Creating a great onboarding experience is challenging, no matter how big or small your business is.
Whether it’s your 1st or 1000th new hire, getting them up to speed with how your company does things needs to happen – and happen fast.
Research shows that “it takes 10 months or more for a new team member to be fully productive.”
It’s L&D’s job to get that number down and to give hires the best chance of not just being productive, but excelling, too.
But how do you do it?
A Learning Experience Platform like Totara Engage contains features and functionality to help you do just that. In today’s post, we’re taking a brief look at Totara Engage’s features – that when combined with a great L&D strategy, can help you manage the intricacies of running an effective onboarding programme.
If you’re new to LXPs, read our guide: What is a Learning Experience Platform (LXP)?
Totara Engage – Workspaces
Taking the principle of an online community like a social media platform and integrating it within a learning platform is a brilliant way to foster engagement. The majority of your team spends a lot of time browsing content on platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter – it’s become part of life.
By utilising this idea, Totara Engage helps you create a sense of community on your own, branded LXP. This investment into bespoke technology sets the tone for a new employee and says “look, we take learning seriously here.”
Workspaces give learners a place to share content, start discussions and interact with colleagues. Totara Engage allows learners to create their own workspaces dedicated to specific topics. Being led by your team encourages engagement, makes it more accessible and turns engaged learners into proxy ambassadors for your platform.
Encouraging new starters to ask questions within Workspaces also allows you to turn your LXP into a powerful resource, too. Firstly, making it clear that any question is welcome creates a positive, welcoming impression and over time, as the question bank builds up, future starters will be able to use the discussion area as a resource to find the answer to questions they might also have.
Setting up onboarding and learning playlists
The ease and flexibility that Totara Engage’s playlist feature gives users mean that curating resources for new starters is effortless. Take your company’s software subscriptions, for example, you could easily create a playlist with a series of short tutorials on how to use them. Does your company use slack, Jira, Hubspot or any other of the leading online tools? There are countless tutorials available on Youtube, that you can feature in a playlist with just a few clicks. It may be the first time a person’s used a MacBook – There’s a video for that, too.
That’s an easy way to create a powerful learning experience for new hires, and if you wanted to take it a step further, you could ask your team members to record short screen share videos explaining the unique ways your company does things. All it would take is a 5-minute time investment and perhaps your marketing team adding a title screen and you’ve got a resource that a new starter could watch on repeat if they need to – rather than team members repeating lengthy system introductions every time someone new starts.
Employee Surveys
Understanding how a new starter is feeling or how useful they find your onboarding resources is difficult. Chances are, someone new to the company is going to avoid giving negative feedback. But with Totara Engages’ surveying features, you can gather feedback without any pressure.
When it comes to making improvements to your programme, you won’t need to rely on your instincts, you’ll be able to take a data-driven approach, reviewing the feedback received at different stages, finding weak links and making improvements that way.
Where to start
If you’re considering implementing an LXP in your organisation, get in touch and we’ll show you how Totara Engage could help support your L&D goals.
