A Guide to Effective Onboarding New Employees with the Knowledge base
The primary purpose of an employee onboarding process is to make an employee’s first days at work informative and productive. But the critical aspect of the employee onboarding process is to ensure that the employee adapts to the organization and its culture smoothly.
If you do not have an effective internal knowledge base for your employees, then onboarding will be a difficult task for your organization as well as your employees!
A knowledge base can help you to onboard your new employees effectively. You can use it to implement a smooth transition to the company and provide the right kind of guidance to new employees with the right content in one place. You can even use it to better your customer service and support. Basically, you can create an internal wiki to scale your organization.
Knowledge Base solution: For effective onboarding
Onboarding can be a very overwhelming time.
At this time, one is faced with a bulk load of data at one go. The new hire might get overwhelmed and start looking for another job, using wiki tools and creating internal wikis along with a trackable sheet set over a span of 4 to 5 months to track the new hires onboarding progress and bring in changes to speed up the process to increase the chance of retention.
Knowledge base or internal wiki tools help create and securely share necessary product or service-related information with the users. Obviously, one of the main reasons knowledge base software is a popular solution for onboarding is that it eliminates wasted time in recreating or searching for relevant content to help get new hires settled and trained faster.
Information on the go
A knowledge base solution provides a way to create, share, store and organize product or service information and supporting content. Using a knowledge management system, you can easily add data on the work process, policies, department, product details, competitor data, role-specific details, and much more and share with the new employees on joining.
And they can access the data, once shared with them, in their own leisure time and learn about the company from anywhere. Rather than shoulder taping their colleagues for information, they can just search on the wiki tools and learn about it.
No rush- learn at your own leisure
Employees can log in and access the training documents once shared– from anywhere online.
Training documentation can be on-demand when it comes to topics that are non-disclosure or non-compete, for example. Employees (or potential employees) don’t need to waste their time going through policies in a hurry!
Besides, learning should be more convenient and be accessible 24/7/365 days. And with bulky documents to wade through in the office for learning, they can focus on what they have been hired for.
Next level Employee training
Employee training gives you an opportunity to tap into the full potential of each new employee. If you are a mid-size company or a startup, it may be very expensive for you to shell out money for such onboarding runs every month.
And you cannot expect your employees to remember everything.
Creating an internal wiki on the platform and providing other wiki tools to help them whenever they get stuck or need help– can help them learn faster and get trained to perform their best at a much faster pace.
An online information repository makes sure that no matter what task, project, or work comes up in the company, there will always be relevant information at the fingertips of each and every employee to ensure that no running shoe gets delayed!
Boost new hires confidence and retention
If your new hires do not have to go shoulder tapping older employees for project information, but rather they can just check it on their fingertips on a wiki tool, won’t it boost their confidence?
And more confidence in their knowledge, product, and company – higher the chances of the new hires staying with the company for longer.
Secure data sharing
A knowledge base allows limited content editor access ensuring authentic creation of documents which is again moderated. It allows limited view access, link view access, and other features to ensure that the doc is not reshared with others without permission when it comes to any company’s confidential documentation or contracts.
Reduces errors and double work
Miscommunication issues – especially the ones related to company policies, ethics, and other matters – often arise in an organization. A company’s knowledge base can help curb these errors because it allows the publication of fully validated facts that were previously approved by editors who regularly review content for accuracy and completeness.
Now that we have seen why a knowledge base solution is a go-to onboarding tool for training new hires let’s see how exactly you can leverage a knowledge base tool during an onboarding process.
Effective Employee Onboarding Process
The employee onboarding process starts as soon as the employee agrees to the agreement and lasts till he has learned everything about the company and company culture. The onboarding process is supposed to be streamlined with the employee’s work task aligned around 2-3 months with periodic checks in to ensure that the employee is well absorbed in the company’s environment.
Let us look at how the onboarding process can be enriched with the use of wiki tools.
As soon as the agreement is signed
To make sure that new employees aren’t stressed out the moment they walk into work on their first day, prepare in advance to make it as easy as possible for them.
For example, remember to double-check with human resources whether they have already finalized all of the paperwork needed to complete a background check, with security clearances obtained so that they are not delayed while getting access to systems and data, including any software and required devices. And inform the joining manager about the joint and get the details about the assigning buddy.
Post that is done in the company’s joining knowledge base or employee handbook with the candidate, so that he/she can be little versed in the company’s background, top members, etc.
First day
The dreaded first day of office!
They might already be overwhelmed as they don’t know anybody. Assign the buddy and share the details of teammates, project, and company’s security policies with the help of wiki tools.
This would allow him to learn about the job he is supposed to do easily and in his own time via remote access. This would give him a chance to obtain knowledge gradually, making the learning process less overwhelming.
First week
Now that the candidate is a little absorbed with the project and his team. You can use the employee dashboard and create a wiki for him to learn about the company’s policies, values, mission, and culture and share in the knowledge base of the company’s other offerings and services.
Track the progress of learning, keeping in mind the job requirements. You can check back again after every 15 days to see how the progress of learning is going, giving the new candidates ample time to learn without over-pressuring them.
After 2-3 months
Based on how your company is, this timeline may vary. For some multinational companies, this check-in is done after four and in some 6.
After a month, employees should be comfortable with the office environment.
If they are not, try getting them engaged by asking them what sort of enjoyable events they’d like to attend and other activities they might like to partake in as a unit and organizing them with the company and, more realistically, with the team.
Review their till now performance and growth and provide them feedback.
The feedback can get their performance to improve quickly and efficiently, turning these new resources into bright spots on your team sooner than later. Have employee reviews with clear expectations and encourage collaboration among new hires by encouraging them to be open with their thoughts about how things could be done better.
You can even enable knowledge-based pieces of training to help new employees develop specific skills more fully over time if needed and empower them to grow!
Note: Periodically check with employees about their development, learning and ask for their general feedback about the company, to know how they are feeling about the company and what their plans are.
Parting words
The Knowledge Base is one of the most powerful features of the HR Planner and is an integral part of onboarding new employees. Creating wikis with the help of the wiki tool is easy to work with and can be used to help new employees learn about the company. The services it offers like, how to find information and how to ask questions give the learning on the go another definition. The knowledge base is an excellent resource for training new employees and can be a great way for current employees to learn new information as well.
Authored by Dheepika Sai, a freelance writer and blogger. While not working, she enjoys gardening and cooking.