FACT CHECKED
High employee turnover. Loss of company IP. Low engagement. Poor productivity.
These are some of the issues that keep HR professionals up at night.
They sound like long-term problems — the kind that come with a workforce that has been with the business a long time and is thinking of moving on.
But actually they’re also direct consequences of a weak onboarding process.
Job hopping is another HR nightmare. Research by Gallup suggests it’s likely to do with poor engagement levels — more than half of millennials are not engaged in their work.
How can we overcome these challenges and set new hires up for success? A user-focused onboarding process is central to upping engagement levels from day one.
This is why employee onboarding with DAP is high on the enterprise HR manager’s agenda in 2019.
3 recurring HR and training nightmares
1. The “forgetting curve”
19th century German researcher, Herman Ebbinghaus, coined the term “forgetting curve” during his research into the time it takes to lose information after being told it.
His work is still highly relevant today. The following sequence is indicative of the forgetting curve in action.
- Employees retain 100 % of the information in the first 20 minutes
- They forget 42% of the information after 20 minutes
- After one hour, they have forgotten 56%
- They retain only 33% by the start of the next workday
- After 6 days, this drops to only 25%
Two problems arise from the forgetting curve:
- Companies will always have to spend money on training and IT support
- New hires can’t become valuable, productive members of the team quickly
The latter is a serious issue impacting employee morale and could result in churn. When an enterprise spends thousands sourcing and hiring the right talent, it’s a catastrophic waste of money not to invest in their onboarding.
The loss of a new hire like this could be prevented through employee onboarding with DAP.
2. Training overload
New employees are bombarded with information within days of their hire. In today’s enterprises, data and systems are often complex, disjointed, and siloed, leaving employees feeling overwhelmed.
Research has found that more than 40% of employees “always or frequently” feel frustrated by disconnected technologies within today’s “virtualized” business landscape.
When technology becomes more harmful than helpful, employee onboarding with DAP is necessary.
The State of Workplace Productivity Report published by Cornerstone On Demand reports that, “50 percent of employees said they experience some type of work overload, with 34 percent claiming information overload and 25 percent technology overload.”
The wrong path to take is to force-feed a new hire with too much information. Instead of their productivity levels rising, they will plummet.
3. Declining employee engagement
With Gallup’s aforementioned engagement research in mind, let’s review some statistics regarding the onboarding process:
- New hires that are taken through a well-structured onboarding process are 69% more likely to stay with the company for 3 years.
- 25% of all companies admit they have no training program to help engage/onboard their employees. This leads to a 60% loss of employees from their total workforce within 4 years.
- Excellent onboarding programs that engage new hires successfully can increase an employee’s performance by 11%.
The importance of successfully engaging employees from day one cannot be overstated.
Mark Murphy writes in Forbes that, if you’re employees aren’t successfully learning, you’re not leading.
He recommends engaging employees in the training process with the following questions:
- What things would you like to get better at this next month?
- What things are you better at now than you were last month?
- Could you tell me about a time in the past month when you felt excited?
- Could you tell me about a time in the past month when you felt demotivated?
By asking these time-sensitive questions, you engage employees in their learning process.
Employee onboarding with DAP
Think of employee onboarding with DAP as technology’s answer to your prayers. The DAP removes common hurdles associated with onboarding and training, and leads to better engagement and employee retention rates.
The DAP accelerates time to competency for new hires on enterprise apps and digital systems. It provides personalized guidance and uses AI to predict user behavior in order to proactively keep employees engaged.
The DAP quickly closes the skills gap between the newly hired employee and the experienced employee, optimizing the entire workforce. Training expenditure is dramatically reduced aswell.
The DAP improves employee knowledge retention by training in real-time and fights the forgetting curve with on-demand-review. New hires have continual feedback and access to guidance, eliminating information overload and allowing them to learn at their own pace.
Employee onboarding with DAP is the solution to common enterprise HR and training woes. Poor engagement, high staff turnover, and massive training and support costs are all a thing of the past once the DAP is implemented.
