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You may have experienced a broad spectrum of onboarding experiences in your career, ranging from bringing your own laptop and office supplies to work on your first day, to:
- A sleek new laptop with pre-installed apps, intranet access, and single sign-on credentials for the company tech stack
- A corporate mobile phone
- A welcome kit of company swag
- A first day guide with a finely tuned agenda
The kind of organization described above is not always the norm, however, but sets a positive stage for what to expect from a robust digital onboarding experience and the day-to-day work experiences to follow.
The first few days or weeks of a new role can quickly make or break an employee’s long-term experience. In our modern era, digital employee enablement is a critical element of the onboarding experience and should extend beyond the first 90 days. Digital enablement solutions that continue throughout an employee’s tenure will keep them aligned with their colleagues, increase productivity, and ultimately drive more revenue to your organization.
Here are the necessary ingredients to create a positive digital employee enablement and onboarding experience.
1. Onboarding Collaboration Between HR and IT
Traditional onboarding often includes a whirlwind tour of the office environment with an HR or team lead, followed by an introduction to your new workspace with login credentials neatly placed on your desk. The next several hours, and even days, are filled with setting up accounts in various tools that range from the company intranet to an overwhelming CRM platform.
Yet when access isn’t given ahead of time or doesn’t go as smoothly as possible, it becomes frustrating for the employees and gives a negative appearance of your company from day one. HR should inform IT staff of the new employee’s first day as soon as possible. This gives them time to procure or test their devices, set up their role-based credentials, and enable access to the appropriate training resources.
2. Application Training and Timing
Any chef knows that timing is critical to anything they create in the kitchen. The same is true for digital employee enablement. It’s a good practice to make training content available for self-directed learning across all the sales-related apps in your tech stack .
In their first week working for a new employer, it can be challenging for employees in roles like sales, business development or marketing to learn the tricks of the trade. It’s no wonder 84% of sales training is forgotten in the first three months , as employees are faced with a flood of new product information, colleagues’ names and personalities, new business processes and business applications all at once. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
Employees don’t have to be experts with every tool in your application library as they ramp up. Take them through “boot camp” training for the basics, and show them where to find micro-learning, just-in-time training or help modules for advanced functionality. Humans quickly forget about 70 percent of what we’ve learned in the classroom anyway, so there’s no need to overload them from the get-go.
Be it classroom or self-directed learning, consider scheduling your software training on days when new hires aren’t learning about your products and services. Or better yet, offer their training for applications like Salesforce.com right in the apps themselves. Digital enablement solutions offer the ability to embed training resources in familiar tools like Outlook, Slack, and Salesforce will help keep the content in context and puts information at their fingertips to make it easy to find help resources later.
3. Communication and Change Management
After an employee has had a proper introduction and time to use new tools and software, it’s important for sales, operations, and enablement teams to communicate their feedback about the effectiveness of said tools and tactics. Keeping a line of open communication can foster a greater sense of community and engagement. Collecting usability feedback from applications like Slack, Outlook and analytics tools can help you populate your knowledge base or modify your walkthroughs and other enablement content.
A foundation of out-of-the-box sales enablement training content is a good way to get started creating a learning library. Sadly, 28% of media and marketing salespeople don’t have easy and direct access to their own sales collateral. When you make it easy to find the content and personalize their learning experience with relevant data and workflows, it adds valuable context and continuity to help your colleagues absorb that learning content.
Sales and digital enablement doesn’t stop once employees are onboarded. As applications evolve over time to mirror changing workflows in the real-world, sales enablement content should be regularly updated to reflect the new user experiences. The same goes for native application upgrades by SaaS providers.
But sharing these notifications and updates can be hard if you’re expecting employees to remember an email or team announcement. Instead, notifying employees to any new features or updates directly in their tools and flow of work continues training effectiveness without ever leaving an application. With Spekit’s digital enablement platform, it’s easy to send and receive product updates as soon as you log in to any application or URL and keeps everyone up to speed.
Be the Reason Your Sales Reps Meet their KPIs
Digital employee enablement empowers your team to do their best work, while making them feel valued and engaged. In return, organizations with the best sales onboarding programs will see 37% faster ramp up time to productivity . Though enablement is often associated with new users or employee onboarding, to be truly effective, it should continue for as long as your team members are in their roles or work for your company.
It’s no surprise that business processes change and evolve all the time. Digital enablement takes the friction out of sales training and enables users to ramp up or adapt to change independently. If you’re looking to augment your digital employee or sales enablement program to one of new productivity and increase revenue and employee engagement, learn how Spekit makes it happen.
