Think back to your first day at your company: In the best case scenario, connections are forged, perspectives are shared, and productive growth kicks off. The foundation that equips every new team member for value creation in their role, employee onboarding sets the stage for a critical pattern of engagement and long-term contribution.

A rich, engaging, and effective employee onboarding experience requires an intentional approach that moves well beyond checklists, rote tasks, and generic information dumps. Modern onboarding programs not only teach a new employee the basics, they foster connection, collaboration, and community through holistic, highly interactive, and immersive periods of engagement that start on (or even before) a worker’s very first day.

In an ongoing series, we will explore onboarding initiatives centered around the six key pillars of learning on NovoEd: Practice & Application, Discussion & Feedback, Mentors & Managers, Effective Facilitation, Team-Based Learning, and Curated & Goal-Aligned Content.

We’ll continue with the Discussion & Feedback pillar, a cornerstone of cohort-based learning and an essential component of NovoEd’s collaborative learning platform.

How Discussion & Feedback Drive New Employee Engagement

Discussions convene groups of learners and experts around specific topics to clarify/confirm understanding, solve problems, come up with new ideas, or generate approaches to issues of common concern.
Feedback closes the gap between performance and goals. Feedback is the exchange of information that leads to an increase in performance and knowledge retention.

In a collaborative online learning setting, discussions create spaces for colleagues to connect, collaborate, reach out for help, reflect on their experiences, and support one another. NovoEd allows for both informal, naturally-sparked discussions as well as intentional discussion activities that can:

Deepen the learner’s understanding of the material
Encourage the practice of reflection
Strengthen shared mindsets and reinforce changes in behaviors
Empower individuals to contribute ideas, insights, and expertise
Broaden perspectives that might otherwise have been limited to individual experiences
Engage introverted learners who might be inhibited within in-person learning environments

Discussions provide richer learning experiences that can connect learners across departments, time zones, and experiences. Complex topics lend themselves easily to a discussion, as learners benefit from increased community participation and peer-to-peer interaction in these cases. Building a community with robust discussions helps spur engagement and increase communication.

Feedback is one of the best ways for learners to grow, and is a key valued-added component to integrate in a learning experience. Evaluation is important in an online learning environment because it allows the learner to assess their progress and determine improvements they can make moving forward. Meaningful feedback can be critical to a learners’ success as it promotes a type of self-reflection that can increase knowledge retention. Learners providing feedback to each other (peer feedback) can lead to constructive discussions that engage them and may expose them to ideas or perspectives they hadn’t considered before.

NovoEd provides several tools for incorporating feedback, whether formal or informal, public or private, instructor-to-learner or peer-to-peer. Peer feedback happens when a course encourages or requires learners to comment on their colleagues’ posts and assignment submissions. Even informal feedback such as comments on submissions can lead to higher course completion rates and higher engagement.

Social and collaborative learning platforms offer organizations the ability to structure a comprehensive, multilayered virtual onboarding experience that incorporates elements of in-person onboarding, such as coaching; peer-to-peer practice; team experiences; engagement with mentors, managers, and business leaders; learning in the context of work; formal and informal feedback; and more.

Ideas for Onboarding Program Activities That Effectively Incorporate Discussion & Feedback

Post questions prior to live events (for subject matter experts to answer during the live session)
Tag other members of your team to continue conversations with them
Feedback on identity sharing/”Introduce Yourself” activity to determine similarities
Talk about shared interests with an affinity group
Have a conversation with a manager/colleague and report back to the community
Share what is your role in achieving departmental and company goals (and get feedback from managers)

To learn how NovoEd’s cohort-based learning platform powers meaningful employee onboarding for today’s organizations, request a demo today.