Onboarding new employees well can be key to their success at your company longterm. But, more often than not we follow the same tired process we’ve always used, with diminishing returns.
Odds are, your company isn’t doing a great job onboarding your employees. In fact, a recent Gallup study found that only 12% of employees say that their company do a great job of onboarding new employees… meaning 88% of companies have room to grow!
Yet, great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%. If something made you 82% more likely to retain your employees, what wouldn’t you be willing to do?
So, what do you do?
First, it’s important to realize that when a new employee starts in your company, they’re not only learning their role, they’re learning your company. The quantity of new information they receive within their first few weeks is extreme, and it can feel intense to process through it all. Trying to remember facts and details, processes and procedures, as well as names and navigation can be overwhelming and exhausting for a new employee.
We can all take a page from educators when we approach our employee onboarding. Educators know that two things help students to learn more than any other: differentiation and repetition.
Differentiation means that you teach the same principle through a number of learning modalities and experiences, meeting the student where they are. So, for example, if you were teaching someone how to conjugate a verb in French, you might speak it, write it, use a jingle to remember the conjugations, post visual reminders and utilize a game to teach the same concept.
Repetition simply means that most people take more than one review of something to remember it. Think about that couple you met a few weeks ago – what was his wife’s name again? She told you… but you didn’t retain it, because you only heard it once. But, if they become your friend on social media and you see their name a couple of times, you’ll remember it the next time you run into them.
As you onboard, consider ways you can differentiate your training and incorporate repetition into the process. We think that leveraging your company’s digital signage is one perfect way to accomplish both of these things approaches. By utilizing highly visual reminders, your employees can benefit from a visually engaging learning modality. Perhaps you upload a video to your digital signage and entertain while you educate, or perhaps you detail basic procedure instructions as a reminder for all.
Repetition is inherent in digital signage playlists, which allows your employees to passively be reminded without the embarrassment of having to ask the obvious questions. Find ways to bring visual reminders of training you’ve already completed and you’ll differentiate as you repeat!
The faster your employees onboard with success, the stronger they’ll begin to feel in their roles. We’d love to help you better communicate with all your employees – download our Human Resources Guide to Communication today to get started.