensive task. According to management consultants Mark Stein and Lilith Christiansen in their book, Successful Onboarding, companies spend up to 30% of a new hire’s annual salary during the onboarding process. Through asynchronous video, training costs decrease exponentially by eliminating the need for costly in-person training.
• Improved knowledge retention: Did you know that video has been shown to improve people’s ability to remember concepts and details? By using video during onboarding, employees are more likely to retain information. As an added bonus, a robust video management system offers searchability features that enable users to search videos for spoken and written words should they have questions after their onboarding is complete.
• Consistent, up-to-date content: Video ensures that L&D teams maintain consistency across all training sessions and have the ability to easily update training videos when needed.
• Greater employee engagement and connectedness: Video is personal. It can be used to introduce team members, deliver messages with a human element, and connect teams whether they are 5 feet or 5,000 miles away.
• Measurable outcomes: Analytics offered through video management platforms allow L&D teams a better understanding of employee engagement with on-demand onboarding videos. These metrics share what training videos are used the most, where new employees may need additional learning, and whether or not employees are completing the required training for compliance purposes.

 

 

 

The Essential Tools for Virtual Employee Onboarding

Video has already become the foundation for how we share knowledge in a distributed world, and many L&D leaders are leveraging asynchronous video to conduct onboarding and training. On-demand onboarding videos offer a flexible, detailed medium for communication. Viewers can watch the videos at any time, from any location, and search and watch them again later.

In order to effectively manage your video onboarding program, there are three main tools in a communication ecosystem that help L&D leaders capture, share, and access valuable knowledge when and where they need it – which results in higher engagement and productivity for new employees.

 

 

• Video Conferencing Software. Video conferencing solutions like Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams offer an opportunity for real-time training.
• Learning Management System. Many L&D teams use a learning management system like Cornerstone, Docebo, or SAP SuccessFactors to house, deliver, and track training content in one place.
• Video Management System. A video management system like Panopto is a central, secure, and searchable channel for an organization’s onboarding resources. Think of it as a corporate YouTube that transforms your onboarding material into on-demand knowledge, accessible at any time.

 

 

📣 “Panopto is an efficient and useful tool because we can reach anyone, anywhere with the same information. It’s really helped us expedite training and save hundreds of hours.”

Jayme Bicknell, Marketing Manager, American 1 Credit Union

 

How to Develop a Video Onboarding Process that Works

Asynchronous video onboarding offers an optimized, scalable solution to improving the new employee experience. Video onboarding is attainable for any organization – and it doesn’t need to be difficult. There are seven core steps to follow to plan and execute an effective video employee onboarding program. 

7 Steps to Designing a Video-Based Onboarding Process

1. 1. Identify a set of core onboarding training activities for every new employee.
   2. Determine which of the onboarding activities can be optimized with on-demand video training.
   3. Map out a weekly onboarding schedule for each new employee’s first 60 or 90 days.
   4. Repeat the above steps with role-, department-, and location-specific videos.
   5. Document the process and share it with other departments so they can add additional content.
   6. Make the onboarding experience consistent with automated messages.
   7. Use video analytics to monitor viewing activity.

 

📣 “We’re growing globally. We’ve doubled in size in the last 10 years, and today we actually have more people in our international offices than we have just in the US.

So how do we continue to support that? If we had a major software change, how can we get that message out if we’re only doing instructor-led training? We’d have to pay to get a dozen people to go out and lead the classes, and that’s an expensive proposition.

We see it being a wiser option to hold that session once in the room, and use Panopto both to broadcast that class out live to 100 people in remote offices, as well as record it and make it available on demand.”

Ken Davis, Senior Learning Technology Specialist, Qualcomm

 

 

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