How Does Augmented Reality Enable Effective Onboarding?
Onboarding is the critical first step in the employee lifecycle. Effective onboarding should set new hires up for success from their first day on the job and every day after that. For industrial organizations, missed opportunities in the onboarding process can leave employees feeling unprepared to meet the demands of their role, which ultimately impacts productivity, overburdens SMEs, and potentially compromises safety and quality.
What is onboarding?
Onboarding refers to the process of introducing new hires to the organization by providing training, resources, assignments, and other ongoing support. Whether or not they’re onboarding employees who are new to the industry, each organization has unique products and processes that they must teach their workforce about. Throughout the onboarding process, new hires will develop critical skills that they’ll use on the job.
Why is effective employee onboarding important?
Depending on the industry and market, onboarding has different requirements. In retail, for example, there can be a gradual runway that includes learning on the job, with a level of permissible errors expected along the way. For industrial companies, onboarding requirements are extremely high, as employee preparedness and competency have a significant impact on quality, safety, productivity, and profitability. A simple mistake on the shop floor can result in hours of downed equipment, missed orders, customer dissatisfaction, or even serious physical injury.
Onboarding is the first step in the employee lifecycle in which frontline workers are learning about the manufacturer’s unique equipment and workflows. Not only are these different for each organization, but they also present a lot of information for new hires to absorb. Effective employee onboarding should prepare frontline workers to be efficient, successful, and safe in their roles. However, it’s due to increasingly complex products and processes that traditional onboarding methods don’t always meet that standard.
What are the challenges of using traditional onboarding methods?
Paper-based manuals and onboarding materials are missing critical visual context, which can slow comprehension for new hires. Long, cumbersome manuals and in-person classes require the employees’ full attention, meaning they can’t be productive while learning new tasks. And the simple act of referring to a printed reference manual can pose a distraction, potentially making a bad situation even worse. When new hires graduate from onboarding, they often require on-the-job assistance from SMEs, interrupting those experienced workers during their important tasks. And when it comes time to update onboarding materials, organizations find that it’s costly and time-consuming to edit and redistribute them. These challenges have led best-in-class manufacturers to pursue augmented reality (AR) solutions for onboarding.
What are the benefits of using augmented reality for onboarding?
AR onboarding methods address these challenges, transforming the new hire experience and yielding important business benefits, such as:
Easy to reuse and distribute training
AR enables manufacturers to create digital onboarding materials, which can be easily shared and scaled across the workforce and updated at any time. This removes the time and money investment that organizations once made to edit, print, and redistribute paper materials. And employees can resume their tasks knowing they’re always using the latest and greatest information.
Provides consistent onboarding to new hires
With paper-based onboarding materials and in-person classes, each employee has a different experience—which means that each person on the line could be approaching tasks with a different level of comprehension. AR onboarding materials are delivered at scale through the employees’ mobile devices or tablets, giving each new hire the same information and the same onboarding experience.
Faster time to productivity
Rather than consuming paper-based onboarding materials and attending classes before beginning important tasks, frontline workers can use AR onboarding to learn and complete those tasks in real time on the job. This “learning-by-doing” approach helps accelerate comprehension and boost workforce productivity while minimizing errors.
Reduces the potential of safety incidents
With the real-time guidance and visual warnings that the AR onboarding experience provides, employees are more engaged with their work and aware of potential issues before they impact safety. As a result, manufacturers realize a lower risk of on-the-job safety incidents, improving the employee experience and reducing the costs associated with accidents.
Less reliance on subject matter experts
Frontline workers can rely on AR onboarding as a “digital mentor,” leveraging real-time guidance and in-context instructions while completing important tasks. This is thanks to SMEs who use AR to capture content for onboarding instructions from their point of view. That way, frontline workers benefit from veterans’ expertise without interrupting their work.
What are the challenges of using augmented reality for onboarding?
Introducing new technology can feel daunting, which might present some challenges when adopting AR for onboarding. But with a clear deployment and adoption strategy, AR is easily integrated into any onboarding program and conveniently accessed on tablets and mobile devices for dramatically improved efficiency, quality, and safety metrics.
How do you successfully incorporate AR into the onboarding process?
As with any new initiative, getting employee buy-in requires a carefully planned change management strategy. Involving the entire workforce in the decision to adopt AR for onboarding will help them understand—and look forward to—all the ways the technology will benefit their day-to-day lives. For new hires, incorporating AR will enrich the onboarding process with exciting technology, empower them to be self-sufficient on the job, and improve their productivity and safety. For SMEs, AR will free up more of their time to focus on their own work.
Examples of onboarding with augmented reality
Once AR has been implemented, the versatile technology is useful across different aspects of onboarding, such as:
Equipment trainings with AR object recognition
Instead of learning about equipment through paper-based manuals and 2D diagrams, which can contain hundreds of pages of information, new hires can use AR experiences with visual context and 3D guidance. By leveraging existing 3D data, AR solutions can recognize those machines and overlay clear 3D instructions, safety alerts, and even live data. AR drives efficiency through the onboarding period and beyond as frontline workers access an immersive view into equipment with object recognition technology.
Process training with AR demonstrations
Paper-based manuals can only do so much when it comes to visualizing a task or process in a classroom setting. AR is also valuable in onboarding for more effective and realistic demonstrations using content recorded from an expert’s point of view.
Safety and compliance training
Safety and compliance training shouldn’t be limited to text callouts in paper-based materials or announcements in the classroom, which can be easily misunderstood or quickly forgotten. AR onboarding and instructions provide visual cues and warnings in real time, in the context of the employee’s physical environment, so their safety and compliance aren’t left to chance.
Realize a new and improved employee onboarding experience
Onboarding is the time to introduce your frontline workers to the business and convey the importance of their role, so it should be efficient, effective, and memorable. Leading manufacturers are unlocking productivity, saving costs, and improving the employee experience with AR onboarding. In fact, AR can serve as a digital mentor long after your employees are onboarded. Explore the Augmented Reality as a Digital Mentor guide and discover how to extend the value of AR technology across the entire employee lifecycle.