You’ve hired seven new employees, and you are responsible for getting each of them trained and up to speed, ready to be put to work by the end of the week. You also are expected to give each of them a full explanation of the various tasks for which they will be responsible, and they will also need to be introduced to the company culture and expectations. What’s more, you need to ensure that they each receive the same information and are afforded the same opportunity to ask questions and get hands-on experience. Oh, and you’ll still be responsible for all your normal duties. Lucky for you, you know the solution lies in a group onboarding session.

 

What Is Group Onboarding?

While it isn’t the solution to every situation, group onboarding provides a simple way to ensure that the same material is presented to each new employee in the same way. This means that they will all begin their journey with your company on equal footing, ensuring they have the same opportunity to be successful. Many variables exist that can affect the training environment, such as unexpected interruptions or questions from the trainees, and providing a single experience for each new employee ensures that these variables don’t set some employees behind others.

Group onboarding is also a good way to extend the training process throughout the year for existing employees. For example, your company may want to provide regular updates on common practices or focus on a different area of interest each month, such as safety while working on ladders or updates to food safety practices. Group onboarding allows you to present this material to all your employees, or individual teams, in a simple and quick manner. Taking this approach allows your leaders to work more efficiently, requiring them to run a single session rather than multiple ones for each employee individually.

 

Things to Remember

An important thing to consider in the group onboarding process is what to do for those employees who cannot make it to the group session. Whether their absence is due to other time-sensitive work or simply absence from work, they still need to learn the material. This can be accomplished in a few different ways, such as by recording the group session and having the absent employee watch the video later, or by providing them a one-on-one session later that covers the same material. However you do it, make sure that the employee is presented with all of the same information, as he or she will need it to be on the same page as your other employees.

Of course, if you are going to have to follow up with any employees who missed your group onboarding session, the next logical thing to remember is that you need to know who that is. This means you need to have some method of checking employees in or otherwise taking attendance, as without doing so, you’ll have some employees who miss out on the information. And unless you are presenting information that isn’t actually important, which we don’t recommend, they need to know what they missed.

 
Whether or not group onboarding is the solution for your company depends largely on your needs. If you typically hire employees one at a time for tasks that only he or she will perform, you’ll be better served by individualized onboarding. If, however, you hire multiple employees simultaneously to similar positions, group onboarding may be the answer, allowing you to streamline your onboarding process and ensure that each employee starts off on equal footing. And if you want the best of both worlds, take a look at insideoutlms.com.

 

For more information on successful employee onboarding, see our other blog posts.