3 Reasons Your Onboarding Might Be Boring

There is a reason why your newly hired employees talk about going back home as soon as switch on their systems. 

They are bored.

What should have been their most exciting days of “starting a new job”, have turned into a drag. And It’s not the fleeting boredom that’ll pass, but a kind of deep-seated, persistent boredom that makes one think – “Is this all that is left to my life?”

And while a person can be excited about learning a new data entry software only so much, it is still possible to make your employees’ lives better. 

So if you too see the “new place, new people, new work” glee vanishing from the faces of your new recruits, here are the possible reasons and the ways to correct it.

Read on. 

You have made their days monotonous

While interviewing candidates, every interviewer tells them about the exciting days and responsibilities that lay ahead of them. However, soon after joining the team, they either resign or feel less and less motivated with every passing day. 

Though many times, when big corporations hire a group of similar background people at once, they instantly become the best buddies and the monotony stays out of way. 

But, this is not the case for a majority of organizations. And since they do their hiring rather sporadically so in-person training becomes impossible. 

And thus all the new employees are left at the mercy of an eLearning course to be completed on their own. 

If this is your way of onboarding, Stop. Drop. Roll. 

To approach this in a better way, you can

• List down the tasks that you would like for your new team members to do. 
• Arrange these tasks in a daily time table and ensure there is enough variety for them to remain engaged. 
• Review their progress on a daily or weekly basis while maintaining a constant healthy interaction.
• Be relevant with information to pass on initially. It may be an exciting thing for you to show the recruits around but telling your content marketing team about the finance department might be stretching it a bit.
• Taking the help of more engaging, interactive, custom eLearning solutions can make the training much easier and fun for everyone.

Your training structure is cumbersome

In order to enable someone to learn something, you must be aware of the perfect time and perfect quantity of knowledge. Only then the learner can relate to and grasp the lessons in the best way. 

If you plan to train your new people during the onboarding process about everything, including the things they may need after a few months or for only specific tasks, then your training is bound to fail. 

A better approach to training would be if you,

• Divide your course content in digestible chunks and gradually impart it.
• Instead of choosing to complete their entire training at once, start slow. 

Train them for the things that they would need immediately after joining and wait for them to gain adequate experience to move on to the next level of training. 

• For deciding the course content for each trainee, you can conduct an aptitude test which will help you in discovering the areas of improvement for each employee. 

You have skipped the orientation 

Orientation is an employee’s most crucial chance to open up to a new atmosphere, build connections and get to know other people and processes of your organisation. When you skip the step of introducing them to their fellows, not allowing them to grasp their surroundings, it becomes hard for them to create bonds. 

Apart from bonding, good employee onboarding and orientation are important for new members to understand the company’s vision, mission and culture. 

For a better orientation, you can,

• Intervene in the introduction program and make it more effective.
• Tell the employees, not just about their job responsibilities but also the business, the company, and its values.
• Give them an idea about what they should expect in the coming weeks and what the company expects from them. 

Good onboarding is crucial for making new employees parts of the organization. If you succeed in keeping them interested throughout, they will be most motivated to take on their responsibilities and excel in them. 

So, keep up the culture, the excitement and don’t let your people be bored.
© New To HR