Streamline New Employee Training with Onboarding Software
Hiring the skills that your organization needs is one thing, but you also need a great onboarding software to help your new team members contribute from their first day on the job. Naturally, this means that onboarding has to begin before your employee’s first day, which means that you’ll need a great onboarding platform to help them prepare. Echo360’s EchosystemTM, the world’s first Learning Transformation PlatformTM brings the industry’s most comprehensive SaaS-based content authoring, video learning, and engagement solutions together that allow instructors and learners to share in impactful learning experiences from anywhere. Our e³ philosophy played a big role in the development of the Echosystem and its animating element, EchoEngage–a learning engagement solution designed to streamline onboarding and bring new employee training to the next level!
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 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. 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 senior employees can answer any questions they have about your organization’s policies and culture. You can even provide fresh hires with important documentation like employee handbooks to review before coming to work.
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:
1. 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? The Echosystem 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. Either way, you can add a video by creating it in or importing it. The Echosystem’s Universal Capture functionality also makes it easy to record video for use in your courses, and closed captioning helps make your courses accessible to all.
2. 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 intervene. For example, instructors can look at detailed results by question in a sortable dashboard to help them determine if a learner wasn’t paying attention or the course failed to make a point understandable. EchoPoll provides data no one else can on student learning.
3. 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 the Echosystem needs to facilitate communication between fresh hires and tenured workers. The platform includes video capabilities to help learners get to know their colleagues before their first day, eliminating a lot 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.
4. Accessibility
All employees deserve access to the same onboarding experience. The Echosystem meets or exceeds 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, the Echosystem makes it easy to design fair assessments to give all learners equal opportunity to thrive in your organization.
5. 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, the Echosystem supports gamification, fostering friendly competition among employees through badges and points on a live leaderboard. Social and mobile-friendly content helps employees engage with onboarding materials on their terms. Our products deliver even more ways to make onboarding software interactive, such as in-the-minute polling that learners can participate in from anywhere, anytime, bringing your virtual and in-person audiences together.
Can an Onboarding Platform Be a Competitive Advantage?
Absolutely. Research conducted by the Brandon Hall Group reveals that effective onboarding can improve employee retention by up to 82%, sparing your organization the expenses of hiring new employees and lost productivity. The same study also concluded that employees are up to 70% more productive after a great onboarding experience, yet only 12% of workers believed they received a great onboarding experience according to a 2017 Gallup poll.
The Echosystem can bridge that gap and help your employees succeed from day one. Don’t take our word for it, book a demo today and see everything it can do for yourself.