When a company hires a new employee, the HR team spends considerable time helping them learn the ropes of their new workplace. This includes not only essential elements like the company's background, vision, and values but also day-to-day operations and even the best local lunch spots.
While onboarding is a key responsibility for HR teams in established companies, startups and small businesses often face challenges without dedicated HR teams. They usually adopt one of two approaches:
Thanks to advancements in online onboarding, creating scalable, sustainable onboarding courses is now easier and more effective.
In this blog post, we’ll share our best practices (and a handy worksheet with a template!) for building an online onboarding course that your new hires—and your team—will love.
Onboarding is the process of integrating a new employee into an organisation, equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and behaviours needed to be productive. Online onboarding uses digital platforms like email, social media, or courseware to facilitate this process.
Share the onboarding responsibility across your team. Online onboarding makes it easier for everyone to play a facilitating role, rather than relying on one person. This approach allows new hires to learn from various team members and fosters team rapport.
For example, at OpenLearning, we have a range of short internal courses on our platform designed to onboard new team members.
👉 Explore courses: Find your next online course on our platform.
These courses aren't just for new hires—our entire global team participates, either having taken them already or being ready to jump in and interact at any time. Everyone’s activity posts are visible in the course galleries, so new hires learn not only from the content we’ve created but also from the experiences shared by their new colleagues.
This approach helps new team members quickly feel like they’re part of the OpenLearning community. They get to know our culture firsthand and are excited to join our global team.
Further courses are delivered in the same interactive way. For instance, we have specialised courses for specific teams, such as Customer Success, and another course designed for everyone to learn about our online learning platform and philosophy. This consistent approach to employee training and development ensures that all team members stay connected and aligned with our company’s goals and values.
Knowing where you want to go makes it easier to plan how to get there. Every online course that we build begins its life as a set of learning outcomes (LOs). You can read more about how we create specific, measurable LOs here.
Then, we create a course plan that aligns with the intended learning outcomes. Here's what it looks like:
Below are 10 essential elements for an online onboarding course that gets new hires to be engaged, collaborating and excited to come to work every day. Download our onboarding course planning template to help you get started.
Remember your first day at a new job? The beginning of your course is similar because it will leave a lasting impression on your new hire—so, make sure it's a good one! It's a great opportunity for you to set the tone, make team members feel welcome and familiarise them with the onboarding course process.
This may be their first time on the platform, so show them exactly how to navigate through it with information on:
Give new hires an idea of what will happen during the onboarding process. This may include a checklist of the most important steps and suggested meet-and-greet sessions. Making these available gives new hires a sense of agency in their own onboarding.
Design your onboarding course in a way that not only embodies your company’s culture and values, but enables your existing team members to interact and learn with new employees. This creates a rich, social learning space for your entire team to discuss and learn about your company’s key pillars.
Your new hire may have a general idea about your organisation, but now’s your chance to own and shape your company’s ‘origin story’ for them. Telling the story of how your company began helps them to put your vision and values into perspective.
Provide general policies that all new hires need to know (such as the employee code of conduct, benefits, claims, leave application, insurance, IT) and who to reach out to for help.
List the software and other required tools, along with guidance on how to install them or log in. You could even include a quick activity to find out if anyone on your team is highly skilled or familiar with other tools.
Let the employee zero in on their own role in the team. Expectations, guidelines (such as branding), and established team processes should be clearly communicated to avoid misunderstandings.
Give your new employees a boost by providing examples of common problems and how to solve them. Sometimes the answer to a problem won’t be clear right away, so it’s helpful to model the thought process for solving them.
Tracking your employees’ reactions to your course will provide you with useful data for future courses. Get feedback and encourage new hires to reflect on their experience. Surveys are useful, but the results are rarely visible to the rest of the team. Make your team’s feedback work for you—ask them to publish a reflection.
Determine the desired results for your online onboarding course and plan backwards.
For example, let's explore the results of the OpenLearning team's own online onboarding courses. Along with learning about how to work with us, these courses also give new team members:
And as a result, they become champions of our team culture, and they’re excited to be part of our global team.
Return-on-investment (ROI) such as the examples above also includes:
👉 Read: 5 Considerations for Measuring Online Learning Effectiveness
You can achieve the same outcomes for your team, too. Use our 10 Essential Elements for Onboarding New Employees worksheet as a framework for creating a social online course that hits the onboarding goals that are important to you.
The world of work is changing. Get a head start with OpenLearning for Enterprise to deliver innovative, cost-effective corporate learning at scale. Featured image by Jopwell from Pexels.
