Let’s talk onboarding.
We all know it’s important. Great onboarding boosts employee engagement and retention and enhances your company’s reputation. So why do so many businesses fall short when it comes to executing the employee onboarding experience?
In small businesses in particular, it’s often a problem of time. A one-person L&D or HR team doesn’t have the luxury of time to pull together an incredible employee onboarding experience, so it will often be a case of leaving managers to figure it out, leading to inconsistent, patchy experiences.
That’s where AI can make the world of difference. If time isn’t on your side, AI can save the day with its speed and efficiency. Let’s take a look at five ways you can use AI to elevate the employee onboarding experience, from AI tutor agents to content creation and more.
Every new starter will have questions, questions and more questions about everything from booking holiday to claiming expenses to setting up new accounts, and when everyone around them is busy, it can be hard to get those questions answered quickly.
AI tutor agents are great for providing tailored advice and information in real time. The best AI tutor agents are trained on your own content, meaning they will share accurate, company-specific information with new starters, whenever they need it.
Vee is our new AI tutor agent, and it’s perfect for helping you onboard new employees. Vee can answer all those new-starter questions in seconds, and can help newbies find exactly what they need to develop their skills and get themselves up and running. It takes the admin burden off HR and managers, and means that time isn’t wasted waiting around for essential answers.
Ready to see how Vee could supercharge your employee onboarding experience? Claim your free 30-day trial here.
If you already have an array of employee onboarding content, lucky you! But if you don’t, it’s time to change that. Onboarding isn’t the type of content you can buy off the shelf – it needs to be tailored to your organisation, which typically requires a lot of manual work.
… well, until now. AI content authoring is the fastest way to create custom learning content. The AI authoring tool pulls everything from your source material and turns it into engaging, interactive elearning assets. For instance, you could upload your employee handbook, and within seconds it’ll be turned into a series of onboarding modules for your new starters.
Almost any document can be transformed into elearning content, whether it’s HR’s onboarding presentation, your chaotic folder of SOPs or your tired old policy Word docs. In just a few clicks, you can supercharge your employee onboarding experience with quizzes, scenarios, flashcards and more, ensuring your new employees feel supported and are able to fully engage with your onboarding.
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You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s never more relevant than when you’re brand new to a company. There’s so much to learn in those crucial first few weeks, and much of a new starter’s time will be spent digging out the information they need to understand the business, as well as to do their job.
Instead of relying on the L&D team to manually push relevant courses to each audience, AI can intelligently analyse each learner’s activity, identify knowledge gaps and compare learning with others in their role or team, and recommend highly relevant, tailored content in real time.
This makes it much easier to discover important content. For the onboarding period, the AI algorithm will know that employees will need to learn the basics, and over time, more advanced content can be recommended to walk new employees through what they need to learn, at a time that makes sense.
More and more companies are creating onboarding videos to offer introductions to new employees. These will often consist of the CEO and department heads introducing themselves, talking about their roles and welcoming new employees to the company, and are a nice way to add a more human touch to the onboarding playlist.
A neat way to further personalise your onboarding videos is with AI voiceovers. You can edit each new starters’ name into your videos, with synced visuals to make it look like your stakeholders have recorded videos just for your new employee.
You can also create AI-generated videos from scratch if you want to create welcome videos for each role, department or location. You can include photos or short video clips of every person relevant to the new employee, create organisation charts and include images of their new workplace, all at the touch of a button.
We all have different preferences when it comes to absorbing information. Some of us like listening to podcasts, some of us need to try something ourselves and some of us prefer written materials we can refer back to.
AI-generated transcripts effectively help you double your onboarding content by turning each of your video and audio files into written transcripts. These can then be added to your onboarding playlist as useful additional material – or you could even turn them into checklists, infographics or other performance support resources, again using AI, to make the employee onboarding experience even smoother.
5app’s AI resource summaries provide an at-a-glance overview of what learners can expect from each resource, without the L&D team having to spend hours writing descriptions from scratch, and making it easier for new employees to explore unfamiliar content.
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