7 Ways to Improve Employee On-Boarding

And, 6 Principles of Mentorship from Muhammad Ali

Most employee on-boarding is pretty terrible. Few companies do it well and most leave employees with a never ending stream of questions — some that never get answered. Most companies view on-boarding as a finite period of time. When in reality, learning about your company, market, ways of doing things, etc. is a continuous endeavor. New employees need a guidance system — a structured way of consuming information from the countless places you store information, resources, or tools in your organization. No one looks forward to going through video on-boarding, receiving a list of links or logins with no contextual background, or having to hound people down for the latest proposal, way to deploy code, or information that is hidden in knowledge silos.

We can do better. Companies need to think of employees as apps that perpetually need upgrading to stay relevant. Below are 7 ways you can improve employee on-boarding.

1. Scale Tribal Expertise

Your best sales rep, engineer, or marketer are the ones that have the best tribal knowledge of how to be effective & crush it at your company. These are the people that everyone goes to for advice, tips, guidance, or to act as a resource. They know where the best resources are, have access to the best content, and typically end up pointing people in different directions.

Empower these people to structure and share their expertise. New employees want to follow your best employees. And, your best employees are likely the ones who want to help the most.

Scaling tribal expertise is about democratizing the process of capturing & sharing knowledge with your team.

2. Foster Continuous Learning

Learning shouldn’t be restrained to the first several weeks or months of on-the-job training. Self paced, modular learning, enables people to refer back to modules or topics when they need them — everything doesn’t need to be learned in the first several weeks.

Abhijit Bhaduri, the Chief Learning Officer of Wipro, believes one of the best ways to facilitate continuous learning is to instill a culture of curiosity. 80% of learning occurs informally at work through internal & external resources. That means valuable resources are found all the time, but rarely shared broadly. Building a framework that helps people structure their findings makes it easy for others to continuously learn from one another. We learn the most when we converse, engage, discuss, and share knowledge with our peers. That’s why peer to peer learning is so important for maintaining a culture that continually learns.

Drive continuous learning with a culture that fosters curiosity & a curation platform that provides the best content that already exists, everywhere.

3. Just-in-Time Learning

Employees don’t need to learn everything upfront — yes, they need a solid foundation, but in most cases they’re learning things that aren’t readily applicable. What’s better is providing resources for just-in-time learning. Kurt Varner wrote an excellent piece applying the Japanese “just-in-time” operational efficiency in factors by timing production of parts so they’re delivered at the moment they’re needed — thus significantly reducing inventory costs. Kurt applies this to learning and you can see how it applies nicely to on-boarding:

This same methodology is directly applicable to learning. In this case, the inventory is the content you’ve learned. There’s a mental cost of having to remember this content before using it. And what’s worse, this particular kind of inventory is perishable. The content you’ve learned is like a banana — it’s great if you eat it when it’s ripe, but wait a few weeks and you’ll be looking at a soggy mess of something that’s hard to imagine was once edible.

At Outlearn, we think of just-in-time learning as having a repository of learning modules that can be combined into learning paths for specific situations. When those situations arise, you can provide a guide with tasks & interactive learning elements that walk an employee through the necessary steps.

4. Align Mentors

Mentoring can have a tremendous impact on talent development, engagement, and ramp time. Think of a mentor that you’ve had and you can probably recall that person helping you take a few leaps on the learning curve by being able to draw on their experience. Ultimately, mentorship helps bridge the gap between experiences and learning. Aligning mentors to new employees helps reduce ramp time while providing employees an opportunity to develop their leadership skills.

Why does mentorship work? Muhammad Ali has 6 core principles that relate to mentoring and it’s importance. Mentors help us to…

Develop confidence:

Belief in oneself, one’s abilities, and one’s future.

Define our conviction:

A firm belief that gives one the courage to stand behind that belief, despite pressure to do otherwise.

Teach dedication:

The act of devoting all of one’s energy, effort, and abilities to a certain task.

Understand the importance of giving:

To present voluntarily without expecting something in return.

Teach us respect:

Esteem for, or a sense of the worth or excellence of, oneself and others.

And, a sense of spirituality or belief to keep going:

A sense of awe, reverence, and inner peace inspired by a connection to all of creation and/or that which is greater than oneself.

Aligning new employees with a mentor will not only help facilitate learning and expertise, but also set the groundwork for engagement & a much better employee experience. They can help us identify areas for improvement and recommend remedies to fill gaps.

“Mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults that we would like. It’s the only way we grow.” — George Lucas

5. Content Curation

You don’t necessarily need to develop all of your own content. There’s plenty of sources already online for nearly everything. You can save time this way, but also leverage the best content out there. Many companies attempt to do this, but end up just providing lists of lists, wikis, technical guides with no context of how its done at their company, or the nuances of their tech stack etc. We’ve built a really easy publishing system at Outlearn that makes it easy to rapidly build learning paths by ingesting material from internal or external sources, wrapping learning elements for engagement, and then contextualizing the information for your company.

6. Personalize Learning

Personalization is one of the biggest buzzwords in digital marketing & sales today. The same should be applied for on-boarding and employee learning. You can’t have a one-size fits all mentality — even when it comes to departmental training. Training becomes very adversarial when you force everyone to go through the same tracks — its the worst feeling when you’re forced to go through every section before being able to move on to the next one.

The following are some ways you can personalize learning to improve the on-boarding experience:

• Build assessments that identify knowledge gaps so you can tailor prescriptive learning paths for each employee.
• Engage mentors in the process so employees can receive feedback in real time based on what they’re struggling with.
• Build a modular learning system so you can mix & match content for each person.
• Leverage a platform that will enable you to rapidly building learning paths on the fly.
• Create narratives that relate content to common situations that an employee will come across.

7. Cut Learning Time in Half

A new study by Johns Hopkins University suggests that people can learn twice as fast by practice through varied tasks (and information) instead of relying purely repetition:

Learning a new skill doesn’t depend so much on how much practice you do, but how you practice. The key is to subtly vary your training with changes that keep your brain learning.

Most on-boarding today requires people to read articles or wikis and then answer multiple choice questions to test that knowledge. Companies are missing a big opportunity here. Not only will varied tasks help employees learn faster, they’re also a way to engage in projects. For technical audiences, you can have projects for deploying code or uploading work to Github. For sales reps, you can have them apply their newly learned knowledge to writing a blog post and contributing to your content marketing strategy.