Why is employee onboarding important?
Did you know that 90% of newly hired employees determine within the first six months if they will stay with an organization or not? According to the Abeerdeen Group Study, when new hires experience a positive and engaging onboarding process, they are 69% more likely to stay with an organization for at least three years. 54% of new hires also claim high productivity with companies with structured onboarding processes.
Employee onboarding in the first 90 days to 6 months thus has a huge impact on how knowledgeable, happier, and engaged your new employees are. Organized virtual and well-implemented onboarding programs are your key to retaining top talent. Further efficient onboarding programs lead to better productivity and employee retention with lower turnover rates.
What are the challenges with conventional employee onboarding programs?
Even though employee onboarding programs can have a positive impact on your company, there are many issues with their implementation. Have a look at the main challenges faced by companies with conventional employee onboarding programs below:
- Inadequate and outdated employee training
- Overly formal and boring onboarding programs
- Less time for full orientation and assimilation of new hires
- Lack of clarity of job responsibility and expectation in new hires
- Low employee engagement and productivity
- Recurrent high cost of employee turnover
- High cost in hire replacement and lost production
- A repetitive cycle of generic onboarding programs
- Low onboarding involvement of busy hiring managers
What is gamified onboarding?
Gamified onboarding is the application of game mechanics and elements such as points, levels, badges, rewards, leaderboards, etc to onboarding training content used for new hires. Gamified onboarding is a super effective way to boost your employee performance, employee motivation to complete tasks, and encourage engagement with your company and other employees. Gamification helps to make your training more interactive and hands-on. This leads to an increase in the rate at which newly hired employees retain information that they can apply to their new job.
What are the benefits of gamified onboarding?
According to the Abeerdeen Group Study, the use of gamification in training increases employee engagement by 48% and reduces turnover rates by one-third. Have a look at the benefits of gamified onboarding programs below:
- More fun and enjoyable onboarding experience
- Better employee participation and information retention
- Makes onboarding less stressful and overwhelming
- Improves employee retention and productivity
- Lowers employee turnover rates
- Sets achievable and challenging goals that keep new hires motivated
- Removes tons of paperwork and reduces the cost of printing documents
- Automates processes which frees up more time for hiring managers
- Provides consistent feedback to new hires for self-improvement
- Encourages employee engagement and attention to detail
- Creates positive company perceptions
How can you gamify your current onboarding program with Infonative Solutions?
Now you can gamify the onboarding experience of your new hires with Infonative Solutions to increase their participation, engagement, and competition levels. In the steps below, learn how you can effectively design and execute gamified training courses which make your onboarding training a fun and enjoyable experience:
- Set up goal-based points, and badges for completing assessments and other tasks as points will provide intrinsic rewards and badges will let employees show their progress to other employees and management
- Create goals and milestones by setting up a levels based system where new responsibilities and privileges are unlocked after a goal or milestone is attained as this will help to track employee progress and induce a sense of accomplishment early on
- Award badges when new hires make connections such as when they add friends or message other employees on Zoom or the company social network
- Build reward programs using interactive videos with xAPI that track employee results and behavior as this will motivate employees and lead to improved productivity
- Give non-monetary rewards such as free lunch coupons or a mention on the company leaderboard as they will drive employee engagement by increasing motivation and feelings of recognition
- Gamify activities like pre-boarding (what to expect during your first day on the job), the first weeks of orientation (introduction to the company, the company products, and services, job challenges, new tasks to do, etc)
- Work closely with instructional designers to add games/animations/live videos to the onboarding lessons to make them memorable and enjoyable
- Include things like knowledge checks, employee feedback surveys, training materials, stored templates and handbooks, and a directory of support staff and managers
- Integrate video game techniques into the onboarding training to break the overwhelming tasks into manageable bits that new hires can get done easily
- Leverage leaderboards to list out the top-performing players to keep employees motivated and promote friendly competition as this will encourage employees to improve their learning efficiency to rank high on the leaderboard leading to better performance
- Engage employees with quizzes and give rewards on completion of small bites of training tasks as these types of habit-forming quick wins will motivate employees to complete many more tasks and drive employee engagement and satisfaction
- Encourage teamwork by building team-based competitions around learning the training content and completing tasks as when new hires share the onboarding experience, it will lead to improved training material completion rates
- Integrate training with the new hire's workday and break up onboarding for each customer service channel using training as a qualification, solving a team content, or a challenge
- Conduct virtual scavenger hunts where newly hired employees have to visit particular web pages or sections in your company intranet to earn prizes like gift cards, and more
- Create task lists for on-the-job training guidance where new hires have to upload evidence to document real-world learning and experience when they complete onboarding activities and then each completed task will unlock new challenges as they become more proficient
- Make onboarding training fun and interactive by including a mix of real-life demos, hands-on tasks, interactive videos, team-oriented games, and continuous feedback
Are you ready to turn your onboarding training program into a fun-filled adventure with gamified onboarding?
Feel free to reach out to us at yg@infonative.net
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