The Untold Pain of New Hire Onboarding: Marlow Podcast Wrap-Up
Nobody likes to broach awkward topics, especially in the workplace. This goes for all areas, from dress to behavior — but a strategy that is not doing its job and is causing employees more harm than good might be the most uncomfortable topic of them all.
To break these barriers and tackle this topic head-on, customer engagement enthusiasts Brittany Rolfe Hillard of WalkMe, who has over 7 years experience in the customer engagement sector, and Kristian Fennessy, who specializes in solutions engineering, joined Mary Fox, CEO of Marlow, on the Marlow Podcast as part of their “New Hire Onboarding Series.”
They discussed the untold pain which companies experience from poor new hire onboarding strategies, which oftentimes leaves employees feeling frustrated, confused, and most importantly unproductive.
“Traditional strategies just aren’t working — 70% of what is learned is forgotten in one day.” -Brittany
New hires frequently wind up plunging into the “valley of death” during the onboarding process. Employees get overwhelmed when expected to learn how to use multiple platforms in a short amount of time — and with no external assistance. They hit a place where they have too much to learn and are attempting to do too much.
Implementing a digital adoption strategy for employee onboarding ensures that new hires experience an easy navigation and onboarding experience that will be felt company-wide.
“We want to empower the employee to get to a higher level of desired performance that is indicative of the role that we hired them into.” -Kristian
Brittany and Kristian have both observed companies go from enduring pain around a certain adoption process, such as HR or sales, to experiencing significant relief after implementing a digital adoption platform.
Below are some of our favorite points discussed during the podcast:
Top 3 podcast insights
1. The enterprise training contradiction
When starting a new job you’re expected to learn how to use twenty new applications flawlessly. In reality though, you will only end up using a few daily and the rest once or twice a month.
New employees often walk out of training sessions as clueless as when they walked in, showing that traditional strategies just aren’t working anymore.
Here we stumble upon our major contradiction, one that is plaguing many enterprise companies.
Digital transformation is one of the most popular trends today, but companies are still stuck using outdated training methods. In order to succeed companies must simplify the user onboarding experience and incorporate training strategies that actually work.
2. Ripping off the band-aid: Going from reactive to proactive
Digital adoption is the concept of getting users to understand what a softwaredoes and how to use it properly. The goal is for employees to achieve a high level of performance with an effective onboarding strategy.
Brittany cites the importance of taking a reactive method and converting it to aproactive method, which provides employees with a solution better than the traditional training methods. This also prepares them for the future and provides an onboarding and digital adoption strategy that can be developed and maintained over time.
Digital transformation is a relatively new concept, which means companies often don’t know what exactly they don’t know. Even after an organization feels it has implemented an efficient process there are always lingering pain points that aren’t addressed.
An increase in employee training pain is especially common as companies expand. A digital adoption strategy is put in place in order to address the pain in the beginning stages in order to alleviate any future pain.
3. Alleviate your digital adoption pain
Often clients will come to Brittany and her team feeling as though they are unable to broach the topic of implementing a digital adoption strategy with their VPs.
The reality is that upper management doesn’t always have an insider perspective of the onboarding pain that their employees are experiencing.
It’s important to make the struggles visible to executives so that they can implement the necessary solutions to improve the efficiency of their strategies. In the long run, making current resources more agile is preferred over investing in a whole set of new resources.
“It doesn’t have to be this rip and replace strategy. There are a lot of ways to incorporate different elements in learning design… You can maximize a digital adoption strategy to make sure your employees are having the best onboarding experience.” — Brittany
