In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the need for effective onboarding practices has never been more critical. Onboarding training used to be a one-day or one-week event, but to meet the learner and team needs, it has become an ongoing journey that scaffolds an employee’s work experience from their very first day to their first ninety days, six months or even a year.

What accounts for this expansion? It is largely a shift in objectives and a growing awareness of the opportunity. There are drivers that directly impact the business, including a need to meet the demand for talent, increase performance and decrease time-to-competency in the new role. But there are also indirect, experiential objectives — to foster stronger connections between team members, to strengthen their affiliation with the organization and ultimately to increase retention. These metrics contribute to a larger objective: Creating a successful employee experience. As we learn more and more about the employee experience, it becomes clear that the onboarding learner experience can play a more strategic role.

A 2023 survey by Brandon Hall Group found that an average of 31% of employees rate their employee experience as less than satisfactory. When asked if their employers understand what employees want or need, an average of 48% rated the understanding as less than effective. So, almost a third aren’t happy with their experience, and almost half don’t believe that the organization knows what to do about it. The good news is that “investment in employee training and development programs . . . is the highest rated initiative globally to improve the employee experience.” An average of 41% of companies are prioritizing their new employee onboarding program to support the employee experience.

Addressing the Gaps

Priority, however, may not be enough. There remains a delta between the experiences that we aspire to create for new employees today and the experiences we deliver. Many are still isolating them in conference rooms on day one, sharing the requisite policy presentations and treating a nuts-and-bolts overview as orientation. Here are a few of the persistent gaps that can lead to an incomplete and unengaging onboarding program:

• The employer may be unprepared to welcome new employees or begin the onboarding process.
• Communication flows in one direction — there are insufficient opportunities for the new employee to ask questions or to understand how or where to find answers.
• The program is generic, outdated and is not 100% relevant to the new employees.
• The expectations for the new role remain unclear and there is no connection between expectations and the learning program.
• There is too much information provided in too little time.
• New hires feel that the onboarding does not prepare them to do their job.

Learner experience design (LXD) provides a valuable design alternative that focuses on the needs of the learner rather than the needs of human resources (HR) or the organization. It understands that the learning journey is comprised of a strategic sequence of activities that include individual learning, cohort learning and integrated learning experiences. It addresses the typical gaps in the following ways:

• The organization needs to be prepared to initiate the learning journey, but all of those pieces do not have to be ready when the new employee begins work. The burden of being prepared for day one is much lighter with a sequenced approach.
• Communication is prioritized over information. A learner-centric approach includes frequent check-ins and feedback mechanisms. It also provides learners with a map or plan for how they can access answers.
• The learner’s experience is personalized to their department, team and role. It may even be tailored to their personal background, skills proficiency and experience.
• Expectations are clearly presented, both for the program and for the new role, showing learner progress and feedback in a visual dashboard. The relevance of each step in the journey is clearly associated with those expectations.
• The information is presented with additional context in a series of activities or microlearning modules so that it does not overwhelm learners or become quickly forgotten.

Critical Success Factors

Achieving these objectives entails a different approach. Here are four critical success factors to help you design a learner experience that builds a strong foundation for the overall employee experience:

1. Align on the desired outcomes: An analysis of learner and organizational needs, including a review of the existing program and research, will ensure that the program is designed to meet the expanded scope. A performance consultant can map the identified needs to individualized learning journeys and key experiences in those journeys.
2. Create a personalized learner journey: When we make the onboarding applicable to all new hires, we also make it too generic, and learners will struggle to understand the relevance. We need to design not only foundational but also department-specific, team-specific and role-specific experiences. This will increase the relevance for learners and increase their readiness on the job.
3. Engage learners in each activity: The learning journey is a series of steps. If those individual steps are awkward, outdated or poorly produced, we decrease the likelihood that learners will take the next step. An instructionally sound design ensures that each activity engages learners and helps to build the overall experience. Because a learning journey often has multiple activities, it will be overwhelming and complicated unless we also design a unified and integrated journey that seamlessly brings together all the components and technologies.
4. Measure progress and readiness: Learners need feedback on their progress and performance. One option is to partner with a provider who can help you create a dashboard that covers the overall journey. This will ensure that the learner has access to all of their data in one location. This data is also useful for leaders as they assess readiness for the new role and the types of assignments to give to the new employee.

What can you expect from this type of approach? Ron Zamir, CEO of AllenComm, referenced the following example: “In collaboration with a major airline, we were able to increase onboarding training (of customer service associates) capacity by 207% and overall productivity by 15%. Those results were achieved by having the domain expertise to think differently and the client being open to change.”

Conclusion

Of course, the overall employee experience consists of much more than just onboarding training or any L&D initiative. That said, the onboarding program has the power to build a strong foundation for other employee experience programs. The mindset for onboarding needs to be one of continuous improvement. Most organizations will not be able to create one program for all. While that may seem efficient on the surface, that traditional strategy will not succeed in meeting today’s objectives of increasing retention, strengthening affiliation, increasing readiness and decreasing the time-to-competency in the new role. If we can approach the challenge from the learner’s perspective, we begin to see the transformative opportunity of meaningful engagement with new employees.