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BLOG 1: Five things that can go wrong with Onboarding training

Introduction:
Onboarding is perhaps the most important part of the employee lifecycle. It is just as crucial for the organization too. A great onboarding program can springboard an employee to achieving high prospects as it makes his vision in the organization clear. The organization wins through optimizing on its employees' vigor and retains them to achieve its goals. For a long time, onboarding programs were conducted on premise without the use of web-training tools. With the advent of the Internet, organizations are reducing their workload and making onboarding digitalized and automatic. While it provides several advantages like saving time spent on orientation and training sessions, it has serious consequences too. Let's take a brief look at the five major issues with online onboarding programs.

1. Overload of Reading Material
When employees are inducted, they undergo a training program where they are made aware of the company's dynamics and their role and contribution to it. This generally involves, besides several activities, reading informative documents about the organization that are sometimes hundreds of pages long. Due to their purely informative nature, these documents could be a long and tiring read. In online onboarding, there is no way to ensure whether the information is read by the employee or not. In many cases, employees skip or merely skim through the files. This could bear disastrous results for the organization because a basic step in onboarding is to make its employees aware of its work structure, motto, its goals and what the organization expects from them. Many types of research conclude that an organization that makes its employees very clearly aware of their roles and its expectations from them could increase its productivity up to 50%.;

2. Lack of Human Interaction
A major challenge that companies face with online onboarding is its impersonal nature. The HR and new hires interact virtually for the major part of their onboarding program. Though video conferencing and calling facilities are utilized during training, a major disadvantage with online onboarding is that the HRs cannot make a proper and accurate evaluation of the employees until they actually start working. There have been scenarios where employees are transferred to a different role in the organization from their original as they were found better suited for the post. This initial misjudgement wastes valuable time of the employee and the organization both. An onboarding program where training is delivered through personal interaction between employees and the hierarchy leads to much better results for the organization. The training provides sufficient time and opportunities to build a rapport between the two and results in employee retention and enhanced productivity.

3. Lack of Engagement and Motivation
A great onboarding program could result in retaining its employees for an average duration of up to three years. This boosts productivity for the organisation due to less turnover, and most of the employees get settled in the companies work environment and stay back for long and good. During training sessions, these trainees partake in activities of various kinds that require thorough engagement and help in internalizing the work process before the workers take up their positions in the company. This warm-up greatly helps in dealing with the stress that new hires could face in their early days. However, online onboarding, as it has been reported, fails to engage employees in activities due to its solitary nature. As a result, the trainee only gets hold of the facts and reports without having any real time or practical experience. This inhibits outcomes as the employee starts off dawdling and takes time to settle. Perhaps this is the reason why companies without an effective training program or a complete lack of it face a turnover of 50% of its employees within the first year of their joining.

4. The Banal, Generic Approach
A lack of human monitoring of employees results in a monotonous, generic approach. Software training trains all employees invariantly. As a result, employees who possess an additional skill set or advantage over other employees are left undiscovered, and the opportunity for the organization to utilize that talent is lost. A major difference between the two approaches is this: Humans are pliant and improvising. Different employees can be provided different and varied training sessions when trained under the organization's senior workers. This is not possible with inanimate software. It cannot be flexible and improvising depending on the response of the users. Hence it is suggested that software for onboarding should only be used to the extent of keeping track on the workers' progress and the task should be carried out by the organization's experienced employees.

5. Breaches and Security Issues
How companies train their employees for their roles and prepares them for their contribution is the most determining factor in where it would stand in the market. From competition's point of view, organizations keep their onboarding programs highly secretive and confidential. Onboarding programs of major tech giants like Apple and IBM are done completely undercover, and employees are discouraged from talking about them in public. With online onboarding, there are high chances that a compromise on companies' privacy policies may take place. A breach of the most basic information about the onboarding program could have major repercussions. This is probably the reason why even companies with huge workforce keep their programs on-premise and classroom oriented. For them, maintaining their originality is of the utmost importance.

Conclusion:
Before implementing an online onboarding program, the above loopholes should be thoroughly researched and worked upon. While these may seem small issues, they could have subtle butterfly effects in the long run and cause irreparable damage to the organization. It is highly advised that small-scale companies keep their onboarding programs on-premise and interactive, while large companies use robust and nimble software to train employees. A great onboarding system can produce marvelous results!


