The Power of Collaborative Onboarding: Enhance Onboarding with Team-Based Learning

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 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.

A cohort-based, collaborative learning platform enables community team building, even across geographies, elevating and enhancing collaboration between new hires, mentors, and managers. Capabilities can be acquired in a safe environment and in the context of your organization and your learners’ roles. Onboarding can be ongoing, reinforcing organizational values over time and with intention.

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, Team-Based Learning, Effective Facilitation, and Curated & Goal-Aligned Content.

We’ll continue our series with the Team-Based Learning pillar, a cornerstone of cohort-based learning and an essential component of NovoEd’s social and collaborative learning platform.

How Team-Based Learning Helps New Employees Connect to Their Team and Their Organization

Research has proven that learning collaboratively is more successful than learning individually, leading to greater retention of information, more learner satisfaction, and a more impactful learning experience that creates mutually beneficial teams and connects participants more deeply with their organizations.

Team-based learning can increase the understanding of diverse perspectives and provide experience for real life social and employment situations. Learners can also discover improved self-esteem, self-management, and leadership skills they might not have known they had. 

NovoEd gives you three options to engage your learners in collaborative learning: course-long teams, assignment-long teams, and groups, each of which allow for connection and collaboration with teammates, managers, and mentors, an especially helpful function as a new employee is being onboarded to their organization.

NovoEd analyzed and compiled years of experience with best-in-class programs into a format you can quickly reference as you design your learning experiences. Take these ideas and best practices to incorporate into your current programs or use as inspiration for new activities, new ways to engage your audience with learning, or as an alternative to traditional methods.

Ideas for Onboarding Program Activities That Powerfully Incorporate Team-Based Learning

• Compile a case study for the company/situational assignment that showcases a challenge to the company
• Assemble homogeneous participants together based on region and or business division and functional area
• Group heterogenous participants together to create networks across divisions
• Collaborate on new employee resource list to be shared with the next cohort
• Play an onboarding bingo game!
• Create a PowerPoint slide about a particular product your organization offers
• Interview with a partner/buddy

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