New employee orientation – how to turn a chore into a competitive advantage

New employee orientation is often viewed as a necessary evil

Many organizations often want new employees working independently as soon as possible. New employee orientation is a chore or an obligation with little to no fundamental value. Agree with this statement? Then we would like to challenge you to think again. Here we will argue that new employee training is a core business process with great downstream repercussions.

Of course we understand that every organization’s resources are finite. If there is a lack of workers, it can be difficult to dedicate older employees’ time to training new arrivals. Particularly if the old employees were struggling with their workload to begin with.

New employee orientation is not free. Alternative costs of having older employees train new ones face to face can be staggering. New employees will, for a time, bring down the entire department’s productivity temporarily. No wonder companies look for shortcuts.

The hidden expenses of saving money in training

It is tempting to cut corners and put the new employees to productive work as soon as possible. However, a thing done quickly is rarely a thing done well. This applies to new employee training as well.

Bad new employee orientation can water down a successful recruitment. What use is a good candidate who is never given the opportunity to become a productive employee? A new member of staff cannot be force fed experience. Professionals are made gradually.

Sub-par training can easily result in

decreased job safety
decreased productivity of work
increased worker stress
increased sick days
higher turnover
anxiety and lack of confidence in employees

You probably understand already just how much saving money in new employee training can cost on the long run. Having to replace and retrain unhappy staff is expensive enough, and the long-term cost of lost productivity makes it only worse. As if hiring new team members was easy and risk free to begin with.

How to train new employees well – and without breaking the bank?

Dedicating more time to face to face new employee orientation probably requires significant resources. But what if there was a way to reduce this time and use it better at the same time?

How about eliminating some repetitive tasks? For instance explaining where the tools are, what security policies are in place, what the dress code is, or simply describing some basic steps of the work. These are all things that are easily forgotten and require a lot of repetition – and likely waste a lot of time during face to face time.

To make new employee orientation more productive, new employees could study these things independently at their own rhythm, and repeat the necessary details often enough. When it is time for face to face training, older employees can concentrate on more practical issues and problems, making the training more meaningful.

Most boring aspects of new employee orientation can be automatized with the right e-learning platform

What if a significant proportion of new employee training took place on a digital learning platform? Training standardized processes would become scalable. Repeating study units would not increase the cost of training. The time older employees spend training new arrivals would dramatically decrease.

At Workseed we specialize in helping companies build holistics new employee orientation processes and address skills shortages – all in a modern cloud-based e-learning platform. The platform works well on mobile devices. This way your staff can participate in training flexibly, and they always have access to up-to-date training materials.

A digital platform provides your organization with a multitude of benefits.

Increased scalability – Costs of training stays constant and predictable, no matter how many employees you train.
Measurable outcomes – Bring lean methods into training. Monitor and analyze just how successful your onboarding process really is. Identify and fix shortcomings and make the most of the face to face time.
Automatic processes – Automatic scheduling and notifications make sure employees stay on track.
Individual learning paths – Learning experience has been designed with an individual learner in mind. Learners can advance at their own pace. It is also possible for supervisors to monitor individual employees and provide support as needed.
Simple certification – You can create a process for certifications to coordinate core skills.

Our experts will support you not only in new employee orientation and LMS use, but also in content production. You can for instance acquire a ready-made introductory course with a 360 virtual learning environment on workplace safety to kickstart your training process. Later you can manage training contents through an intuitive and easy-to-use web-based tool.

How to update the training process at your workplace?

Are you still training your new employees the hard way? If you want to turn a chore into a competitive advantage, why not book a consultation with our experts. We will show you how to create a streamlined training process for your organization in just 60 minutes!