Establishing a standardized onboarding process is a significant component of employee productivity and retention. A Harvard Business Review report reveals that organizations with a structured onboarding process achieve 62% greater new hire productivity. Through an effective onboarding program, human resource (HR) professionals can engage employees from the outset to build trust and alignment.
However, building an effective onboarding process can be challenging due to rising employee expectations and frustrating manual processes. One way to reduce challenges and create a structured onboarding approach is to take advantage of an employee knowledge management system. Outlined in this article are ways on how knowledge management software can enhance your onboarding process and empower new hires to engage throughout the journey.
Professional relationships work alongside the nuts and bolts of what new employees need to know. Therefore, you must ensure that they have access to information that would put them in a position to do their jobs better. Using a dynamic knowledge management software platform, you can provide them with easy access to information such as work environment guidelines, customer data, and other business functions.
By putting all information in a centralized location, you can give them a coordinated stroll through all of your business frameworks. This way, you can reduce onboarding time and ensure that your new employee has the skills and certainty to manage their work quickly. It also allows you to make the new hire feel supported in their early days at the job, which can be stressful considering the adjustments they have to make to fit right into your company culture.
Self-service is another component of several types of knowledge management systems that can improve your onboarding process. More often than not, the best knowledge management platforms are geared with powerful features such as search engines and content categories that make it easier for new hires to find the training materials they need. Technically, a knowledge management system allows them to bookmark specific posts and refer back to them as they go through the onboarding process.
Usually, new hires ask a lot of questions during the onboarding process. While this signifies interest and enthusiasm, answering similar questions can rob your HR teams time to do meaningful work. By letting employees self-serve and learn at their pace, you can re-assign your HR teams to more pressing matters while empowering new hires to get the training material they need to improve their performance.
Transforming an onboarding process can be daunting because traditionally they are dry and inconsistent. By using knowledge management, you can automate mundane processes such as policy education and video training. This way, you can alleviate some of the burden on your new hires while allowing your HR teams to focus on making employees feel more empowered throughout the journey.
Often, HR teams provide their new hires a significant amount of information from the start. While it allows them to work effectively on their roles, doing so can also overwhelm them and result in new employees spending a considerable time searching for information they need instead of doing what you brought them to do. With an effective knowledge management system, employees can automate the process of having to navigate through a sea of data while easing first-day anxieties.
Onboarding processes are traditionally dry and unilateral which makes it more challenging to keep your new hires engaged. Left unengaged, you increase the likelihood of your new hires leaving your organization quickly. Taking advantage of a knowledge management tool allows you to make the onboarding process more interactive since anyone on your team can immediately respond to questions a new hire will throw at them.
This allows for new hires to be onboarded faster and more consistently while ensuring that you can make them feel good about their decision of working for you. Through this process, you can lay a good foundation for long-lasting engagement and reduce employee turnover since you have a single source of truth of business information. It also allows hires to take control of their professional developments and supercharge their expertise as needed.
New hires often feel nervous when starting a job and companies which lack a plan for their arrival may even exacerbate the situation. A lack of plan can often show to the new employee that the company didn’t value them enough to prepare for their arrival. Although it's not the case for everyone, the lack of plan can often lead to new employees second-guessing their decisions.
Knowing how to build a knowledge management system is essential in reducing the nerves and helping employees settle into their positions. The benefit of a knowledge management tool is it allows for HR teams to create a structured plan for onboarding and answering employee questions. Through a structured onboarding process, you can deliver a positive candidate experience and accelerate the time for new hires to reach the same level of proficiency as the existing employees.
With more employees having the best associate degrees and experiencing slick consumer experiences, the need for organizations to improve the onboarding process is no longer an option. Thus, using powerful knowledge management software such as KnowledgeIQ is essential in meeting these rising employee expectations. KnowledgeIQ is powered by dynamic features such as single sign-on, dedicated account management, and integrated analytics in addition to its quote-based pricing.
