Good employee onboarding has a significant impact on retention, job satisfaction, and engagement. While this has been common knowledge in the business community for years, putting the theory into practice is still a persistent issue for many organizations.
Onboarding is about far more than just signing documents, getting login credentials, and meeting a new team. It’s also about learning and adopting new tools so that new hires are ready to contribute to the business in meaningful ways as quickly as possible.
Thankfully, dedicated software for employee onboarding and training can help businesses unlock these benefits and show the consideration and respect that are the building blocks of a healthy employer-employee relationship.
Understanding that you need an employee onboarding solution and actually picking the right one for your business are different things. Software vendor selection is a challenge, with the consequences of bad choices, including lost time, money, and momentum.
To make matters worse, there is a diverse range of employee onboarding tools, offering a mix of advantages and disadvantages. Picking the software that suits your business's unique needs can easily leave you lost.
If that sounds like you and your journey to find an employee onboarding software solution, don't worry; we're here to help. This article will take you through everything you need to know when choosing employee onboarding tools.
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1) Price
The last few years have been difficult times for economies across the world. The post-COVID economic rebound brought high inflation that has continued to persist. As central banks raised interest rates to address runaway inflation, it signaled the end of easy monetary policy and low-interest loans and funding. Suddenly, businesses that had grown used to profligate spending had to cut their cloth. Value has come back into fashion.
Now, as every business leader knows, you need to invest in people and resources to make money. However, now that spending is under greater scrutiny, managers need to justify their outgoings. That attitude extends to vendor selection for employee onboarding tools.
Two big questions that you need to ask when evaluating an employee onboarding platform are:
Does this solution provide value for money?
Will this solution facilitate a return on investment (ROI)?
If you can answer these questions positively, then it will be far easier to convince the boardroom to invest in new software, even if budget cuts are happening across other departments.
Think about the features you actually need to achieve better employee onboarding and training. Be cautious about paying for nice-to-have but ultimately unnecessary features.
Unlike many of our rival employee onboarding platforms, Usetiful offers a free version alongside other incredibly cost-effective pricing tiers. No other tool offers this level of value for money.
2) Interactivity
Learning is a big part of onboarding. New hires need to feel comfortable with the tools in their workflow if you want them to hit the ground running and achieve productivity.
People learn in different ways and at different speeds. However, when it comes to learning software, we all have a clear sense of what works and what doesn’t. Training days with PowerPoint presentations, user manuals, and even instructional videos have some merits, but the problem is that employees just don’t retain the information. The Forgetting Curve is a real thing, with students failing to retain as much as 75% of information within a day or two of learning.
There are a few different ways to defeat the learning curve. These include:
Breaking learning down into bite-sized chunks
Learning while doing
Keeping things relevant
Bear all this in mind when you are choosing a digital employee onboarding tool. Look for a tool that enables interactive product tours and walkthroughs that can show employees how to get value from the software they’ll use on the job. With the addition of tooltips and checklists, you can build comprehensive, engaging, relevant training materials that allow your new hires to learn at their own pace.
Usetiful offers a flexible, no-code user interface that allows you to build interactive employee onboarding and product training material. Our tool can help you develop a high-functioning learning and development strategy that boosts productivity, employee satisfaction, and engagement while producing analytics that help you fine-tune your onboarding.
3) Ease of Use
Onboarding tools for new employees should be user-friendly and intuitive. You shouldn’t need to hire a developer or be a technical wizard to create onboarding and training content. So, look out for a no-code digital adoption platform when you want to make creating and editing onboarding material as simple as possible.
Tools with drag-and-drop interfaces mean that non-technical teams have access to the content they need to show new hires how to excel at their company. Features like this are essential because they help you get the most from your investment by breaking down previous barriers to entry.
Good employee onboarding is about making things as easy and as smooth as possible for new hires. So, it stands to reason that the tools you use to achieve these goals should also be easy to navigate.
We made Usetiful to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. Our tool is no-code and comes with editable templates, meaning you can build slick, professional-looking onboarding content in just minutes.
4) Branding customization
Branding customization is another important consideration when choosing digital adoption tools. The idea here is that any additional onboarding content should fit seamlessly with your applications and products. Tools that allow you to customize the look and feel of your product tours and checklists mean you can create content that won’t take users out of their flow because they are visually consistent.
Usetiful helps you customize the look and feel of your onboarding and training content to create a seamless customer experience that matches your app. You can change colors, font, borders, buttons, and other elements with simple CSS commands.
5) Support
The next factor to think about is what type of support each vendor offers. In particular, there are two big areas to consider.
Integration
Look for software providers who are ready to help you integrate a digital adoption solution within your workflows. While most digital adoption platforms are highly user-friendly, if you haven’t used one before or you’re not technical, you could run into some problems.
A digital adoption platform vendor should work with you to understand your requirements and existing technical setup. Armed with this information, deployment should be plain sailing.
Ongoing customer support
Beyond the integration and deployment of a DAP, you need to find a vendor with responsive customer care. A mix of customer self-service options in the form of a knowledge base and responsive email support will help ensure that you get the most from your onboarding tools.
Ensure you look for a vendor whose interest in onboarding tools for new employees doesn’t stop at selling you software.
Usetiful offers excellent, responsive customer support via email and troubleshooting calls to help resolve any issues you might experience. In addition, we provide online training sessions to ensure your team acquires the skills they need to develop effective onboarding content.
Finally, we have a help center with all the technical documentation necessary to navigate even the most advanced tasks within our product.
6) Security & Privacy
Finally, security and privacy are often overlooked factors when choosing the right employee onboarding software. But they really shouldn’t be. There are strict rules and responsibilities around any software that deals with personal data.
Usetiful offers several security-focused features, such as 2FA, zero-knowledge design, and GDPR-compliant data handling. The rise of remote work means that many of your employee onboarding and training content is vulnerable. For businesses in sectors like finance or healthcare, this creates an unacceptable level of risk. Partnering with a vendor that places a high priority on security and privacy is the only solution.
Final thoughts
Good digital employee onboarding has rarely been more important. Securing talent is challenging and time-consuming, so you can’t let your new hires fall through the gap. Employee onboarding SaaS solutions like Usetiful are here to ensure that your employees can learn to use all the tools they’ll need for the job in an engaging and memorable manner.
The best onboarding tools for new employees should also be part of your overall employee training approach. Learning and development is a huge predictor of employee retention and satisfaction, not to mention the significant role it plays in boosting productivity.
Usetiful has the right blend of characteristics that you need when choosing an employee onboarding platform. It’s incredible value for money and capable of producing interactive product demos for any app or website. Thanks to its no-code capabilities, all you need is a drag-and-drop interface to design complex onboarding materials.
Furthermore, you can customize your onboarding content so it represents your brand, ensuring that colors, font, and the overall look and feel of elements match your company brand. Finally, with first-class support and a focus on security and privacy, you’ll get an application that you can rely on every step of the way.
Try out Usetiful today when you need the most well-rounded employee onboarding software on the market.