According to a study, most organizations achieve about a 22% turnover rate during the first 45 days of onboarding. Also, about 4% of new hires quit their jobs after the first day of resuming at their organizations. Well, these challenges often arise as a result of less interactive onboarding programs.

According to a study by Gallup, only 12% of employees agree their organization’s onboarding program is active. As such, it means that about 88% of organizations don’t onboard well.

What if I told you that creating an effective and interactive employee onboarding program isn’t as daunting as you think? That all you need is to follow a few steps, and you’ll be able to get it done the right way?

In this post, we’ll be looking at how to create an interactive onboarding experience for your new hires.

5 Steps to create an interactive onboarding experience

Step #1: Take time and plan your onboarding strategy

To create an interactive onboarding experience for your new employees, the first thing that you need is to have an effective strategy in place.

Talking of an effective strategy, it should enable all your new hires to participate in the program entirely. While there are several design conventions and tools to help you achieve that, here are a few steps you can follow:

• Firstly, you need to employ an interactive training approach to immerse your new hires in the work environment. You can do that by combining both traditional and online onboarding elements. However, the focus should be on creating an interactive onboarding experience for them.

• Also, ensure you enroll your new hires in online training courses to help them establish background knowledge of their job functions.

Step #2: Engage your new hires immediately after the recruitment process

To create a practical and interactive onboarding experience for your new employees, another thing you need to consider is the engagement level.

So, as soon as the new hires accept your job offer, you should try and take the opportunity of the functionalities of onboarding tools to send welcome emails to them.

Apart from that, you should also make use of the tool to invite them to your new hire portal, where they get to see relevant information about your company.

Furthermore, you can make use of the opportunity and provide them with the option of making use of the portal to upload their scanned documents.

Also, you can introduce them to what they’ll be expecting on the first day of onboarding. By doing all of that, new hires tend to become free to interact with their mentor during the onboarding program and also settle down quickly in their new roles.

Step #3: Make use of gamification

To start with, gamification is a learning strategy that helps to apply typical elements of game playing to online training. With this strategy, you can quickly provide your learners with a practical and interactive onboarding experience.

One of the benefits of gamification in an onboarding program is that it helps to challenge and engage the new hires in a task.

Apart from that, it also helps to boost their retention ability, allowing them to apply knowledge to their job functions.

As for the strategy, it includes creating interactive games and supporting them with quizzes. The essence of that is to assess their knowledge and fill gaps – in case there is any.

Step #4: Use video to create engagement

For you to create a memorable onboarding experience, another thing you can consider doing is to create an interactive video. While there are several benefits attached to doing that, one such is that it helps to create the right engagement.

That said, to create a video, you can have one, which begins with the message from the company’s CEO. That could be followed by the company’s culture and its aim as an organization.

Step #5: Make use of simulation

Surely, you’ll agree with me that most new employees, if not all, feel anxious and nervous about their first day. Apart from that, they are mostly worried about how to navigate themselves in a new environment.

One way to provide a solution to the challenges is to offer them a simulated experience, which you should be able to create using your onboarding tool.

With simulations, you can quickly provide the new hires with a virtual tour of your company’s environment. The benefit of doing that is it helps to build your new hires’ confidence on the first day of joining the company.