Create An Effective Onboarding Training Program With DeskAlerts

If you’ve spent any time at all recruiting to find great candidates to fill roles in your company, you know how much time and effort goes into the process to get the right person for the job.

When you hire someone you want to make sure they’re a good fit for your company and that they are likely to stick around so you don’t have to go through with the recruitment process again.

Unfortunately, many companies find great candidates and then lose them within the first year because they fail to live up to the expectations that the new recruit has for the company.

According to the Harvard Business Review, almost 33% of new hires begin the search for a new job in the first six months, while 23% will leave their new job within the first 12 months.

New recruits can feel lost and frustrated when they are “thrown in the deep end” in a new job without appropriate support and guidance or being given clear instructions and information about what they need to do.

The talent you have recruited might very well be able to do the job with their eyes closed… in theory anyway. But doing the job in your company might be a very different experience to where they have worked before.

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Why you need an onboarding training program

Every organization has a unique corporate culture. Rules and regulations, policies and procedures, protocols, personalities and preferences all combine to mean that performing a particular role in your company might be challenging for your new hire in ways neither of you had anticipated. Leaving your new recruits to their own devices isn’t an effective way to develop people in your organization.

But by spending time ensuring your new recruits have consistent training as a part of the “onboarding” process, you can plant the seeds to grow a dedicated and loyal employee who will stick around for the long-term.

A report from Brandon Hall Group found that organizations committed to offering their new recruits a strong onboarding process are able to improve employee retention by 82% and their company’s overall productivity is improved by more than 70%.

While onboarding itself is the process of getting new employees set up to begin working with the organization, an onboarding training program is an educational function that is part of this process and is designed to teach employees everything they need to know about in order to do their jobs well within your company.

By building a training function into your company’s onboarding process you are able to make them separate functions and give your new employees better insights into working in your organization. It provides your new staff members with clarity about their roles and responsibilities as well as developing their knowledge of your workplace culture.

An onboarding training program shouldn’t just be something that’s done on a new recruit’s first day or first week. To really nurture and develop employees and help them ease in to your corporate culture, you should ideally have an onboarding training period of around six months.

How to develop an onboarding training program

You should develop an onboarding training plan that is generic across your organization and then tailor it to suit specific roles, job functions, geographic regions and teams. This ensures that there is a consistent process to share knowledge with new recruits no matter where they are in your company.

Steps to take include:

• Determining who will be responsible for delivering any or all parts of the onboarding training program.
• Determining the information that you need to communicate with new employees as part of the training.
• Determining if there are any specialized or technical job requirements that need their own standalone training.
• Ensuring that senior leaders within the company are committed to the onboarding training program.
• Developing and designing the training format(s).
• Scheduling training as part of the onboarding process.
• Determining how and when to deliver different facets of the onboarding training program.
• Following up with refresher training to determine if knowledge has been retained.

How DeskAlerts can help deliver your onboarding training program

When it comes to delivering your onboarding training program it’s important to have the right tools for the job. That’s where DeskAlerts comes in and can help you throughout the entire process.

DeskAlerts is a sophisticated internal communications software that is used by many human resource departments around the world to improve engagement, training, education and corporate culture in their organizations.

DeskAlerts works by sending pop-up notifications straight to employees’ desktop screens, cutting through all the digital clutter of the modern workplace. Messages appear no matter what other software or application the employee is using at the time and can’t be skipped or ignored.

The statistics module in DeskAlerts lets you see who has seen your messages and who hasn’t, with results appearing in real time.

Packed full of features, DeskAlerts is the perfect channel to deliver your onboarding training program to new staff.

1. Target staff

DeskAlerts allows you to determine niche audiences to send information to. For example you can send training information specific to a particular work team, or a group of employees with something in common (such as start date in your organization). Or you can send to just one employee at a time.

When you have new staff you can easily send them content that relates to onboarding on a schedule. For example you may send first day training information, first week training information, first month and so on. By staggering the release of the material you send in your onboarding training program you help new employees to ease into life at your company and don’t overwhelm them with too much information they’ll no doubt forget if you just bombard them with it on their first day.

Many organizations have new recruits who need to access onboarding remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DeskAlerts can reach your employees no matter where they are located - whether they are in the office or working remotely. 

2. Send content in a variety of formats

DeskAlerts enables you to send rich content in a variety of formats including text, photographs and videos. You can also link to HTML content that exists elsewhere, such as on your corporate intranet or internet sites or corporate social network.

Producing a suite of customized videos as part of an onboarding training program is a great way to ensure that employees receive the same experience no matter where in the world they are located.

3. RSVP to training

Another one of DeskAlerts’ features is an RSVP tool that lets you send invitations to events – such as face-to-face training workshops and seminars – and you can be certain that the intended invitees have actually seen your invite. Unfortunately, when you send invitations via email they can be overlooked and ignored. With DeskAlerts you are certain to get right under their noses.

The DeskAlerts RSVP function allows you to gather information such as any dietary requests to help your function run smoothly.

4. Surveys, quizzes and polls

of your onboarding training program, you can utilize DeskAlerts’ surveys, quizzes and polls module to get feedback from your new employees or test them on the knowledge that they have acquired so far on their journey.

This will allow you to determine if they need more work in specific areas or if they understand what is expected of them. You can then take whatever steps necessary to provide further assistance and guidance to these employees.

It will also give you an idea of whether or not your onboarding training program is capturing all knowledge you need to share, or if you need to fine-tune it.

It’s also a great way to capture overall statistics and data to help refine and hone your onboarding process for the future.