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The Great Resignation, the Great Reckoning, or the Great Reshuffling, whatever you may call it, one thing is certain: it is 100 percent real. People are switching their jobs now more than ever before.
This shift is even more prominent among the frontline staff, which makes up 80% of the total global workforce. As per Axonify’s The State of Frontline Work Experience in 2021, 45% of frontline employees have already decided to leave their current jobs.
This exodus of workers means that companies are hiring more than ever to fill the gaps left by employees who have quit and to scale the business. While HR managers and recruiters are scrambling to hire the right people, it is also important to make sure that they are onboarded the right way to get up to speed quickly and start delivering as they learn on the job.
The cost of hiring a new employee is high. In fact, it can cost a company 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace him or her. One of the major reasons new employees do not get absorbed the right way in the organisation is a lack of proper onboarding. A lack of adequate training results in decreased confidence and low motivation. The pressure to perform and start delivering results in record time leads to dissatisfaction among the new employees, which eventually makes them want to change jobs.
As per a report, 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay within a company for three years if they experience great onboarding. Therefore, you need to pay equal if not more attention to onboarding your new employees the right way.
Here’s how you can onboard new employees faster and better.
Each person on your team is unique and has their own pace at which they can absorb and retain knowledge. When a new person joins a team, they have to absorb a ton of information, and it can be easy to miss or forget important knowledge. This is why learning needs to be adaptive and personalised according to the need of each individual. Axonify, a frontline LMS, closes training gaps with AI and Machine Learning to deliver a personalised and powerful learning experience.
2. Make learning bite-sized and easy to digest
While onboarding new employees, training is often delivered in hours-long sessions, making it difficult to digest it all in one go. For frontline workers especially, who are often geographically dispersed, it gets even more tedious as long training sessions take them away from the valuable floor time. Axonify solves this problem by delivering powerful training content in just 3-5 minutes a day, accelerating learning and making knowledge retention much easier.
3. Ensure consistent training
Consistency is critical for making learning stick. Research on The Forgetting Curve suggests that people forget an average of 50% of the information presented within an hour, and this can go up to 70% within 24 hours. However, information can be better retained with spaced and consistent learning.
Therefore, you must provide personalised bursts of consistent training to make sure the most important things stick. Since Axonify requires just 3-5 minutes a day for training, it makes it easier to ensure consistent and regular training. Gamification is another great way to beat the forgetting curve. Axonify’s in-app games make learning more fun and keep them coming back for more.
4. Provide job aids and on-demand knowledge
No matter how comprehensive your onboarding process is, it is impossible to cover everything in the initial training sessions. Therefore, it is important to keep the common job-aids, Frequently Asked Questions, and useful resources at your new employees’ fingertips. This would give them the knowledge and confidence to perform their job confidently and get them up to speed. A smart Learning Management System (LMS) acts as an easy to access central repository for all the relevant information your frontline staff needs.
5. Communicate with your new employees
In the past couple of months, the frontline workforce has probably seen the maximum number of new work updates and guidelines due to the pandemic. The frontline staff needs to stay updated with all the latest rules and guidelines to perform their job well.
Since frontline staff are often geographically dispersed, it can get difficult to communicate with them regularly and consistently. Axonify acts as a central place to share new updates and information, which you know will be accessed regularly. Mobile notifications make sure that the message is not missed. Leadership can send out information company-wide, while frontline managers can communicate directly with their teams or individual employees. You can also keep track of whether or not the employees saw the message.
6. Keep track of the onboarding progress
Often the end of training sessions marks the end of the onboarding process, regardless of whether actual knowledge retention happened or not. Managers need to be aware of the training completion rates, test scores, compliance reports, training time, etc to understand the gaps in training and identify coaching opportunities.
Whether you need to supply the right knowledge to your sales staff for winning you the next business deal, or you need to keep your service staff updated with the latest guidelines to deliver exceptional customer service, frontline staff onboarding and training is critical for your business. Axonify leverages AI and Machine Learning to deliver personalised and adaptive training that helps to reduce the time taken to onboard new hires. It allows you to pull in the right mix of topics, events, on-the-job training activities into structured learning paths that set your new frontline employees up for success.
Get in touch with us to find out how you can leverage Axonify to onboard your frontline employees faster and better.
