Onboarding Facilitation: Enhance Onboarding with Cohort-Based Learning

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 Effective Facilitation pillar, a cornerstone of cohort-based learning and an essential component of NovoEd’s social and collaborative learning platform.

How Effective Facilitation Drives New Employee Engagement

Effective facilitation helps provide every participant with a successful and high-quality collaborative learning experience that leads to results.

While online learning can offer great opportunities for self-directed learning and flexibility, sometimes you need to have a human (or a team of humans) on the other side to encourage, guide, and create opportunities for connection and deeper learning. This is where facilitators come in.

Course facilitation includes everything involved in running a course, from administrative tasks to the kinds of tasks that a traditional classroom facilitator would do.

A facilitator, or team of facilitators, may use a number of different strategies to engage learners in an online learning environment. Facilitators who are available and accessible to learners are a crucial part of a learner’s journey. Humanized content, being able to convey concepts in meaningful ways, and using multiple engagement methods improves learners’ sense of community and feeling of connectedness to the content and the course. Effectively facilitating an online course can also be very rewarding for the facilitator(s).

Based on years of experience with enterprise clients, our expert team of learning designers has seen firsthand how integrating high-quality facilitation into online programs increases engagement, activates learning, and accelerates capability development.

Ideas for Onboarding Program Activities That Effectively Incorporate Effective Facilitation

Lean towards a more involved facilitator approach (see here for more details)
Create a safe space for questions and discussions
Offer the option to add pronouns in custom profile questions and ensure the facilitation team uses them appropriately in all comments and conversations
Use the Privacy Option on assignment submissions that allows learners to choose whether they share publicly with the course or just with the teaching team

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