Seven benefits of using an LMS for your employee onboarding process
Integrating new employees into your organization can be a daunting task sometimes, especially as there are many elements to onboarding.
Onboarding new employees is a significant task, as it includes ensuring the right paperwork is completed and new hires are properly trained. Onboarding is also a very important role as it helps people adapt to the ways of the organization, and understand the goals that they will be working towards.
By incorporating a learning management system, you can simplify your employee onboarding process. An LMS would help your new employees get on track as quickly as possible. It will also make your onboarding process more result-oriented and effective.
Here are seven benefits of using an LMS for your onboarding process.
1) Starting early
An onboarding process is not just about getting the paperwork done. This is the stage where the newly hired employees start adapting to the organization’s work culture and values. An ideal onboarding process helps the new employees understand the goals of the organization. Thus, at this stage, it is important to set the right expectations for them.
Using an LMS in the onboarding process can help you set expectations about how different teams in the organization and the organization as a whole work. Even before creating job role tutorials, organizations can provide online training material that can help highlight the values, principles, and objectives of the organization to the new employees.
This kind of content can help the joining employees can better understand their job expectations as well as what to expect from their workplace; thus adapt better to the work environment of the organization.
2) Onboarding becomes more cost-effective
A major part of any organization’s resources is spent on finding, hiring, and onboarding new employees. Training them for the job can be the most expensive process of them all. Training of the newly hired employees is usually done by a dedicated HR team or more experienced co-workers by taking time out of their usual work schedules. If the new employees have no prior experience, the training can become more time-consuming, which translates to a significant amount of expenditure.
Meanwhile, incorporating an LMS into the process can enable the new joiners to learn at their own pace without anyone having to put in the extra hours from their schedule as they have access to the online training material all the time. You can also save a lot of money on expenses like travel, venue, and learning supplies, which are crucial in traditional training practice, by using an LMS for the onboarding employees and their training.
3) Faster onboarding
The biggest benefit that incorporating an LMS to your onboarding process can give you is that it can make the whole process a lot faster. With an LMS you can create and distribute new hire online training resources that can help them learn faster.
By digitizing the information related to the very basics of the organization that is usually given to the new hires during the first week, like, the company policies, company’s organization charts, and payroll system, you can save a lot of time. You can even give them early access to the online training resources concerning joining, so that when they join it and the onboarding process starts, they already have their basics covered.
4) Easier onboarding procedure for remote employees
Onboarding remote employees can be a tough task especially when your workforce is distributed across the globe. And, naturally many factors need to be considered while working with a geographically scattered workforce; from the difference in timezones to the employees’ extent of access to solid connectivity.
Incorporating an LMS can eliminate these limitations of onboarding remote employees. An LMS can empower the employees with access to online training resources at any time, from anywhere in the world. Self-hosted LMSs that provide mobile responsiveness can be especially beneficial for this situation as it enables the employees to access their online training material even with limited internet access.
The process can get easier for the employees as well since they can access whatever they need at any time without waiting for someone to pass it on to them. The usage of LMS can also eliminate the need for unnecessary video conferencing while onboarding remote employees.
5) Trackable onboarding
Only training your new hires and leaving them to do their job without actually keeping track is pointless. Tracking the progress of the new hires is an essential part of the onboarding process to know how effective the training is. However, for large organizations that hire a lot of people at the same time, it can be very difficult to keep track of each employee.
Using an LMS can eradicate the issue as it becomes easier to track the onboarding process as a whole as well as the progress each new hire is making. This information can help you find out exactly where an employee is struggling. It will enable you to help them fulfill their needs and requirements which will surely have a positive impact on the organization in the long run.
6) It’s scalable
For organizations with a massive workforce, the scalability of the onboarding process is very important. LMSs can support large numbers of online employees. But even for medium or small organizations, it is better to be ready for growth. When the company is at the growing stage, it is important for the leaders to build a solid HR infrastructure that can be scaled up the onboarding and training process of new employees in the future.
7) It’s less overwhelming for the new employees
Joining a new organization is exciting for most new employees; especially if it is their first time. In the excitement, many new hires pressurize themselves trying to soak in as much information as possible. This can cause them to be overwhelmed and burnout soon. Things become even more confusing when they encounter outdated or contradicting information.
By using an LMS, you can make sure that the new employees counter only updated and standardized online training content in the system. You can also empower them with the access to all the online training resources they will be needing at any given time. As they get stuck at their task or have a question to ask, they can refer to these online training resources and solve their issue without panicking.
Could an LMS be right for your onboarding?
As the market is growing, organiztions are competing for new talent. As important as it is to find new talent, it is also very important to keep them. Kept aside all the other elements, the role of a good onboarding process and L&D programs in higer retention rates cannot in undeniable. An LMS can be a tool to achieve this easily while also helping the new hires join the workforce quickly.
