Most businesses are knowledgeable on the basics of training employees but have difficulty maintaining that momentum long-term. Successfully onboarding a new employee isn’t easy, as they have to grasp the skills required for their role and how to fit into your company culture. To create a successful and personalized training program, try these 5 tips.
5 Expert Tips on How to Streamline Employee Onboarding
To strategize your development and training program, you need to put the hard work in. You’ll also need to learn from your mistakes, ask for feedback and automate employee onboarding.
1. Outsource Human Resources (HR) Tasks by Using a PEO
Professional Employer Organizations (PEO’s) provide outsourced human resources services that help ensure compliance by minimizing employer risk. There are multiple advantages of PEOs, including peace of mind. By hiring a professional PEO team, employers will receive payroll services, workers’ compensation administration, and benefit plan administrators.
Instead of going through the process of hiring HR professionals yourself, PEO’s are guaranteed to be up to date on federal and state taxes, as well as experts in their field. Simply ask what they need to complete the onboarding process of a new hire and send over the documents.
Some PEO’s are even capable of offering support for issues related to worker classification status, employee relations and harassment, risk and safety in the workplace, and more.
2. Establish a Training Game Plan in Advance for New Hires
While some employers have a dedicated training package and walkthrough in place for new hires, others will train their new hires on the fly. Even businesses with reliable training programs have a hard time individualizing the experience. However, each role in your company requires different skills and expertise, so give each team member the training they need.
To accomplish this, you’ll need to give all new hires the best start possible:
- Ask employees in a similar role to help create a training package.
- Keep new joiners updated on the training schedule.
- Understand skill gaps immediately before a problem occurs.
- Get them to grips with business acronyms or jargon/slang.
- Remove redundancies in the training program by asking for feedback.
Update your training program to give all new hires the information they’ll need to succeed in their sector. Add steps to the program if a step or procedure consistently confuses employees.
3. Organize and Separate Training by Beginners and Experts
An IT pro isn’t going to get much out of skill training, while a beginner will want to spend less time on corporate culture during their first week. Staying organized will avoid unnecessary steps in the process and will set all employees up for success. It’s also good practice to change the order of each training process depending on what a new hire requires for their position.
Businesses need to speak to new employees before consulting a walkthrough to do this effectively, so create a questionnaire that can determine where they fall. Beginners may need program prerequisites, like certificates or training, and it’s good to be prepared if that’s the case.
Although experts won’t need a lot of time to prepare, you’ll still need to assess the effectiveness of the training program. Did both beginners and experts receive all necessary information?
4. Use Online Resources, Video and Digital Forms
There are some processes that don’t require the physical presence of a new hire and bringing in an employee for these training modules wastes everyone’s time and money. If a new hire has to watch a video or read a pamphlet, let them do it at home with a time limit. Your employees will feel less overwhelmed if they don’t have to juggle work, culture, and skill training.
In-house training will be streamlined when you adopt online resources and digital forms because you won’t have to fax paperwork. Pre-questions and feedback forms are easy to create with software, and these answers can be sent directly to any email of your choice.
The Internet becomes integral to your workflow and onboarding schedule if you forget to ask for vital information or tax forms as you’re smoothing out your new training process.
5. Automate the Onboarding Process in its Final Stages
When you first implement your new training process, you’ll miss critical details. For example, if you’re hiring a remote employee, you may have to research freelance tax forms, how to include them in meetings, and how to train them via video chat. As you learn from your mistakes, you can start automating the onboarding process and start integrating employees faster.
Once your new employees become comfortable with their workplace, you can ask them for feedback, which will help your employees integrate even quicker. Don’t be afraid of criticism because you need to know what your new hires struggled with to improve your process.
Automating workflow may involve including all the stakeholders that also have a say in the hiring process. If you need to discuss hiring with stakeholders, ask for their feedback, as well.
