It’s never too early to think about your onboarding process and where an employee training checklist would fit in. After all, studies show that companies with a strong onboarding experience can increase employee retention by more than 80% compared to their counterparts.
But where do you start? How can you ensure that new team members can follow the right training process from the moment they step in the door, ready to get started?
The key is a new hire training checklist. With a standardized process, you can make sure that your employee development gets off on the right foot from the first moment of the first week.
Of course, you can’t just build your employee onboarding checklist based on hunches. The right plan starts with understanding the training needs of your team—along with the needs of other stakeholders, like supervisors and existing team members. It ensures a smooth transition into ongoing training sessions once onboarding is complete.
So, let’s get started. Learn how to build a new employee training checklist designed to make your onboarding process a rousing success.
Why do you need an onboarding checklist for new hires?
A successful onboarding process might just be the most crucial factor in helping new hires succeed. Most importantly, it builds employee engagement from the start date through the entire orientation process. According to one study, employees who go through successful onboarding feel 18 times more committed to their workplace than those who don’t.
But that’s not the only benefit of a successful employee training checklist. Consider:
- An ability to reliably train all new hires on core competencies, like safety training for emergency procedures
- The potential to familiarize your new hires with the employee handbook and all policies outlined in it
- The opportunity to familiarize new employees with their workspace, from individual workstations to the larger environment
- Enhanced capacities to train new employees in person with the same core skills as your distributed workforce
- The capability to create a common baseline for new hires that makes eventual performance reviews more objective and fair
The right new employee training checklist can accomplish all of these goals. More broadly, it creates a roadmap of milestones and check-ins that all new hires can use to maximize their chances of long-term engagement and success with your organization.
What makes a good training and onboarding checklist?
Don’t just use an employee training checklist template you find online. It might not fit your organization or specific needs. Instead, make sure any checklist you build or find has a few key attributes to help it succeed:
- Relevant: Does every item on the list match the steps and skills that newly hired employees will be expected to complete?
- Goal-based: Can you define an end goal of completing the checklist and track the process toward that goal through learning metrics?
- Chronological: Can newly hired employees easily follow along, from one step to the next, to complete the list?
- Tangible: Does each step connect to specific modules and other actions your new hires can take to complete it?
- Easy to follow: Are the words, steps, and flow of the checklist natural to follow, or could they introduce confusion for employees?
Checklists that follow these best practices are much more likely to benefit your new hires. They allow you to build intuitive training courses, FAQs, and other supplemental pieces that help your employees complete the individual steps required. Now, it’s time to get into the nuances of what the ideal employee training checklist should actually include.
8 components every employee training checklist template should include
For any good employee training checklist, standardization is crucial. With the right learning management platform, you can build your own. At the same time, you’ll still want to make sure every template you build includes at least a few core components to help it succeed.
These core components include the following:
1. Basic employee information
Every checklist must be at least a little custom to be relevant for every employee. That also means you should identify exactly who it’s for. Include a space for key employee information at the top. Even a blank spot for the new employee’s name, start date, and department into which they are onboarding can go a long way.
2. Key learning objectives for the training program
After that, provide an outline of what exactly the training program you’ve built for your new hires entails. This is not necessarily a checklist item, but the guiding principles that guide the checklist items your employees will need to follow for successful onboarding.
In other words, this is where you let your new team members know what they’re expected to learn, from the basics of your policies to some of the more specific skills required for their jobs. In the spirit of an employee training checklist, you can include a field where the reader acknowledges that they’ve read and understood the objectives before they get started.
3. Simple steps to take on the employee’s first day
When your new employees walk in the door, what do you expect them to do? The answer is probably only tangentially related to their eventual day-to-day activities. It might include signing some documents with HR, introducing themselves to others on their team, and familiarizing themselves with their workspace and equipment.
No matter the exact steps, including them on your employee training checklist can help to set those expectations. Now, every new hire walking into the new situation will have a good idea of what they should do and what constitutes a successful first day.
4. An overview of company policies
Next, be sure that your employees familiarize themselves with the key policies through your employee handbook. Though each new employee training checklist should be customized, this is one step you can safely include for all new hires.
Be sure to make the checklist item as actionable as possible. For example, simply asking employees to check off that they’ve familiarized themselves with all policies is not easy to prove or standardize. Instead, consider building a simple quiz in your LMS that asks fundamental questions about each of the most important policies your employees need to learn. The checklist item can then become a successful completion of the quiz, which is a much more tangible step.
5. Training materials on company culture
The willingness and propensity of new hires to understand and embrace your company culture is vital to their long-term engagement with you. Your training checklist is a perfect opportunity to start that process on the right foot.
Use the checklist to guide your newly hired employees to the right spots to learn about your culture. It might consist of videos from other employees of whitepapers that further explain it. Any background on mission and vision can also help to build that deeper insight. Then, as with basic company policies, create an actionable step for employees to acknowledge that they understand what working for your organization is all about.
6. Hard skills training to build core competencies
Of course, learning about policies and culture can only be part of successful onboarding. The ideal onboarding checklist should also include more in-depth training sessions. This will ultimately provide new members of your team with the hard skills they can apply directly to their jobs.
This is where the checklist most closely connects with your larger training program. Link checklist items to your training sessions and modules. Then make passing the final test or quiz automatically check an item off the to-do list. In an ideal world, by the time all items are checked off, your new team members have acquired all the basic skills needed to succeed in their daily responsibilities.
7. An ongoing training schedule for continuous improvement
Of course, in any successful learning-optimized optimization, training is never truly complete. The onboarding checklist may cover the basics. But ongoing development can still serve to continue improving employee skills, engagement, and productivity.
That, in turn, makes it extremely beneficial to link your new hire training checklist with the types of ongoing development opportunities that might be offered. It may be a simple connection, like linking to your training materials and schedule. Alternatively, you can go more in-depth. For example, require new employees to engage with at least one development opportunity to consider their onboarding complete.
8. An opportunity for collecting feedback on the employee training plan
Finally, it never hurts to hear from your employees. In fact, it might just be the final piece to make sure your employee training schedule is successful.
To get there, consider making one of your checklist items providing feedback about your training plan. A simple form or quiz will allow new hires to let you know:
- How relevant each step they need to complete is
- What’s missing
- Where improvements are possible
Then, use that information to improve your plan and checklist over time.
Ready to build and execute your employee training checklist?
It’s a complex process, but the effort you put into it will be well worth it. With the right employee training checklist, you can make sure that new hires learn everything they need to be successful in their role. Also, while not the only component of it, the right software can make a massive impact in driving toward that success. Book a demo with Docebo now to learn how the right LMS can make all the difference in building and executing your onboarding and new hire training process.
