Employee Onboarding Process at the Speed of Growth

The employee onboarding process is a multi-stage process that allows a person, employee or customer, to enter into the current work process of a software, website or a company – step by step. The quest for optimal functionality has produced a proliferation of cutting-edge enterprise systems. Accordingly, the switch from analog to digital has challenged the traditional manner in which virtually everything is done in business. This includes how companies approach training new employees. Scaling growth to match demand is an essential component of strategic expansion. Specifically, creating an employee onboarding process presents unique challenges and opportunities. Like many change-driven initiatives, it entails effective management of numerous, often subtle variables.

When training new employees, consider time-to-competency

The traditional employee onboarding process is linear in nature – new hires sit through predetermined hours, days or weeks of lectures, videos or some other tool designed to inform and demonstrate. Upon completion, graduates proceed to tackle real work scenarios with little to no experience. Supplemental training fills in the gaps and eventually the employees adjust or phase out. But in a global market where narrow margins make and break industry leaders, long periods of non-productivity inevitably translate to missed opportunities. Maintaining a competitive edge means understanding how times have changed and capitalizing on a transition which, if nothing else, was prompted by the need for efficiency and adaptability. This is why companies choose WalkMe – a training tool designed to help an organization meet the robust challenge of onboarding at the speed of growth. The following are a few points about how it does this and why it is the right tool for thriving where other companies are barely surviving.

Capitalize on More by Onboarding for Less

Opportunities are a zero-sum game. You either rise to the occasion or pass it on to a competitor. Regardless of which you opt for, the mere discovery of a new revenue stream produces ripples. The smaller the pond, the bigger the stakes. This is particularly true for tech companies. Most of today’s innovation results from neck-to-neck competition between just a handful of firms. Taking the big steps required to succeed in this environment means making everything else as simple and efficient as possible. The employee onboarding process should optimize value from the workforce by reducing time-to-competence. On-screen guides can accomplish learning efficiency with fewer errors, limited managerial oversight, and ease of adaptability. The money, time, and other resources typically allocated to a traditional employee onboarding process are now free for redirection where they can make a greater difference. This advantage carries over into foreign environments as well. Training in the native language of a foreign market or franchise requires merely translating the content.

Improve Efficiency Without Compromising Training Quality

Most importantly, however, an on-screen guide can teach by guiding individuals through real scenarios. This provides both the user and the enterprise with real-time feedback on competency and learning habits. Small differences become big ones if you stack them high enough. Reducing individual time-in-training means placing the most competent new hires on important work sooner and at a lower cost. Modern training and business software can boost the productivity of competent users by orders of magnitude. Yet, turnover in sales and related industries is astonishingly high, translating to missed opportunities and stunted growth if onboarding new employees is burdensome. Flaws in onboarding are a key factor in this failure, and an examination of modern learning trends sheds some light on why this happens.

Understand The Incoming Generation’s Learning Habits are Completely Different

Part of what made the traditional approach the “right” approach was perspective. What organizations knew and were capable of observing about personnel was limited to the technology of the past and the learning culture it produced. Namely, that instruction was the proper way to cultivate competence. Employees worked more effectively when they possessed a certain base of learned knowledge from which they could draw. This generally translated to memorizing large volumes of material before performing the relevant tasks. Needless to say, evaluating individual competence under this approach boiled down to speculation at best, even given the most refined examination methods. This approach is now outdated because today’s workforce operates on a completely different learning model. Millennials grew up with easy access to virtually unlimited information and are self-guided learners. They are accustomed to using engaging and immersive learning tools that take them to the information they need, rather than exposing them to volumes of generic information which they do not need at that moment. Moreover, the incoming generation appears to be “bottom-up” learners, preferring to vet information and more likely to challenge things they disagree with.

Innovate Employee Training & Employee Onboarding Process

Placing groups of these new entrants in a resonating chamber and expecting them to revert to old-fashioned methods of absorption and retention reflects a dilapidated view of both the workforce and the market. Emerging cognitive models suggest that challenging assignments account for the bulk of how lessons are learned. Coursework and training account for only a small fraction of the overall learning process. WalkMe’s success stories prove this to be true, warranting a reconsideration of what constitutes “training.” As the future state of markets and business practices become less and less predictable, the ability to evolve your employee onboarding process becomes more and more important.