BLOG2: Five reasons why training needs are different in the Services Industry

Introduction:
The retention of talent and the delivery of innovative products to increase the company's market share and bottom-line are common challenges facing any industry. While experts believe that employee training and development holds an answer to these concerns, traditional training practices tend to add to the list of woes that organizations suffer from. This is particularly true of the services industry, where employees are required to constantly be on their toes to keep customers happy. eLearning could help businesses in the service sector plug the gaps in this regard. In this post, we list five unique training challenges faced by the services industry and how a robust eLearning tools can help address them effectively. Read on to know more.

1. Imparting need-based training
- High attrition rates plague most service-based businesses. As a result, companies are forced to invest twice the money and effort in replacing the resource. The changes that happen on the floor during the period of absence of a resource need to be promptly counted in and updated on the course to avoid lapses. Therefore, it is highly important that inputs from field functionaries are incorporated into the learning material as and when the need arises. However, traditional learning practices are not equipped to meet such a demand at the breakneck speed that is expected. Modern LMSs, on the other hand, can be used to edit and update learning content on the go. They provide trainers and managers control over the training process and help close communication gaps over new feedback and processes. As the course material is dynamically updated, the need to design courses from scratch in order to train resources for added responsibilities is minimized. Various tools, lets trainers edit courses after publishing and allows greater synchrony of content updates between teams and departments.

2. Ingraining organizational ethos in employees
- A considerable section of the services personnel work at the customer-facing end. These employees are your brand's identity; your customers' interaction with them determines the quality of your customer engagement, and therefore ROI. It is imperative that your employees believe in your organizational values and represent your brand like their own. Yes, internalization of the ethos and culture of the organization is a key aspect that needs to be covered in the training program. But remember that there is always a limit on the number of classroom hours your resources can take. Modern LMSs serve as an efficient tool in this regard as they let employees learn 24x7. LMSs allow mobile learning; employees can now stay connected to their learning environments anytime, anywhere. This helps employees imbibe the values of the organization better, faster and on a deep level.

3. Retaining skilled, motivated manpower
- This is one cycle that the service sector often finds hard to escape. At first, the HR finds it difficult to find the right person for the right job. After all, not every second person you meet exhibits exceptional communication and people skills - two key skills necessary for a wide range of jobs in the service industry. But once a resource has been placed, a new set of challenges comes to the fore - a) the resource must be trained and b) the resource needs to be engaged with adequately so they don't quit on you. While a traditional training program will ensure that your resource is well-trained, it cannot assure you of consistent engagement that can help you and your employees. LMSs today use gamification to entice learners and keep them hooked to learning and staying ahead of peers. LMSs, in addition to using gamification, makes use of leaderboards to display the names and ranks of top performers in each course. It also rewards learners with cool badges for every learning milestone accomplished by the learner. This motivates employees to keep getting better at their game and fosters a culture of learning throughout the organization.

4. Keeping stress to the minimum
- Being a service sector personnel means being answerable to customers/clients. Even if your organization had the most perfect training program that successfully instilled your company's mission, vision and value statements into your employees, there are some areas that you can never truly control. Like the stress experienced by your employees when they need to repeatedly address client queries during the peak season within an 8x8 cubicle. While you certainly cannot help the fact that customers' concerns need to be addressed, you could mitigate the stress felt by your employees. And no, we are not talking about perks that might bite into your budget. Investing in an efficient LMS would do just as well. Modern LMSs offer microlearning as a feature which organizes information into smaller, digestible chunks of data for the learner. This ensures that employees don't feel overwhelmed by all the information that's coming their way. These LMSs also employ interactive e-learning exercises that help bring down stress levels. They offer guided learning paths, so the learner knows what to expect from a course and after.

5. Following up after training
- Most employees take their learning programs seriously and strive to be best performers. But a recurring scenario after the completion of a course is a lack of on-the-job implementation of the lesson. Trainers often find it difficult to track how employees put their learnings to use on the job after the completion of the course. But again, this is only a shortcoming of traditional training methods. With the help of modern LMSs, trainers can easily track the progress of a learner through a course and after. In an LMS, trainers can track all online learning activities such as course progress, skill level attained, interactions with peers and so on. Trainers can also enrol learners to new courses based on their skill level and performance, thereby bridging the gap between demand and skills.

Snapshot for eLearning in the Services Industry:
1. Need-based training
2. Organizational culture and values
3. Employee retention
4. Increased stress
5. Tracking of progress

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