Streamline New Employee Training

Hiring people with the skills that your organization needs is one thing, but you also need a great onboarding program to help your new team members contribute from their first day on the job. In fact, 93% of employers believe that a good onboarding experience is critical in influencing a new employee’s decision whether to stay with the company, but just 12% of employees agree that their organization does onboarding well.

Naturally, onboarding has to begin before your employee’s first day, which means that you’ll need a great onboarding platform to help them prepare. As an employer, what are the most essential elements you should be looking for? What software suite will provide you with the tools your new hires need to align themselves with the company? Echo360 offers the industry’s most comprehensive SaaS-based video learning and engagement platform that allows instructors and learners to share impactful learning experiences from anywhere. Online onboarding is the most convenient way for employers to get their employees started — even before their first day in the office.

At Echo360, our e³ philosophy plays a big role in the development and ongoing evolution of Echo360’s Echosystem: a learning engagement platform designed to streamline onboarding and bring new employee training to the next level. Continue reading for all of the details on how Echo360’s tools facilitate engaged learning — made easy.

What advantages can onboarding software provide?

If you wait until your fresh hire’s first day to start training them, it’ll probably take them a couple of months to get them up to speed. Your employee may also feel uncomfortable with their new role, potentially encouraging them to send out resumes in search of a better fit. In fact, a negative onboarding experience can make new hires twice as likely to look out for other jobs.

An online onboarding platform can help you ease new employees into their roles before their official start date, ensuring that they feel prepared for that first day. New team members can introduce themselves to their colleagues, and any questions they have about your organization’s policies and culture can be answered by senior employees or HR.

You can even provide fresh hires with important documentation like employee handbooks to review before coming to work. Receiving this information ahead of time saves time during the overall onboarding process and helps them enter the training process armed with the basics.

What Features Should I Look for in an Onboarding Platform?

A bad onboarding experience can permanently sour an employee’s relationship with their employer, so it’s important to choose onboarding software that delivers results. Here are five things you should be looking for:
Course Authoring Tools
Your organization is a unique entity with policies and procedures that nobody else uses, so why would you want your onboarding materials to be generic? EchoPoll makes it easy for instructors to create courses tailored to your organization, whether that means importing existing Microsoft PowerPoint presentations or creating brand new courses from scratch. The Echosystem’s EchoVideo tool can help you create outstanding videos that you can embed into any course, or you can add a video by embedding a YouTube clip or importing it into EchoPoll.
Personalized Learning Paths
No two new hires are exactly alike, so why should their training be? EchoPoll allows for blended, personalized learning paths. For example, let’s look at two new hires: Hire 1 is an entry-level administrative assistant. Hire 2 is a senior-level officer. Both Hire 1 and Hire 2 will need to know the company’s policies on things like holidays, benefits, and so on. However, their paths may diverge at this point: Hire 1 wouldn’t necessarily need to know certain procedures that Hire 2 might — and vice versa.

Powerful Reporting Tools
The best onboarding platform in the world won’t make a difference if learners aren’t using it, so EchoPoll automatically tracks attendance, course completion rates, and assessment scores to give you the evidence you need to personalize an employee’s learning path. As mentioned above, instructors can look at detailed results of each question on the administrator dashboard. This helps them determine if a learner had difficulty understanding the concept because the course failed to make a point clear. EchoPoll provides data no one else can on student learning.

Communication Tools
It’s easy for employers to think of onboarding as asking new employees to memorize company guidelines and how to use their systems, but employees also want to be integrated into your organization’s broader culture. To that end, a great onboarding platform such as EchoPoll needs to facilitate easy communication between fresh hires and knowledgeable veterans.

Our platform seamlessly blends with any LMS (or our Echosystem), so your new hires can access video chat capabilities. This can facilitate a connection between the new hire and their colleagues before their first day, eliminating some of the new job jitters. You can also establish a mentorship program so that new team members have a trustworthy source of information to direct any questions toward.

Accessibility
All employees deserve access to the same onboarding experience. EchoPoll meets or exceeds all WCAG 2.0 guidelines, ensuring that all learners enjoy equity in access to training materials regardless of any sensory impairments or technological limitations. Our platform records any live classes you’re using as well, allowing asynchronous learners to go back and review that information on their own time. Most importantly, EchoExam makes it easy to design fair assessments to give all learners equal opportunity to thrive in your organization.

Fun Factor
Nobody wants to sit through boring lectures on compliance or dry videos on discrimination, so you need software that can liven things up a bit. For instance, EchoEngage and EchoPoll’s features foster friendly competition among employees, such as gaining badges and points on a live leaderboard.Social learning opportunities give team members a good reason to check in with their onboarding progress, and mobile-friendly content helps employees engage with onboarding materials whenever and wherever is most convenient for them.
Employee Engagement
EchoEngage and EchoPoll also offer effective tools that can help you make sure that your audience is staying engaged. In addition to polling and roll call, you can also enforce the locations where an attendee is allowed to sign in.

And if these features aren’t enough on their own, EchoEngage offers tools that provide even more ways to make onboarding interactive during live classes, such as in-the-minute polling that learners can participate in from anywhere, anytime, bringing your virtual and in-person audiences together.

Can a great onboarding platform be a financial advantage?

Absolutely. An efficient, effective onboarding process can spare your organization the expenses of hiring new employees and lost productivity. One study reports that employees are up to 70% more productive after a great onboarding experience. The problem is that just 12% of workers believed they received a great onboarding experience, according to a 2017 Gallup poll.

Research conducted by the Brandon Hall Group reveals that effective onboarding can improve employee retention by up to 82%. As you know, losing a new employee isn’t just a matter of finding another qualified individual. There are significant costs associated with finding a new employee: The Society for Human Resource Management reports that filling an open position costs employers an average of $4,129 and takes, on average, 42 days. Onboarding and training costs, on average, are $1,000 for each employee.

EchoPoll, EchoEngage, and the Echosystem: Online onboarding that works

EchoPoll allows you to build an engaging onboarding experience that uses a variety of elements, from video to embedded polls. These and other interactive elements live in your library, and with drag-and-drop capabilities, it’s easy for anyone to create content that can make an often-dull learning experience more enjoyable for everyone.

EchoPoll’s online onboarding software can help your company bridge the gap between online onboarding that’s so-so to onboarding that’s engaging, exciting, and engineered to help your employees succeed from day one. Book a demo today and experience everything the Echosystem can do for your new employees.

| Case Study

Keeping Knowledge Current:

How HealthMarkets Onboards Insurance Changes Efficiently

HealthMarkets leverages EchoPoll’s powerful authoring tools to create effective, engaging material that helps to onboard and train their new and existing insurance sales reps. With EchoPoll, HealthMarkets can quickly and efficiently create and update learning materials. The insurance industry is ever-evolving, so the ability to add or update information on insurance products in the marketplace is vital. EchoPoll supports this goal with features one of the easiest user interfaces, making building, presenting, and testing. EchoPoll’s drag-and-drop content library is just one example of the way EchoPoll helps HealthMarkets saves time. This ability to quickly update and build onboarding and training modules is a critical element, helping to ensure that employees always have the best information at hand. HealthMarkets is part of just one of the many industries with a need for outstanding training and onboarding. Clients in retail, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, and more have used EchoPoll to save time while creating engaging onboarding, training, and certification modules. Along with the rest of the Echosystem, EchoEngage’s EchoPoll is engineered to help companies provide their employees with high-quality information in engaging ways from day one.

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