5 reasons why you need an LMS for onboarding

While hiring top talent is essential for the growth of your business, having a robust and scalable onboarding process is arguably even more crucial. Solid onboarding processes are the key to retaining the top talent you’ve worked so hard to obtain. 

Organizations with good onboarding processes increase new employee retention by 82% and boost productivity by 70%. Whereas, a lack of strong onboarding can lead to high turnover rates and disengaged employees. A recent study revealed that half of new hires plan to quit shortly after starting a job due to a poor onboarding process or being undertrained. 

This can seriously inhibit your business’s growth because you lose money when you have to hire someone for a position once a year or every other year. These costs add up. An employee onboarding LMS can help you provide a strong onboarding experience and much more. Here are the top 5 reasons why you need an LMS for onboarding. 

What is an LMS for onboarding? 

A learning management system (LMS) is software that helps businesses build, manage, and deploy online learning experiences. You can use an LMS to create an optimized and highly engaging onboarding process for new hires. 

With an LMS for onboarding, you can quickly and easily train new employees on company culture, specific job tasks or expectations, and even compliance. And depending on the LMS, once you have the software, you can use it for a variety of other training needs such as regular training and annual compliance. 

1. Cut down training costs

One of the biggest benefits of using an LMS for onboarding employees is that it significantly decreases training costs. As of 2021, the average cost to onboard an employee is $1,071. 

An LMS can drastically reduce this cost by using one centralized system and delivering trainings virtually instead of through expensive in-person ones.

Here are the typical recurring expenses of in-person training versus an LMS for onboarding: 

By leveraging virtual training, you can greatly reduce the costs to onboard an employee. And you actually create a more engaging and focused learning experience. Employees can learn at their own pace, go back and review materials in an LMS, and learn from the comfort of their own home. 

2. Standardize training

Though not as cost-intensive as in-person training, onboarding training is still somewhat of an investment. It does have an associated cost, so businesses may be tempted to do things on their own. 

This may result in piecemeal efforts or having to draft new content every time you onboard a new hire. It can also lead to managers having to figure things out. And most typically, these efforts end up overwhelming HR, burdening busy managers, and confusing new hires. 

As one study reveals, the biggest challenge when it comes to onboarding for most companies is inconsistent onboarding application. Variations in onboarding content and learning resources reduce the effectiveness of training and can greatly impact companies down the line. 

Oftentimes, new hires are left in the dark, resulting in poor training that ultimately leads to disengagement and backfires on companies down the road.

By standardizing your employee training, you can avoid onboarding pitfalls such as:

• New hires starting on different points because of varying materials
• Ineffective tracking of skill gaps among employees
• Expenses from continuously developing new content

Conversely, using an LMS for onboarding enables new employees to all start on the same foot, ensuring they receive the same standardized training. When employees receive standardized onboarding, it increases employee loyalty and productivity. It also decreases business risk by ensuring all employees are on the same page as well as admin and manager burden. 

3. Make onboarding fun and engaging 

One thing an LMS can do for onboarding that most other forms of onboarding can’t is that it makes the process fun and engaging. With an LMS, you can leverage gamified features such as games, quizzes, puzzles, and more that engage learners and make learning interactive. 

The great thing about this is that it gets learners into an active state of learning instead of a passive one, so they’re even more likely to retain information. And if your LMS offers it, things like virtual classrooms can enhance learning even more, creating a more memorable and interactive experience. 

You can use virtual classrooms for things like social learning, where learners are encouraged to collaborate with one another to solve problems. Again, this is great because it gets learners into an active state of learning, which has been proven to increase knowledge retention. 

Tools like leaderboards and awards can also enrich the learning experience by motivating learners even more. An LMS is one of the easiest and best ways to engage your learners and make onboarding fun and interesting. Interactive games, awards, and leaderboards are easy enhancements that are just not as easy to implement during an in-person setting. 

4. Increase productivity and retention

An LMS is one of the most effective and efficient ways to provide standardized training to your entire workforce. With an LMS, you can have peace of mind that all your employees will receive an excellent onboarding experience and standardized training that sets them up for success in their role. 

When employees receive a good onboarding experience and standardized training, they’re significantly more likely to stay with a company and be more productive while there. Poor onboarding and training can confuse new hires and create the wrong impression of a company, adding to long-term dissatisfaction. It also sets them up to be unsuccessful for in their role and can negatively impact productivity. 

44% of employees who quit their jobs within the first six months after getting hired do so because of ineffective training or lack of clear guidelines on job responsibilities. This is a significant contrast to 69% of employees who are likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they have a great onboarding experience. 

And new hires with onboarding programs have a decreased time to value in proficiency. New hires with onboarding experiences report being proficient in their jobs four months sooner than companies that don’t offer an onboarding process. 

Onboarding creates a positive impression of a company for new employees that lasts well beyond the first weeks or months. And this impression can pay dividends in the future. 

5. Create a data-driven feedback loop 

Onboarding processes that aren’t centralized or are fully in-person lack powerful feedback loops. Yes, maybe you’ll be able to send out a survey at the end of onboarding that can give some insight into the effectiveness of your program, but it still lacks robust data insights. 

In addition to streamlining onboarding and providing standardized training, LMSs are great because they provide data on all of your learners in real-time. So you don’t have to wait until the end of your training session to gather feedback and even then, only get a handful of completed surveys. 

An LMS automatically gathers information throughout the process. You can use these insights to improve the effectiveness of your training program and even make company-wide improvements by identifying skills and knowledge gaps. 

Depending on the LMS, you can even get granular insights like seeing exactly where learners are most likely to become disengaged with content or become confused with materials. These data insights can help improve onboarding and your overall ROI, making it a valuable business tool that goes beyond just creating great experiences for employees. 

A learning management system provides a streamlined onboarding experience without the hassle 

A learning management system streamlines and centralizes onboarding programs, making them more effective and engaging. By leveraging an LMS, administrators can reduce burden and associated costs.

With Tovuti’s onboarding LMS, administrators can automate enrollments, easily create engaging courses, quickly make training updates, and use granular data insights to improve their program effectiveness. They can also use things like Tovuti’s Net Promoter Score to gauge employee satisfaction and get in front of churn before it happens.

And with the most robust gamified and interactive features on the market, including over 40 plug-and-play gamified features, leaderboards, and virtual classrooms, your employees are sure to retain more information and have fun doing it!