The first few days on the job are vital to employee retention.

Recent research suggests that 32 percent of employees who have been in their current position less than six months start looking for a new job. What’s more, 22 percent of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment.

Much of this discontent is due to poor onboarding practices characterized by a lack of clear expectations, limited support, and poor workplace integration. Although content-based training is one of the easiest ways to deliver important information to new employees, it could be exactly where new employees are slipping through your fingers.

The key to retaining new hires lies in combining content with engaging practical education and rapid integration into company culture — it’s what keeps employees around longer than 45 days.

The Problem with Content-Only Training

While content-based training is easy, new employees need clear and practical performance-based training to teach them the skills they’ll need to be successful. Otherwise, you run the risk of encountering three major issues:

1.      Setting people up for failure: Without performance-based training, employees are set loose in their new work environment without the skills they need to succeed.

2.      Disengagement: New employees lose interest when they aren’t immediately drawn into workplace culture or prepared for their new responsibilities.

3.      Non-measurable success: Without performance-based training, there’s no way to measure how well your employees are retaining your content. If you don’t have a way to measure training effectiveness, you won’t know whether your employees are succeeding.

Equipping Your Training Arsenal

To create effective performance-based training that sets your employees up for success, you can’t simply avoid these traps. Instead, you have to actively create engaging training that leads to effective onboarding.

Here are six valuable ingredients to a successful training program:

1.      Storytelling: Every training course should start with this simple tactic to create an engaging connection. Storytelling sets the stage for an engaged audience, so employees will be more likely to remember important nuggets of information.

2.      Real-life scenarios: Training should include scenarios that depict situations employees will likely encounter on the job. You can use writing, animation, or role-play to teach everything from compliance training to sales techniques. Employees can see how their behavior impacts real-world interactions, and managers get to provide immediate feedback.

3.      Appealing to all senses: People remember very little of the information they read and hear. But speaking, writing, and actually doing an activity increase retention rates drastically. Effective training includes approaches that appeal to every style of learning.

4.      Analytics: Include analytics that equip managers with data to ensure their employees are headed in the right direction. For example, a post-course quiz allows new employees to test their knowledge before they’re put into real-world situations. This type of confidence-building exercise heightens an employee’s chances to succeed.

5.      Ongoing training: An occasional refresher course helps employees resolve issues that inevitably arise. An organization-specific knowledge library can serve as an accessible reminder for ongoing training.

6.      Playbooks: One of the best ways to ensure employees have access to important information and increase workplace engagement is creating a playbook. The playbook should detail what’s expected of new hires and serve as a reference for everything they need to know about the job.

More on the Playbook

Every new employee should receive a copy of your playbook to help him feel comfortable from day one. Each organization’s book will be different, but they should all include these basic points:

• Administrative information: This includes your vacation and sick leave policies, how to sign up for insurance, how to contact tech support, etc.

• Workplace culture: Information on the dress code, upcoming events, and daily activities integrates new employees into the company culture and makes them feel like they’re part of the team.

• Job strategies: Even experts need clear expectations. This should also include objectives and general ideas of successful work strategies.

• Online references: Websites, social media, and other references should be listed. This gives new hires the power to find answers by themselves by providing the tools to look up information.

• Goals: Detailed expectations and objectives give new hires something to work toward. A list of positions and promotion opportunities can help them envision a future at your organization.

Huntington Total Health, for example, does a great job using playbooks for performance-based training. Its playbook is broken down by day for new hires. This way, they’ll know exactly what they should be doing on any given day. It takes the guesswork out of an employee’s first week on the job and provides comprehensive information on conduct, expectations, and timelines.

Losing an employee costs a company more than just a warm body. Estimates place the cost at three times the employee’s starting salary, which is harrowing. Fortunately, companies willing to improve onboarding processes can increase employee retention rates. Tweaking your onboarding process to include performance-based training, support, playbooks and analytics is guaranteed to produce results for your company.