New Employee Onboarding Software

Let’s face it. It’s tough making sure your large group of new hires all get the onboarding experience we want them to have. Gone are the days when we should be relying on in-person, classroom training full of endless PowerPoint presentations, tests, and activities. By relying solely on manual processes, onboarding new employees can be more difficult than it needs to be. It’s time for a better and more modern onboarding experience.

Enter new employee onboarding software. This form of employee training software makes it easy to build, deliver, and track your new employee onboarding efforts. Not only is it easy for employers to use, but it also creates a seamless learning experience for your new hires. By incorporating an online training system into your onboarding strategy, it’ll be easy to create best in class onboarding programs. Let’s learn more.

The Benefits of Employee Onboarding Software

Save Time By Consolidating to One Platform

Most small to mid-size businesses use a combination of HR Cloud software combined with Survey Monkey and emails to build, deliver, and training. You and your learners deserve something better. With Lessonly’s onboarding solution, you can easily build your program, share lessons and training tracks, and even measure the results, all within one user-friendly platform. Oh, and if you use an HRIS, our API can easily plug into that as well!

Create Automatic Workflows

Online training systems can also streamline the onboarding process by automating tasks over a certain period of time. This means that managers and trainers don’t have to manually push out training content or schedule training session after training session. This creates an effective communication process between leaders and new hires while assuring managers that everyone is hitting necessary benchmarks and predetermined milestones throughout onboarding.

Know Who Learns What, When, and How Well

The crown jewel of our training program is it’s easy to automate onboarding and tracking. By default, you gain insight into who knows what they need to and who isn’t quite getting it. We believe accountability is just the beginning of measuring learning. Our most successful customers use Lessonly to highlight problem areas and even reward over-achievers.

Drive Performance and Productivity

Companies that deliver a great onboarding experience are also more likely to see an increase in employee retention, performance, and even productivity. In fact, companies that automate onboarding tasks with new employee onboarding software have a 16% higher retention rate of new hires. If that doesn’t show the benefits of onboarding software, then consider the fact that 77% of new hires who hit their performance goals had a formal employee onboarding experience.

Employee Onboarding & Development

Just as a first impression is critical for interpersonal relationship assumptions, employee orientation and any ongoing integration efforts, are some of the most essential elements of long-term happiness in a career. While most companies have a new employee onboarding process, most employees would say the experience they had could have been better. When onboarding new employees, keep in mind that your new hires are most likely comparing the way you are onboarding employees to the way they have been onboarded in the past. That’s why employee onboarding software is a great way to not only develop employees efficiently but also to stand apart in a positive way from an employee’s previous onboarding experiences. Then, once a new hire has been onboarded, it’s critical to keep the employee development going with ongoing training and education opportunities to keep the employee engaged. Lessonly’s software can also help you track the results of ongoing training efforts.

Onboarding Process

The onboarding process for new hires is crucial to get right and in spite of common practice, includes much more than the first day of work. In fact, best in class onboarding programs last more than just a few weeks. We’ve seen some great onboarding programs create 30,60, and even 90 day checkpoints for new hires after the initial onboarding process ends. Similarly to the group dynamic process flow, a good onboarding program will be aware of and include the phases of forming, storming, norming, and performing.
Here is an onboarding process flow chart to better illustrate these phases:

Forming

The forming stage is typically referred to as orientation and will normally include only the first day of work. This is the part of the onboarding process where an employee is typically spoonfed general company knowledge, filling out new employee forms, and very little job-specific training is happening.

Storming

The storming phase of the employee onboarding process will usually include the first week of work. This is when the new hire gets to learn the details of their specific role, get to know the other members of the team better, learn the lay of the land in the office, and start to understand where they can provide value.

Norming

The norming phase in a new hire process will last from the second week until around the sixth week of employment. This is where an employee starts to become comfortable with their new surroundings and begins to move beyond the barriers of learning the basics of the company. This phase should not be ignored by onboarding programs as it is critical to transition from this phase to the next.

Performing

The performing stage of the onboarding process is typically marked by the seventh week of employment until the individual exits the company. This is the goal of the new hire process as it is when the employee begins to provide true added value to the team and earn their paycheck.

New Employee Orientation

Referenced in the onboarding process flow chart above as the norming phase, new employee orientation is the first of four stages in proper new hire onboarding programming. New hire orientation is generally understood to be the first part of a new employee’s experience with their new job. It is considered new employee orientation best practices to be as thorough as possible in the beginning of a new employee orientation program because that is the time when new hires are expecting to learn onboarding-type training materials. It is also common practice to introduce a new employee to the rest of the staff with an announcement email. Feel free to use our Employee Announcement Templates download as a tool for sending informative, company-wide emails such as this.

New Employee Orientation Ideas

In addition to leveraging new employee onboarding software, here are some ideas to make your orientation program for new employees more effective:

New Employee Orientation Activities

Some of the best new hire orientation ideas are around the activities for the day. Be sure to make them fun and engaging, keeping in mind that most people be either excited or cynical about this type of experience. It’s best to feed on the excitement of those interested and make it engaging enough that even the cynics will at least smile a few times during the day.

