“Onboarding is a magic moment when new employees decide to stay engaged or become disengaged.”—Amy Hirsh Robinson, The Interchange Group in Los Angeles (quoted in SHRM article).
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Employee engagement is the most important component to every company’s success. You can have a killer business plan, but if you don’t have innovators who are willing to get the work done, your business is going to fail. How do you counteract this? The answer is by having Human Resources (HR) develop a rock-solid employee onboarding process that will engage employees, starting with the interview process.
1. Engage Employees
Why do you want to engage your employees? Among other reasons, employee engagement leads to increased productivity. Engaged employees are employees who problem solve on their own, ask insightful questions, bring ideas to your brainstorming meetings, and fulfill their quotas.
How do you engage employees in this manner? One way is by providing them with top-of-the-line training during onboarding. You want to make sure you have an onboarding strategy so you can allow your new hire to adjust to the social and performance aspects of his or her job. An onboarding guide is an excellent resource for developing your own onboarding process for increased employee retention. However, in 2019, there is one surefire way to make your onboarding process memorable: virtual reality.
It’s the Digital Age. As such, many companies are using virtual reality training systems, which are proven to increase employees’ training retention. Virtual reality training programs allow employees to walk through simulations of tasks while receiving instant feedback. For example, an employee in customer service may have the opportunity to interact with a variety of customer types and troubleshoot his or her approaches to improve success rates. Or, virtual reality could be used with a machinery operator to simulate emergency situations and ensure that the employee gains experience in reacting correctly in a safe environment. This is been proven to reduce workplace-related injuries.
By providing your employees with an excellent form of training, you demonstrate the importance of your employees’ involvement in the company.
2. Understand Your Employees
Engaging your employees through the onboarding process can also help you understand who they are as people. A common method during onboarding involves a personality test, which can even be done right at the interview.
By having an applicant complete a small personality test, which can even be in the form of a game, employers have the opportunity to learn how and why prospective employees respond the way they do. This allows them to get to know their candidates’ personality right off the bat so they can determine whether the candidates will be valuable members of the team.
Interview questions and scenarios for training can be tailored toward the personality types’ strengths and weaknesses. By understanding the fundamentals of who a potential employee is, HR representatives can gauge if this person will be a productive addition to the team.
3. Create a Team Environment
By getting to know employees through personality tests and engaging them early on through virtual reality training, HR is able to create a team environment. Hiring diverse personalities and backgrounds allows HR leaders to understand their company culture and bring a variety of opinions and ideas to the table. There needs to be a balance between complementing personalities and differentiating experiences to ensure there’s a well-rounded communal perspective. This will allow for a maximum amount of creativity in brainstorming meetings, as well as day-to-day collaboration.
4. Corner the Market in Technology
By integrating virtual reality into the training process, a company brands itself as a leader in market trends. By staying ahead of the technological curve, companies show not only other industries that they are at the top of the heap but also their potential employees. This gives them a wide pool of candidates to choose from and allows them to pick the cream of the crop.
Conclusion
Overall, there are several reasons why HR leaders are choosing to invest their time in the onboarding process. Succinctly put, a solid onboarding process brings in strong employees who are looking to improve the company as a whole.
Craig Middleton graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and has worked in healthcare and HR businesses for most of his professional career as an HR specialist. In his free time, he likes to write about topics that interest him, watch baseball, and try new restaurants. You can connect with Middleton on LinkedIn.