I've been at Pliancy for a little over a year and one of my first main objectives was to think about how we can scale our onboarding. It was very manual in the beginning: new hires were meeting with department heads virtually, the initial training was provided in person on zoom calls. It was taking up hours of management time, and the process couldn’t be scaled.
We’ve chosen microlearning with 7taps as a solution because it allows us to present all the information that a new hire needs without making them feel overloaded.
7taps mini-courses can be easily shared on Slack or embedded into our LMS — that’s very convenient. Plus, we adopted 7taps Learning Paths to digitize and automate the onboarding process. We packed all the essential information in bite-sized digestible pieces that later formed a learning path — a chain of onboarding courses delivered to newcomers every 2-3 working days. No delays with the training. No scheduling conflicts.
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Before diving into content creation, I put together all possible questions that a new hire may think of. What does a typical day look like? What's the holiday schedule? How is the business structured? What are the expectations? What acronyms do we use? And many others. Then, I compiled the answers into mini-courses.
This approach shows your new hires that you've thought about helping them ahead of time, you're there to anticipate their needs. And it creates an environment where it's a little safer to ask all the questions, especially those ones a person might feel shy to ask their new manager about.
Here’re some specific examples of what we've done for new hire onboarding at Pliancy:
7taps mini-courses serve as an engaging quick overview. For example, we have a lot of fun Slack channels that we'd like people to take advantage of in order to build community. We have a “Popcorn Party”, where you can see the movies and TV shows that are trending; a “Wish You Were Here” channel where we post vacation pics, and many others. And we have a separate mini-course to tell people about what we’re doing. It has a link so that a new hire can always go to a larger resource if they are interested to learn more.
