Employment growth looks optimistic as the world becomes more vaccinated and recovers from the economic impact of the last year. In the U.S. specifically, first-quarter jobs reports have indicated payroll numbers rising above previous expectations — projecting serious momentum for hiring in the coming months. Although many industries are still well below pre-pandemic jobs numbers, it’s evident that companies are gearing up to bring people back to work with velocity. In fact, many corporations are even propping up nationwide hiring events to meet current and future needs for more workers.
While getting staffed up fast is certainly a feat in itself, it comes with the challenge of onboarding hundreds — or even thousands — of new workers as quickly and effectively as possible. With the increase in hiring scale and speed, business leaders can expect increased complexities in getting new teams initiated, connected to company culture, and trained to provide value.
In other words, the global economic recoil, combined with the more flexible nature of post-COVID-19 working environments, has created an urgent need for innovation in how companies develop their people from day one. The problem is, many organizations have had trouble optimizing one element that permeates all aspects of employee enablement: content.
Fixing the Experience
If we’re being honest, current conditions have only exacerbated how ineffective typical onboarding programs tend to be. According to Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of bringing on new hires. Ineffective onboarding increases employee turnover within the first year of employment and decreases engagement for employees who don’t leave as soon. Even worse, disengaged employees who do stay risk spreading unhappiness to others.
As the Association for Talent Development points out, addressing low employee engagement has additional challenges when people are working remotely. A lack of in-person contact provides employers less opportunity to notice warning signs of disengagement, and less able to make corrections — resulting in a number of consequences, including:
- Lowered performance
- Opposition to change
- Bare-minimum contributions
- Lack of problem-solving
Considering the costs of turnover and an underperforming workforce, it’s safe to say that companies interested in growing can’t afford a bad onboarding experience. After all, it’s where the employee journey begins.
So, what can companies do?
That same Gallup article challenges HR leaders to fix a “broken” onboarding experience by designing a consistent, creative and deeply engaging experience that wows new employees.
Fortunately, interactive content platforms have evolved to help leaders do just that. Here’s how:
Consistency
The average employee receives company resources in numerous formats. Keeping up with and organizing a collection of reference materials to get up to speed creates a chaotic environment for new hires as they drink from a firehose of one-pagers, websites, emails, slide decks, Word docs, e-books, etc. Modern content tools can create consistency for users by trimming down various content formats to a single multimedia experience. A microapp, accessible via a unique URL, can house an entire onboarding program’s worth of information and resources in one place.
Creativity
Creating rich content is a matter of reducing limitations. With interactive content technology, individual creators can access built-in design tools that make it easy to combine assets from multiple sources. Traditionally, creating educational content required entire instructional design teams contributing copy, design, and programming skills just to create a single document. No-code builders now enable individuals without mastery in multiple skill sets to deliver onboarding experiences solo — dramatically speeding up the process.
Engagement
The key to engaging content is interactivity. Onboarding and training materials should invite employees to engage with them the same way they interact with other digital content. The ability to easily embed assessments, quizzes and access to related resources gives employees a better opportunity to digest and apply new information to the job in a format they are comfortable with. In addition, company resources should inspire dispersed teams to collaborate by making content easily editable and shareable in a virtual environment.
Reject the Status Quo
Millennials now make up the majority of the global workforce. The content they consume the most comes from digital platforms optimized to be interactive, shareable, and experiential. It only makes sense that playbooks, training materials, and all other documents created for employees align with those expectations.
Onboarding successfully for the future comes down to embracing technology to improve employee communications and enablement. When it comes to creating an engaging and effective new-hire experience — with speed — innovating the way content is created and delivered is key.
