Ask yourself, is your new hire training everything it needs to be to prepare your employees for today’s business challenges? If you have a feeling that your new hire training could be even a little bit better, consider these sobering statistics.

According to the Wynhurst Group, the cost of losing an employee in the first year is estimated to be at least three times their salary. What’s more, 22% of staff turnover occurs in the first forty-five days of employment. For any business, training is an investment in your resources, money, and time. If your training isn’t engaging, it will have a detrimental impact on your business. It could lead to lower employee productivity, high turnover, and lower customer satisfaction.

If you haven’t considered engaging your trainees with content created with thoughtful consideration of their onboarding journey, now is the time to begin. Let’s explore the benefits of an engaging new hire training program and how you can get started with creative, engaging programs and materials.

Benefits of an Engaging New Hire Training Program

Beyond the significant cost savings and the productivity gains, there are many benefits to investing in adding more engagement to your new hire training. With a more engaging new hire onboarding program, you’ll help employees deliver better results and be prepared to manage future challenges.

An engaging new hire training program can have numerous benefits to both your company and your new hires. These benefits include:

1. More Productive Employees. If an employee is properly engaged during new hire orientation, they are more likely to pay close attention to their work and ensure that all procedures and processes are being properly followed and that they are performing to the best of their abilities.
2. Loyal Employees. Investing in your employees by properly training them is extremely important when trying to build a long-term relationship with a new hire. If your new staff member feels like they have been properly trained and supported, they are more likely to feel emotionally invested in your company. This not only increases employee loyalty, but it also can aid in decreasing your turnover rate. Many companies fail at this initial step because they think that training only means setting up the new hire’s workstation.
3. Better Information Retention. When new hires are truly engaged in their training, they are less easily distracted and hence retain more information.  This is valuable because it means that re-training is less likely, and new hires who are more invested in their new positions are also less likely to add to your turnover rate.  While your new hire training does not necessarily need to be a carnival of entertainment, it should incorporate the unexpected – and that means providing a training curriculum that strays off the beaten path.

Ideas to Make Your New Hire Training Program More Engaging

Now that you see the benefits of engaging your new hire, it’s time to step up your training program. No more delivering training that causes new hires to nod off to sleep or miss most of the content because they view it as monotonous and boring.

A few ways to engage your new hires during training include:

• Start engaging your new hires early. Investing the time to engage your new employee beyond the first several weeks will help them feel valued and appreciated. A mistake that is often made with new hire training is that the introduction to company policy and the procedure is done within a small time frame. With all of the information that they need to absorb, it can be like trying to drink from a fire hose. New hire training cannot be adequately accomplished in a matter of hours or even one eight-hour day and instead should be done slowly and over time in order to properly engage your employee.
• Incorporate Quests and Challenges as Part of Your New Hire Training Program. Take your new hires on an online learning adventure.  By taking your new hire on an online learning adventure, you can create a landscape that will help your new hires feel involved in the material that they are learning and increase their enthusiasm for both the material and your company.
• Create Videos and Mix them in With Your Powerpoints. Videos have the power to engage all of our senses – it is the most powerful medium available to us. Although it can be more expensive to create video content, there are many ways to keep your costs low. If you are stumped on how to create fresh video content, you can even repurpose your old presentations into awesome new training videos.
• Create New Hire Mentorship Opportunities. New hires need to see and experience what they learn in practice. Assign your new hire a mentor who can guide them through the initial onboarding process. This mentor can be someone whom your new hire can reach out to if they have questions about company policy or who they should address specific questions to. The personal relationship with the mentor during the new hire training will make your employee feel more connected and invested in the company from the start.
• Establish Goals. Goals give your employees something to reach for. As they achieve one set of goals, new goals should be established. This step-by-step process helps them feel they are making progress and that inspires them to keep moving forward. Don’t forget to reward new hires for doing a good job. This may sound simplistic, but positive reinforcement is powerful.
• Foster Intrinsic Motivation. Use internal incentives to foster a more holistic approach to learning. Implement the principles of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in your training program to start building a better performing organization from the inside out.

If your new employee is engaged and encouraged to participate during their training, they will be more likely to retain the information that is presented to them and they will be ready to excel. A well-trained employee is one that is prepared to succeed in their position. The best way to help an employee become prepared to succeed is by engaging them during new hire training.