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How cloud computing can onboard and train employees

How new employees are on-boarded and trained is crucial to the success and growth of an organization. According to Amy Hirsh Robinson, principal of the consulting firm The Interchange Group, “Onboarding is a magic moment when new employees decide to stay engaged or become disengaged.” It’s also been found that 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they have a positive on-boarding experience.

Thankfully, cloud-based software solutions can now ensure that your new hires are properly inducted into the company by training them faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Acquire international talent

Depending on your current location, it can be difficult to find enough of the right employees to fill your roster. If the entire training and development process occurs within your local area, for example, you are likely missing out on a world of qualified prospects. Implementing cloud-based software for training and even recruiting will open doors to the vast amount of talent that exists outside your home office.

Thanks to cloud computing, IT departments no longer need to establish buggy and often slow VPN networks in order to connect with employees. Using hosted virtual desktops, employees who work remotely can access their files and apps from any device, anywhere in the world. New hires can answer questionnaires remotely prior to their first day, which can autocomplete forms such as I-9s and W-4s. This cuts down on monotonous paperwork from day one, when the new hire should be focused on learning the job.

Increased security and instant scalability

Francis Li, the Vice President of IT at Softchoice, says that employees are going to utilize the apps that help them get their work done most efficiently. However, in their eagerness to do so, they likely won’t wait until the company has set up alternatives or protected them from external threats.

“It’s far better to control an environment where employees can procure their own apps – but IT can mitigate risk and manage identities and the storage of private data,” says Li. It’s much better to allow employees to work in a controlled and secure network, rather than let them introduce SaaS offerings into your network on their own. A proper installation of cloud-based HR solutions sets the department up for safe and secure success.

Cloud computing solutions are also beneficial in that they grow with your company. When new hires are brought on, they are immediately added to the database and tracked. Small and large companies alike can save some much-needed capital on expensive network infrastructures and instead redistribute that money to their products or employees. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says that 85% of a company’s IT budget is spent on infrastructure maintenance instead of product and innovation. Financial allocation like this can stifle a company’s growth, making it harder to keep up with the competition.

Using software like learning management systems will ensure everyone is on the same page and that you have the right solution for your business, no matter if we're talking about 1k+ employees or just a few tens. LMS solutions can be even more crucial in helping small businesses guarantee capital for investment in other areas of the company. Making the switch to digital training materials can be a very wise economical decision for small businesses.

Progress tracking and a uniform message

Many HR professionals struggle to maintain uniformity in new hire training. If employees receive conflicting information, the entire company’s productivity can suffer as a result. When new hires are brought in without a straightforward strategy in place, inconsistencies in scheduling and training materials become obvious. Your organization will appear disorganized to new hires, ruining their first impression of the company they’ve looked forward to joining.

In a study from the Journal of Managerial Psychology, business professor Jamie Gruman states that “simply throwing newcomers into a job and letting them fend for themselves results in their being socialized by default rather than design.” His study found that a more structured orientation for new employees made employees happier and more confident that they were a good fit for the job. Cloud-based software training allows organizations to implement training protocols ahead of time. In this method, all new hires are guaranteed to follow the same process as everyone else.

Applying these cloud-based training structures also allows for improved data analysis. The software will not only walk new hires through the on-boarding process, but it will also track their progress along the way. Employers can gain insights into which tasks are taking longer than expected and which areas appear easier to understand. It might turn out that an assignment a company had allotted days for a new hire to complete actually only takes a few hours. In such a case, the training program can be adjusted company-wide in real time.

Without a structured plan, gathering this data becomes much more difficult. If each new hire or training class has differing on-boarding experiences, it is more laborious to deal with performance issues. If an employee is struggling to perform early on, it can be near impossible to tell if the problem lies with them or their training.

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