Budget-Friendly Ways to Improve Your New Hire Training and Onboarding

Budgeting: it can be the bane of an organization’s existence at times. There are so many aspects of your company that require you to budget carefully and correctly, and training is no exception. Training new employees is absolutely critical to retaining them and making sure that they are successful within your company. It’s well known that poor training leads to high turnover rates and low employee satisfaction. So, when it comes to creating a training and onboarding program using software, you want to make sure you give your new hires the best. But that being said, you probably don’t have the budget to just splurge on software and all its bells and whistles without giving any consideration to how much it costs. Here, we will go over some tips to help you stretch your budget for onboarding and training new employees.

Create an LMS Welcome Pack

You can start by populating your onboarding software with resources that you find free on the Internet. Have the software ready to download and login information ready to give to your new hires. Then, fill it with training videos, articles, or even podcast episodes that they may find helpful. Consider this a sort of software welcome pack. Gone are the days of handing new employees huge packets of paperwork that they need to rifle through. Doing it all using an LMS solution is a much more efficient and cost-effective way to create a useful welcome pack.

Introduce New Staff Through the LMS

Of course, you’re going to introduce their coworkers in person, but you can also introduce them through your Learning Management Software. If you have any colleagues or staff members that have created published articles or have professional media profiles, link them within the software so that your new hires can get to know them. Some LMS solutions even enable you to create staff profiles directly and integrate them straight into the employee training program. This could help them to get to know and feel comfortable with the team before they ever even meet them in person.

Use Your LMS to Emphasize Values

Your LMS can be used to put the emphasis on your company’s culture so new hires can become familiar with the values of your organization from the get-go. Use Learning Management Software to teach the values that matter to your organization, and you can even link articles or podcasts that relate to such values. For example, if innovation is a core value for your company, you could link your new hires to free resources on the web about how to be more innovative. This will work much better than going the old route of forcing new employees to recite mottos. Instead, you can deeply integrate your company’s values into them from the start using forward-thinking, budget-friendly LMS methods.

Ask Other Employees to Contribute Resources

If you have staff members or employees that are veterans or very successful in their position, have them contribute to the LMS and new hire training program by developing lessons or contributing topics. Choose an area that they are very experienced in and then have them lend their expertise to the new hires through your LMS. This can include work-related resources, or it can even be resources that will just help new hires settle in general. For example, if you have an employee who’s just moved to your city from out of state, maybe another staff member who has lived in the city for 25 years could create a guide to the city to help them feel at home.

Repurpose Content That You Already Have

You probably have loads of training materials lying around the office somewhere that you can reconfigure for the training of new hires. This is budget-friendly as it allows you to utilize resources that you already have access to, rather than wasting money on creating new ones. For example, you could search for press conference speeches or recorded calls from customer service and upload them to the LMS. The more materials that are relevant to the training process that you can provide for new employees, right at their fingertips, the better. Just make sure that when repurposing existing content, you condense the structure in a manner that’s easy for new hires to read, understand, and consume.

Foster a Buddy System

Many of these budget-saving tips include using your current staff members to help train new employees. Think about it, with an old-school training process, most companies would use veteran staff members to train new staff anyway. With a Learning Management Software approach, that really doesn’t need to change. You can still bring old staff members into the new hire training process through the software.

One of the best ways to do that is to build a buddy system. You can assign your new hires to another staff member who will act as their trainer or mentor. This gives them someone to go to if they have questions, and they can even communicate with them directly through the LMS. Just make sure that you act with care when selecting a mentor or trainer. Ensure that whoever you choose is knowledgeable and a model employee. Buddy systems will work particularly well for remote employees who may feel a little bit disjointed from the workplace when they’re first hired. It’s critical for company cultures that remote employees feel involved and having a mentor that they can reach out to is a great way to ensure they feel part of the team. Your mentors could even video chat with new hires to help them feel welcome.

Investing in an LMS is quite a big expense for most organizations. At the same time, you’re probably trying to stick within a budget, particularly when it comes to training and onboarding. You need to strike a balance between the LMS, your budget, and making sure that new hires are properly onboarded and trained sufficiently. Fortunately, these budget-saving tips can help you train employees excellently and onboard them efficiently without breaking the bank.