Onboarding in Totara

What is onboarding?

Onboarding is the process of preparing new employees to work in your organisation. This typically includes:

• Making new starters feel welcome
• Conveying the organisation's mission, values, policies and culture
• Introducing new starters to important people and colleagues
• Completing any mandatory training
• Setting out performance expectations and metrics

Providing a good onboarding experience should prepare employees to do their jobs effectively and productively, as well as increasing job satisfaction and employee retention. Onboarding will look different for every organisation depending on their exact requirements - you'll need to spend some time thinking about how best to onboard your employees to give them the tools they need to succeed.

Watch this video from the Totara Academy for a short summary of how Totara supports onboarding, then read on to find out about useful features you can use to create an effective onboarding experience.

Complete the Using Totara for onboarding course on the Totara Academy if you want to delve deeper into this topic.

Setting up user accounts

Whenever new employees join your organisation, you need to set them up with a user account on your Totara site, allowing them to access learning, performance activities, goals, workspaces, competencies and more.

If you're a small organisation with very few new starters, you might prefer to create user accounts manually. However, if you have a large number of new starters, it's better to automate the process to reduce the manual work required. HR import allows you to easily import all of your user data from a CSV file or other data source.

User access

Next, you need to consider what content different users will be able to see on your site. The permissions and capabilities given to each user are based on their role in the system and at different context levels - the majority of your users will just need the Learner role, but you can assign other roles as required.

Instead of managing individual users, it's useful to set up audiences to group your employees. An audience can either use a group of manually selected users, or users that are automatically added based on a set of rules. You can then assign different content to each audience as required.

You can also create specific dashboards for each group of users, signposting them to relevant training, policies or contacts using blocks. If you created any audiences, you can use these to assign dashboards.

Assigning learning, competencies and more

Here we have assumed that you already have learning content on your site, so check the Course Creator guide for more information on setting up courses on your site. 

There are a few ways to approach assigning content to learners, depending on how automated and how granular you want the process to be.

For example, you could simply allow managers to enrol their team on any useful courses. Alternatively, for a more structured approach you could use any audience you have configured to assign content from your site, such as:

• Assigning learners to programs and certifications
• Creating learning plans
• Assigning competencies

All new starters could be added to a single audience, which you would use to assign mandatory training for all employees, such as training on company policies. You could then create audiences for specific roles or departments, which you would use to assign more specific training, such as relevant health and safety or data security courses. For training that will need to be completed after a certain amount of time, you can create and assign certifications.

As well as assigning specific learning that needs to be completed, you can also assign competencies to reflect the various skills a user needs to demonstrate in their role, and the standards they need to meet for those skills. Once they've sufficiently displayed those skills, a manager can mark them as proficient for the relevant competencies.

You could also set up a learning plan template containing all of the training and competencies (if using the advanced learning plan workflow) relevant to a group's roles and responsibilities, then assign it to a dynamic audience, or allow managers to assign the learning plan manually if you wish to have more granularity.

Checking in with your new starters

Onboarding isn't just setting up new employees for their first day - instead, it's an ongoing process that should ensure that employees are settled in and able to do their new jobs efficiently.

One of the best ways to find out how new employees are doing is to simply ask - you want new starters to have opportunities to check in with their managers throughout their onboarding and first few months in the organisation. You can do this by setting up regular reviews and check-ins using performance activities. By encouraging managers to have regular, structured conversations with their new team members you can help to ensure that any issues are discussed and addressed.

Additionally, you could set up a workspace for each cohort of new starters. This can be a space for users to ask questions, share knowledge and resources, and review curated informal learning to help them on their onboarding journey. You can also set up other useful workspaces - for example, you could set up a workspace for each team, allowing new starters to meet their team and start collaborating immediately.

Case study: Onboarding with the Met Office

Onboarding looks different for every organisation depending on their requirements. Watch this video from the Totara Academy to see how the Met Office onboards their new starters with Totara.