September 6, 2024
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Elena Obolonskaia
The employee onboarding process goes beyond mere paperwork and introductory meetings. It is a comprehensive approach designed to seamlessly incorporate new employees into their positions and the company culture. This involves equipping them with the necessary tools and facilitating a smooth transition into their new environment.
Traditional onboarding methods, with their lengthy binders and tedious sessions, are outdated in today's dynamic workplace, failing to suit the needs of distributed teams, gig workers, and high turnover. A flexible, scalable, and personalized approach is essential.
The rise of remote work and rapid growth challenge maintaining personal connections, making traditional, individual onboarding impractical. Companies must equip new hires with tailored training and resources, utilizing a comprehensive checklist and metrics to ensure effectiveness and boost engagement and retention.
Automating the onboarding process helps efficiently manage resources while adapting to market changes. However, it's crucial to balance digital resources with personalized experiences to address disengagement and information overload, ensuring a welcoming and effective onboarding journey.
Microlearning is a learning methodology that delivers training in quick, targeted chunks, allowing each piece to focus on one outcome. This approach breaks complex information into bite-sized modules, making it easier for learners, especially new employees, to grasp and retain information.
Microlearning aligns with the current workforce's preference for accessible and engaging learning experiences. By utilizing microlearning, companies can better meet the needs of remote, shift, and gig workers, enhancing information retention and onboarding efficiency.
Thanks to the low cost of developing microlearning materials, organizations can offer effective, personalized training tailored to individual needs using minimal resources.
💡Learn more about microlearning, its benefits, and use cases.
Microlearning advocates presenting information in small, easy-to-understand parts, making training for new hires more efficient and reducing the learning curve. Imagine covering one topic at a time through a mobile-friendly training module, delivered in a text message right when a new hire needs it. This approach is ideal for providing a supportive environment.
To optimize your onboarding process, focus on understanding each employee's unique needs, and tailoring the program to their specific roles and responsibilities. This involves identifying the most common questions and essential information sought by new hires, such as benefits, team dynamics, company culture, and daily procedures. Use this insight to create concise microlearning modules on topics like using the knowledge base, understanding pay schedules, Zoom etiquette, and navigating social aspects of remote work. This strategy ensures new employees receive vital information without feeling overwhelmed.
Incorporate microlearning tools or onboarding software, such as 7taps, to provide role-specific training plans, add a personal touch to content, and seamlessly integrate training into daily routines.
“To support our team members during our new HRIS software implementation, we used 7taps to create a job aid about how to set up a direct deposit and began sharing it with newcomers via a QR code during orientation sessions. It helps new team members each week.”
Julie Anderson McKee
Director, Learning and Development
Inova Health System
Transforming content into microlearning requires a thoughtful approach. Start by assessing your existing materials. Identify key topics and break them down into smaller modules. The key to successful microlearning lies in creating content that addresses one topic per lesson or course. These courses can be anything from company values to effective communication.
By breaking down the onboarding curriculum into bite-sized, focused courses, organizations can effectively provide information while maintaining employee engagement and retention. Course delivery spaced out over time reinforces learning and aids in preventing the forgetting curve.
💡Learn how to transform existing content into micro lessons.
You might encounter some resistance from traditionalists when taking the binders apart. However, the success of microlearning is evident through its engagement and effectiveness. By focusing on clarity, staying visually appealing, and providing user-friendly content, many organizations find that the benefits of microlearning far outweigh any initial resistance. By incorporating a feedback loop within the microlearning process organizations can adapt and evolve their microlearning content based on new hire input and emerging trends in onboarding strategies.
Learn how Greene Tweed managed resistance when implementing a microlearning program.
Timing is key in microlearning. If you throw hundreds of microlearning resources at a new hire, it won’t help the cause. Instead, deliver micro-content at intervals using spaced learning to reduce cognitive load and improve long-term retention.
By structuring microlearning content into a logical flow, you can create personalized learning journeys for employees. Drip-feeding content lets new hires learn at their own pace, ensuring they get the right information when needed.
Everyone has a preferred communication channel that they instantly check. Find out what it is for your employees, and connect with them where they are. SMS, Email, Slack or Microsoft Teams can help you deliver microlearning materials in no time.
💡Ask new hires about their preferred communication channel before assigning onboarding materials. They'll appreciate the personal touch.
7taps microlearning platform can help you schedule the delivery of your content and automate a great part of the onboarding process. In times of rapid company growth and resource constraints, it allows for training multiple individuals simultaneously, each with tailored materials. Automate onboarding via 7taps Learning Paths delivering content via SMS, email, MS Teams or Slack.
Learn how Pliancy adopted microlearning to transform and automate the onboarding process.
7taps is a microlearning platform that aligns with the science of learning and helps you create, deliver, and track learning experiences. Besides onboarding process automation via Learning Paths, it helps you to:
Traditional onboarding overwhelms employees with information. 7taps uses a unique framework that helps you create bite-sized learning content in no time, keeping it short and sweet.
A user-friendly, social media-style interface creates a welcoming environment for new hires. The content builder allows you to add personalized videos, voice notes, graphics, and more. This approach alleviates the stress often associated with starting a job and forms a positive association with the onboarding experience.
7taps mini-courses can be effortlessly shared on Slack or MS Teams, integrating training materials into the daily workflow. These integrations promote learning without feeling like traditional training.
From interactive quizzes to video tutorials, 7taps helps you build diverse assets. Leverage the tool and its prompting capabilities to create visually appealing content that effectively guides and supports your employees.
💡Don’t forget to gather feedback from new hires. Ensure their onboarding experience is effective and identify areas for improvement. 7taps allows for gathering such data in an informal, friendly way.
Once you defined your learning objectives, identified your key topics, and mapped out the onboarding journey, it’s time to create your microlearning content.
We created an onboarding course example for you to better understand the concept.
That’s it! You’re now ready to create your first onboarding course.
Integrating microlearning into your onboarding process with tools like 7taps provides a streamlined and effective approach, ensuring a successful start for new hires. By leveraging microlearning, you guarantee that your onboarding process lays the foundation for success. Get started with a free trial of the 7taps Enterprise Plan.
💡 Discover more microlearning ideas