The quality of your onboarding training obviously impacts how your staff will perform day to day. It also influences their sentiment towards the business. Which is key in retaining your best employees in the long run.
The human brain is wired to make first impressions fast – whether that is of people, products, or your business. Once a first impression has been made, individuals will continue to reinforce their opinion over time. Seeing negatives where their first impression was bad and positives where the first impression was good.
With exactly the same experience, two people can have very different feelings towards a business. This reaction, that is hard-wired into all of us, can have a direct effect on how long employees choose to stay with your organisation.
When you create a new staff training programme, it’s important to think about how it will improve the skills of your new employees. But it might be more important to your bottom line to deliver training that encourages them to like you as a company.
Otherwise all you may achieve is to up-skill someone who will leave you. Then find a company they do like and use those skills for one of your competitors. In short, costing you time, effort and money.
Staff training experiences should be as well planned as customer experience, Aare your team given the right information and support to do a good job? Are all new employees given a consistent, quality training programme? Does your onboarding training make you look good to new hires? Or could you improve on the content and the delivery?
Experts in body language and communication tell us that, by nature, humans have a default setting. That default setting is to be indifferent towards each other upon a first encounter or an initial greeting.
Then a part of our brain called the “reptilian brain” (or “r complex”) kicks in and sends a signal for us to decide quickly whether the person we have met is:
This is the same when a new starter or job applicant meets a company for the first time. Not only will the first people they meet help them decide whether your company is a friend or enemy. The way you organise and deliver their onboarding training also sets their impression of what they are going to think of you going forward.
Once they have made a decision that you are a “friend” they will look for all the positives in everything they encounter whilst working with you. To justify their brain made the right initial choice. Interestingly, they will ignore many of the negative things (such as long or anti-social working hours) because their brain is not looking for negatives.
Of course it works in reverse too. If your new starter’s brain makes an initial decision that your company is an “enemy”. Then it ignores all the positive things you offer and focuses on the negatives. This helps them justify why they didn’t like you and soon enough, why they want to leave.
Learning & Development tools like eLearning pathways help nudge their brains towards “friend”, so they become positive employees who want to stay with your business.
Something as simple as well designed onboarding training can present your company in the best light, showing that you are professional, organised and considerate of your team.
The most obvious benefits of eLearning are reducing your staff training costs, while making it more consistent and easier to deliver. But the biggest difference to your profits will come from giving your employees a positive first impression of the company. They will be happier working for a business they like, deliver better service to customers and colleagues, and you will keep them for longer.
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It lets staff choose the learning styles they prefer (such as videos, text, quizzes and face to face training).
You can make it fun and rewarding, with league tables of performance by individual, groups and departments.
Employees can gain direct access to your experts, even if they don’t know who the experts are. (For example: after completing training on how to use a till system. They can message your experts with questions on anything they struggled with).
At eLamb, we organise all your online training in a learning management system (LMS). We set reminders to be sent for due dates or when appraisal forms need to be completed. You can use our LMS to assign courses to learners by job role, sites, or for scheduling face to face training. Your eLearning courses are always available to give you consistency of training. Even when line managers are busy or there is no line manager!
Give staff the best resources to do a good job with custom eLearning content, bespoke onboarding training and our Off The Shelf eLearning modules.
Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you deliver better onboarding training. Reduce staff turnover and improve customer service levels – which all adds up to a healthier bottom line for your business.
Call us on 01325 734 885 or email info@elamb.co.uk.
