Hiring new employees requires a huge investment of time and money. The onboarding process should celebrate this new relationship and help drive immediate engagement between your organization and new employees. It’s a critical time to cultivate a genuine connection with new team members, and an opportunity to share the organization’s values and culture and train employees on the company’s products and services—not just fill out W2s and benefits forms. Onboarding for small businesses can be even trickier, as new hires can have an even greater impact on a company’s bottom line.

Giving new workers the proper training to complete their job rather than throwing them into the role (or a five-hour seminar) will make them feel valued, and will save businesses time and money. By training them and enhancing workplace skills, they will feel like the company is helping advance their career and may even be more likely to stay.

Knowledge Sharing

This process of sharing information and knowledge should be bilateral; as the new team members learn about your organization, there is an opportunity to create a dialogue and have them also share their backgrounds, expertise, and knowledge. The organization becomes richer through this peer-to-peer experience, and facilitates camaraderie and collaboration when bringing in knowledge from every corner.

Leveraging online tools to foster ongoing dialogue between new employees and company veterans provides not only scale, but also a real-time mechanism to facilitate ongoing conversation and idea exchange. In turn, the content and knowledge created through these exchanges can be curated and published to the entire organization for all to learn. For new employees, this provides an immediate way to quickly come up to speed and benefit from those who’ve gone through the process. This also accelerates the process and leads to incremental gains or new knowledge discoveries.

Formal to Informal Learning

Traditionally, learning during onboarding starts formal, but as it travels through the company in the form of discussions and shared experiences, it eventually transforms into peer-to-peer and informal learning. Organizations now require a mechanism to facilitate pulling the informal learning back into the rest of the organization, where others can benefit from the knowledge exchange.

It is essential to provide employees a way to easily grab knowledge and insights during the onboarding process. Ideally, they should have access to all learning resources from one centralized resource that is vetted or rated by other members who have been through the process.

Mobile Access

Small business owners aren’t always your typical nine-to-five workers at a desk. For these entrepreneurs and the businesses they’re building, mobile access is crucial, especially as they scale up and onboard new recruits. With mobile apps available to easily deliver online learning, there’s no excuse not to invest in cultivating and developing your team. Through mobile, you can train your staff quickly on products and services so they always stay abreast of your latest offerings. If you have remote team members, this is a perfect way to get them up to speed without having to sit through a long meeting or web conference; they can access the latest training on demand and on the go.

Onboarding new employees doesn't have to be a painful process. With the right tools and support from your organization, new employees can be brought up to speed quickly and efficiently. Allowing knowledge to flow through every department and making mobile content available will acquaint new workers much faster than long training sessions, and will also give them fulfillment in their new role.