Danielle is a journalist turned content marketer who’s spent the greater part of her career building marketing and content strategies at early-stage B2B tech companies. Based in New Orleans, you can find her at a concert, Take Paws animal shelter, or eating her weight in crawfish!
22,000 people signed up last year to use Tango for onboarding and here's what they secretly dreaded most:
⚠️ Being on an onboarding island for weeks, disconnected from the team and real work
⚠️ Not being able to get their first win because they don’t know how to use new software yet
⚠️ Sifting through traditional software training (👋🏽 long videos; 👋🏿 wordy PDFs)
…that is, if there was any process documentation at all.
Here’s what your new hires actually want out of their first two weeks.👇🏽
🙏 Less time completing training modules and dutifully crossing items off a checklist
🏃🏾 More time channeling energy and excitement about your company/product into their first project
Think about it this way. The longer it takes your new hires to learn new software—and the more mental energy they have to burn trying to memorize constantly evolving processes—the less time and bandwidth they’ll have for learning about your company’s:
✔️ Customers
✔️ Product/service
✔️ Category
✔️ Goals
✔️ Competition
Your training and enablement tech stack can either fuel or flatten a new hire’s first-day-of-camp energy.
It may be tempting to lean on your Learning Management System (LMS) or Knowledge Base (KB) to help new hires learn their way around your most important tools.
But your LMS and KB are designed to increase general knowledge—about your market, customer, company, product, or service. To increase software knowledge, you need a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP).
What’s a DAP? A tool that guides people through how to use new software…as they jump in and start using that software. 💪🏾
Whether you have a DAP purpose-built for software training or not, here are some clues your onboarding is missing the mark (even if your new hires are too reluctant to tell you otherwise):
1️⃣ Onboarding looks the same for everyone across roles
2️⃣ You get a sea of blank stares throughout your training sessions
3️⃣ 90% of your training material is for later/someday
4️⃣ No one’s watching your software training videos in your LMS or Google Drive
5️⃣ Your (admittedly dense) SOPs are collecting dust
6️⃣ People can’t find answers in your knowledge base or learning management system
7️⃣ 50% of your cohort is pinging you for help learning your tech stack
8️⃣ The other 50% is too embarrassed to ask for help
9️⃣ Onboarding tasks never get finished because people are already context-switching like crazy
🔟 Hiring managers and execs are complaining about new hire time-to-ramp
Digital Adoption Platforms like Tango make it easier to set new team members up for success.
You can:
✨ Help your operations team automatically document processes and turn your onboarding materials into step-by-step, interactive walkthroughs new hires will actually want to use
🤩 Embed how-to instructions directly in the software essential to each role (where end users work)
🌟Instead of overwhelming new hires with processes to memorize, provide progressive instruction and reference closer to when it’s needed
📈 Dig into process adoption analytics to deliver personalized help and show impact
Don’t want to take our word for it? Fair enough. Aaron MacDonald, Faire’s Senior Manager of Customer Experience Enablement and a recent Change Enablers podcast guest, also knows a thing or two about overhauling onboarding.
After all, he was brought on to:
…and he accomplished all that and then some.
“We were successfully able to increase knowledge sharing across the board and reduce time to proficiency from six months to three months. Now, we’re exploring what else we can do to take an even more employee-first approach to onboarding, drive ongoing program and performance improvements, and prove the ROI of our program.”
Learn more about Aaron’s project—and how to enhance your own impact—on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
