Heading

The recruitment process within an organization does not end when the new employees receive their offer letters and joining dates. It extends to the onboarding process that helps the employees adjust to the new work environment and make themselves comfortable with their new team.

Onboarding is a far more important activity than it is given credit for. The first few weeks of an employee in an organization are often decisive about their journey ahead of. Organizations need to ensure that employees across the board are engaged with the company after joining the team.

The importance of employee onboarding can be evidently seen in the following statistics:

1. Organizations with effective onboarding have 33% more employees that feel engaged as compared to those with inefficient onboarding processes (Source: BambooHR, 2019)
   
   
2. In 2020, around 1 in every 3 global executives stated that their onboarding was below the standard (Source: ClickBoarding)
   
   
3. 88% of employees think that there is a high scope of improvement in the onboarding programs of their companies (Source: Gallup)
   
   
4. 37.4% of the recruiters say that their most important concerns during the pandemic were to onboard and train remote employees (Source: Workable)
   
   
5. 61% of employers anticipate the new hires to work with them for at least two years, making effective onboarding necessary to maximize their stay (Source: The Manifest)
   
   

However, many organizations are not focusing on streamlined onboarding and are taking it lightly. A report by Gallup suggests that 88% of the organizations do not onboard well. This results in employees switching jobs, lack of motivation in the long run, and eventual lack of organizational productivity.

If an organization wants to get onboarding right, microlearning is an essential tool to streamline effective onboarding processes.

However, before getting into the benefits of microlearning for onboarding, let us briefly discuss the issues with traditional onboarding processes.

Major Issues With Traditional Onboarding

Delay In Basic Setup

The scope of traditional onboarding is fairly restricted. It often results in employees having to wait for basic setup. When your employees do not get their laptops and work emails set up on time, their motivation to work with you is bound to go down. This gives you a bad start at the onboarding process.

Filling Employee Forms And Tickets Manually

In traditional onboarding, lack of digitization and process automation results in the hiring managers having to fill employee forms and add create tickets manually. This often takes up a huge chunk of their time to focus on the core business issues.

Lack Of Effective Monitoring Of Service Levels

The traditional onboarding processes do not provide IT Managers with a consistent and automated mechanism for keeping track of service levels while onboarding employees. This makes it difficult for management to assess how effective the onboarding processes are for every new employee.

Confused New Employees

It is common for new employees to need some help from the IT department during their first few weeks as they settle down and get used to the systems/software they work on. The traditional onboarding approach rarely provides them with personalized assistance to obtain IT help as and when they need it.

Difficulty In Answering Employee Questions

When new employees join your organization, they are likely to have several questions related to the work they are required to do, the company policies, the team members they are required to coordinate with, and much more. The traditional onboarding system has no provision to have a centralized platform where all their questions will be answered. This results in the new employees making calls and sending emails every time they have questions.

Difficulty In Onboarding Remote Employees

Most traditional onboarding processes are designed to suit employees working in a physical workspace. The last two years have seen a significant rise in the number of employees working remotely and offices functioning remotely. This makes it difficult for the HR team to onboard employees effectively using traditional processes without physical interactions.

Read More- How to provide an easy onboarding experience to your remote employees?

Microlearning And The Modern Employee Service Desks

Gone are the days when employees preferred being trained by a dedicated trainer who would provide them with manuals with nothing but plain text followed by practical applications. New employees in 2021, just like any other learner in any other situation, prefer learning new skills engagingly and interactively.

Microlearning allows organizations to train their newer employees in specific skills in a way that is not tedious and time-consuming. Microlearning can be leveraged by pairing it with the employee service desk implemented within an organization.

The modern employee service desks make sure that employees obtained personalized and context-based support from their organization with the help of technologies like conversational AI. The use of AI chatbots makes it easy for employees to ask questions, raise queries, and give commands to automate several repetitive processes.

When you use an AI-driven employee service desk to provide microlearning services for employee onboarding, you can add all necessary training resources to your enterprise knowledge base, allowing your employee to access the same according to their convenience.

Benefits Of Microlearning Used For Employee Onboarding

1. Promoting Self-help And Increased Independence

When an employee joins an organization, they are often motivated and excited to be doing the job tried hard to secure. It is the organization's responsibility to keep this passion alive and keep them engaged with their work. This feat cannot be achieved if your new employees need to depend on their mentors and seniors to perform various tasks.

Microlearning helps you make your employees learn new skills all by themselves. The core of such training is similar to that of taking up an online course or reading up about a new skill by oneself. With a modern service desk in place, all your new employees would need to log in to the platform, access the training resources, and get themselves trained at their own pace.

When your employees find themselves independent and self-reliant during their first few weeks in the organization, it boosts their motivation and keeps them engaged even after the onboarding process is officially complete.

2. Increased Retention Of Information Via Engaging Content

When new employees are provided with a plethora of literature with plain text for training them, likely, they will not retain the information well. In the age of digitization and social media prevalence, we are accustomed to consuming content in audio-visual formats.

Microlearning using employee service desks allows organizations to provide training resources to new employees using multiple engaging formats, including audio, video, animation, GIFs, images, and infographics. You can provide your employees with links to informative videos and use gamification to increase their retention capacity.

This allows your employees to learn new skills and hone their existing ones by consuming content in an easy-to-understand and retain format.

3. Personalized Training Resources

In traditional training processes, a group of new employees are trained by the same instructor and provided with the same set of training resources. AI-based microlearning allows you to provide personalized training to each of the employees being onboarded.

The modern employee service desks possess all relevant details about every employee enrolled with an organization. As the new employees use your AI-driven service desk, the platform starts making sense of their preferences, common issues, and areas of interest. These details help you provide training materials based on the specific needs and preferences of your employees.

When your new employees train themselves using resources tailored specifically for them, they feel valued as an integral part of the organization. Ultimately, this results in increased employee engagement, making your onboarding successful.

4. Ideal For Remote Onboarding

As discussed earlier, one of the most prominent challenges organizations face is onboarding remote employees using traditional techniques. Especially in 2021, when most organizations are working remotely, using digitized platforms for microlearning allows employees to obtain extensive training at any time and from any location.

5. Integration With Online Collaborative Platforms

Along with working remotely, all industries have witnessed a significant rise in the adoption of online collaborative platforms over the last two years. Organizations have been setting up virtual offices using Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom to streamline working from home.

In such a situation, integrating a service desk with microlearning helps employees get trained on the same platform that they use for work. Such a centralized approach to training saves new employees from using multiple platforms to train and implement the lessons learned.

Read More: Microlearning Boosts Employee Training and Experience

The Final Word

One can compare the use of microlearning for employee onboarding with educating students in the 21st century. In both cases, organizations can achieve the best results by using engaging content, monitoring individual progress, and encouraging self-reliance.