New Hire Survey

A new hire survey can reveal a lot about the individuals going through the onboarding process and can reveal quite a bit about the process itself as well. We recommend conducting one before orientation and one after. Then, you can compare the results and understand how well a new hire has engaged throughout the process. Be sure to include some questions that are completely open-ended so that you can learn fresh ideas from your new team members.

New Hire Orientation Presentation

Creating an orientation presentation obviously makes the onboarding process more efficient, but make sure it’s not boring. We find one of the best ways to relieve the tension and boredom of a typical onboarding presentation is to use a lot of funny and interesting animated GIFs rather than relying on text to convey information. Giphy is a great source of inspiration.

New Employee Orientation Template

A great way to make sure that every single new hire is onboarded in a similar way is to create a new hire orientation template. We realized that most of the templates currently on the web were static and seemed relevant to very few people, so we created a resource for you. Check out our new employee checklist template.

Training & Development

As a part of the onboarding process, it is important to keep in mind the new employee’s experience with the company after their first day and first week. After planning the initial phases of the orientation process are complete, be sure to plan for the ongoing training/development that should take place to push a new hire to the performing phase. Although this is often found in T&D departments of larger companies, we’ve found that many companies now expect ongoing training and development to be completed by the functional area where the employee works.

Human Resources Training

For the HR department, there are typically a number of company-wide human resource training materials that need to be distributed to all incoming employees regardless of their position. Human resource training and development will usually include information around company culture, corporate values, and other ways to keep the company consistently drumming to the same beat. It may also include training and development in human resource management if the new employee will be working with the HR team.

Training and Development of Employees

Training New Employees can be difficult, but just like most things, new hire training gets easier over time, especially if you implement a new employee training plan. A training plan will help others know how to train new employees better and will help the training and development of employees add to your culture to retain more talent. Remember, the more you plan and prepare for training and developing employees, the better equipped they will be to be successful in their roles and lead to growth for the entire company.

Staff Training and Development

Often times, training for individual employees is just simply not efficient, so you may resort to staff development and training, where your entire company or a specific team will be trained. This type of staff training and development is very common, especially when you are paying for an expert to come and train your team. To help organize staff and team training like this, we have implemented the Group feature in Lessonly, so that you can assign training materials to your entire company or a team, rather than just an individual.

Professional Development Training

There are many occupations where professional development training is a requirement, such as education, real estate, and other licensed positions. It is important to discuss how the professional development process will be handled with your team. Who will be paying for the ongoing development? Will you provide resources that help prepare for exams? Will you provide reminders for each new employee as they reach their requirements? Will you provide leadership development training? Make sure these expectations are set before, during, and after the onboarding process.

HR Software

One of the best categories of tools to use when onboarding a new employee is human resource software. There are dozens of types of HR software solutions, including HRIS software that are often delivered as online hr software, also known as cloud hr software. We are proud to consider Lessonly in this category of employee software and glad that it can be used in all of these applications:

Recruiting Software

Lessonly can be used as recruiting software if you share it with potential recruits before they come onboard to teach them more about the company and push the benefits you view as important. You can then track which prospective new hires are more engaged with others and understand which ones are more knowledgeable about your brand and your company.

Onboarding Software

After a new hire has been recruited, Lessonly can be used as new employee onboarding software. We pride ourselves on the various features we have designed specifically for this use case, such as the Groups and Courses features that help manage bulk onboarding activities that then populate information in the Gradebook so you can understand who is doing what and when in the orientation process.

Employee Handbook Software

Another great use for Lessonly is to act as an employee handbook. Using Lessonly in this way allows you to always keep all of your staff on the same page with regard to the handbook as they will always be able to view the most recent version, rather than hundreds of out-of-date paper copies floating around the office. It also provides a great experience if you need to reference the employee handbook on the road because our software looks fantastic on any mobile device. We’ve created an employee handbook template as a resource for you to start developing a comprehensive handbook.

Employee Management Software

Ongoing management of employees is difficult enough without tools to get in your way, so we have designed Lessonly to be as easy as possible to use, requiring effectively no training to be efficient. The tracking tools within Lessonly allow you to stay abreast of how well your entire team is retaining the essential information you need them to know and in a glance understand who is falling behind. Although you probably already know who is falling behind, these tools give you an objective way to quantify progress of a team member or lack thereof.

Employee Appraisal Software

We often find that managers will use Lessonly as this type of hr software. Reviews are a critical part of a company’s culture as they allow for a two-way feedback loop to keep everyone on the same page. Using Lessonly’s Quizzing features as employee review software is an incredibly effective way to deliver regular employee evaluation surveys, store that information for an employee’s appraisal log, and collaborate with your employee to drive engagement, culture, and productivity.

Get started with Lessonly’s employee onboarding software

If you’re ready to roll out the red carpet and welcome your new hires in a special way, take a look at Lessonly’s online training software. Not only can we help you create an onboarding program that engages and excites your new hires, but we can also help you deliver ongoing training that will help everyone do Better Work. Learn more with this quick preview of Lessonly!