Starting a new job can be stressful for employees. While nervousness is common among new recruits, the onboarding experience often determines their future in the organization. A traditional onboarding approach that is often dry and disengaging can lead to poor employee retention rates. If you want your new employees to have a smooth and engaging experience during their onboarding, you need to explore options that offer immersive experiences during the training sessions.
Today, immersive learning is one of the most important developments in employee training. It uses advanced technology to introduce employees to a simulated environment where they can have a hands-on experience without physically visiting a warehouse, office, store, or project site. However, before we discuss how immersive learning can improve the onboarding process, let’s understand why traditional onboarding no longer works.
Understanding the Limitations of Traditional Onboarding
Even though traditional onboarding methods have driven positive results for organizations over the years, they have some limitations that need to be addressed.
- Lack of Engagement: Employee engagement is closely related to profitability in most organizations. Since static presentations and long webinars often fail to engage new employees during the onboarding period, they feel disconnected from company culture and remain unclear about complex concepts.
- Passive Learning: Traditional onboarding methods typically rely on passive learning, such as attending lectures or reading documents. This often leads to information overload and poor retention, which impact the performance of new employees after onboarding.
- High Cost and Limited Scalability: If your organization has large or distributed teams, traditional onboarding methods can be expensive and difficult to scale. Travel expenses and external instructor hiring can also limit the effectiveness of the programs.
- Inconsistency in Training: The effectiveness and engagement level of traditional onboarding generally vary with the instructor (trainer). If you have teams spread across multiple locations, you will likely need to hire different instructors for each location, which may lead to inconsistent training across locations.
Now that organizations have options like immersive onboarding, it makes no sense to continue with traditional methods.
What Is Immersive Onboarding?
Immersive onboarding refers to the employee onboarding process that uses immersive technologies to improve personalization, interaction, and overall training effectiveness. This type of onboarding uses technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to immerse the employee in a virtual environment that simulates real job scenarios.
This helps them better understand the job and organizational culture. This kind of onboarding is considered more effective than traditional methods that rely on documents, videos, and static training sessions.
Why Use Immersive Onboarding in Your Organization?
When your organization takes new employees through immersive onboarding processes, it helps existing people connect with new recruits more effectively. Unlike traditional onboarding methods, immersive onboarding aims to make the entire process more engaging for employees by offering hands-on exercises and simulating real-world scenarios for effective learning. Here is how immersive learning programs can enhance your onboarding process.
Better Understanding
Employees are more likely to understand and retain knowledge when they learn by doing. With immersive onboarding, employees can practice in a simulated environment. As they get a glimpse of how real-world situations would be, they can make decisions based on their experience when they start their jobs later. With more clarity of their job roles and responsibilities, they can perform everyday tasks with more efficiency and accuracy.
Efficiency through Shorter Training
With immersive onboarding, you can reduce the duration of the training process and make it more effective. Since new employees receive hands-on practice in a simulated environment, they can develop the critical skills needed to succeed. Also, real-time feedback can improve proficiency. In other words, the lessons learned during immersive onboarding can be more effectively reflected in real-life scenarios faster than any traditional method.
Effective Skills Development
Immersive onboarding can be a unique and fun experience for any new employee who joins your organization. It ensures that every employee learns faster and more effectively and helps them develop critical skills needed for the job. From getting hands-on experience with safety protocols to effective lessons about workflow, immersive onboarding can improve consumer service, operational efficiency, and other necessary soft skills from an employee’s first day at the office.
Showcase Organizational Culture and Values
Every organization has unique cultural values that contribute to its employee and customer experiences. The employee onboarding process plays a key role in driving these values home. As new employees see these values in action through simulated, immersive learning, they can develop a better understanding of how they are expected to act and behave in the workplace and while interacting with customers.
Safe Environment for Trial and Error
Immersive onboarding allows new recruits to make mistakes and learn from them in a simulated environment. Thus, they can learn with little to no disruption and without facing real-world consequences. Studies suggest that learners who use VR technology are four times more focused during training than those who use conventional eLearning methods. VR learners also enjoy an accelerated learning process and showcase better knowledge retention.
High Employee Engagement and Satisfaction
An immersive onboarding experience helps keep employees engaged throughout the initial learning journey. As a result, employees display a better knowledge retention rate. Having such a unique and engaging learning experience also increases employee satisfaction, improving an organization’s capacity to retain talented employees. At the same time, employees are more likely to acknowledge the organization’s efforts in making their orientation more interactive and educational.
Flexibility
Immersive learning in collaboration with LMS allows organizations to train their new employees anywhere during onboarding. Organizations may sometimes be unable to conduct on-site training due to safety and compliance reasons or a lack of time and resources. With immersive onboarding, organizations can enable learners to wear VR equipment and be transported to a simulated environment. It can be done from a warehouse, office, or shop floor without disrupting operations or conducting sessions during off-hours.
Wrapping Up
Advancements in immersive learning technologies will continue to transform organizations’ onboarding processes. The biggest advantage of immersive onboarding is that it improves the knowledge retention rates among new recruits, and the process takes very little time compared to conventional onboarding methods.
As organizations adopt these cutting-edge technologies, they will be able to create onboarding programs that are more engaging, scalable, and effective than traditional methods. With immersive onboarding, companies can build motivated teams who are prepared for all sorts of challenges from the very beginning.
Photo at top: Henri Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, Pexels
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