From Paper To Platform: Transforming Employee Onboarding With An LMS

Streamlining Employee Onboarding With An LMS

When you hire someone, this person should become fully aware of everything that’s going on in your workplace. It means that specific activities are necessary to show a new employee all their responsibilities and how they are connected with others. It also includes making them familiar with their team members and the company’s corporate culture practices.

Here, we’re going to talk about how a cost-effective onboarding platform can help with onboarding, focusing on Learning Management Systems (LMSs). These platforms are designed to ensure efficient corporate education, so their features are sharpened for distributing learning materials and motivating users to watch them and complete assigned tasks. Let’s look at how digital onboarding solves problems more efficiently compared to traditional paper-based approaches, and how to use LMSs for that.

The Rise Of Digital Onboarding Solutions

Not so long ago, onboarding was connected with a large amount of paperwork, such as fixing all employee information, including their names, contacts, and work responsibilities. Managers needed to guide them on their first workdays, showing them everything they needed to do and connecting them with colleagues.

Now, the use of digital apps is widespread in all industries. Learning Management Systems are mostly used for corporate education, but they fit very well for organizing onboarding sessions. Essentially, onboarding is a learning activity: newcomers learn what they should do at work and practice it. Therefore, learning videos and gamification are valuable in employee onboarding.

While other tools, such as project management apps and HR suits can be used for onboarding, too, they mostly lack the specific functionalities described above. Therefore, they cannot handle onboarding needs such as delivering the content about the company’s activities, or creating learning tasks like surveys and motivating newcomers to solve them. While each company may need a different type of onboarding application, here we’ll focus on LMSs. Let’s look closer.

How To Use An LMS For Employee Onboarding

Learning Management Systems focus on corporate education. Unlike project management tools, they have many more functionalities for social interactions and motivation. They also can deliver content, such as videos and long reads, much more efficiently, while their task management features are focused on checking and reinforcing knowledge. Let’s look at five specific ways in which Learning Management Systems transform education

1. Deploying A Human-Centered Onboarding LMS

While many are afraid that tech will replace humans and make our interactions primitive, actually the opposite is true. When you use digital tools to speed up your work, you have much more time left for more sincere and meaningful communication. Before, we spent a lot of time on paperwork, but now LMS tools can organize all learning and employee data much quicker.

Virtual onboarding benefits include the fact that all relevant employee information, such as their names, contacts, and occupations, can be seen on their profiles. Moreover, you can see their progress in learning modules and contact them at any moment when necessary.

2. Creating Personalized Onboarding Videos

Continuing the conversation about human-centered onboarding, each corporate role requires its own set of instructions. With a Learning Management System, it’s easy to create a set of videos for each role and deploy them as a learning path. It saves a lot of time, and each newcomer will obtain the material they need.

Moreover, many LMSs enable managers to further customize the learning journeys for each user, considering their psychological peculiarities. While the videos may remain the same, managers can create specific tasks for the new employees to complete and communicate with them using the LMS functionalities during their onboarding.

3. Making The Onboarding Remote With An LMS

With the rise of remote education and work, managing these processes becomes more and more important. If at least a part of your team can work remotely, they can work from different places while still remaining connected. Many roles can be safely done online, including programming, writing, and project management. Therefore, using a digital tool that helps with remote work organization makes the company more sustainable and resilient, ensuring that all tasks will be done no matter where the employees are located.

4. Providing A Gamified Onboarding Experience

When people do something they want to do, they always do it much better. Our brains are designed to compete and achieve something for a reward, even if this reward is virtual. That’s why we all play games, be it on a computer, socially, or in any other format. That’s why corporate education specialists pay a lot of attention to gamification. It includes granting badges for completing the tasks, creating user leaderboards, and making the learning process interactive, so learners can choose how to respond.

5. Automating All Processes

Last but not least, the usage of an LMS, as well as any other digital technology, means that many of the onboarding processes will be automated. This means reducing onboarding costs and freeing up time that can be used for other tasks, or just reducing the workload without sacrificing efficiency. You don’t need specific roles to proceed with onboarding or rooms where your employees can work. Everything is automated, and no matter whether your team is remote or on-site, all processes can be conducted online without any problems.

To extract the most value, it’s important to align your onboarding with business goals. Let’s now focus on the specific benefits the company can get when deploying an LMS-based onboarding.

Benefits Of Paperless Employee Onboarding

As one can see, making everything online and automated has a lot of benefits compared to the approach where we do everything by hand. You need to invest in deploying an LMS, which can cost as little as $1 per user per month, and all your onboarding processes will become automated and optimized. Let’s look closer at the benefits that can be obtained here.

1. Managers free up a lot of time that they would otherwise spend on paperwork and organization. They can use this time to communicate with newcomers and explain all work aspects to them.
2. Creating specific corporate culture onboarding modules ensures that new employees understand all the peculiarities of your workplace and can check the information when needed.
3. Team members can be connected all the time, no matter where they are located, and can learn during the work, which means they can start working from the first day at the position.
4. Such solutions ensure an eco-friendly onboarding process, as paper is a large element of anthropogenic pollution.
5. Motivation features, such as badges and interactive tasks, increase user engagement and ensure successful onboarding.

Therefore, by using Learning Management Systems, companies can manage the onboarding process much more efficiently.

Establishing Sustainable Onboarding Practices

The usage of a good LMS leads to many benefits for the company in any industry. Most importantly, it makes the company more sustainable, as managers can organize everything much quicker and stay connected with everyone using the internet.

By deploying an LMS, the company’s management can organize the onboarding process from anywhere, set tasks, and stay connected with employees. In addition, there are numerous environmental benefits of using an LMS for onboarding, as it means no paper needs to be used and much less waste is produced. Therefore, using digital onboarding tools saves time and money and increases the company’s competitiveness, and is a good investment for all businesses.

Editor’s Note: Check out our directory to find, choose, and compare eLearning Industry’s Top Onboarding Software.