When it comes to new hires, incorporating roleplays for employee onboarding can completely transform the way employees new to the company assimilate. Roleplaying provides a safe space that also encourages engagement and makes what’s normally a tedious experience more exciting.
In our beginner-friendly guide, we’ll give you everything you need to know onboarding employees using roleplay, including the best scenarios to practice, how to design effective roleplays, how to implement them into your training programs, and what tools can help you do so.
Why Are Roleplays for Employee Onboarding So Useful?
Employee onboarding is an experience that every new hire faces in some capacity. Most folks aren’t able to just take on a new role and dive right in without any training. But traditional employee onboarding and training can be tedious and boring. If you’re looking to improve engagement and retention among new hires, roleplays for employee onboarding can be revolutionary.
These types of roleplays can improve learning outcomes and help new employees get a better grasp of the company culture and expectations. Roleplaying can also aid in facilitating building custom learning plans to accommodate every learning style.
7 Most Effective Roleplay Scenarios for Employee Onboarding
If your team has never considered using roleplay as an onboarding tool, it might feel overwhelming at first to ideate and design the perfect roleplay for orientation and training. However, to give you a little inspiration, here are seven of the most effective roleplay scenarios for employee onboarding.
1. Roleplays to practice technical skills
Some companies use roleplaying to help teams practice technical skills. So, for example, sales teams might practice using sales methodologies or crafting expert sales pitches, and folks in law might practice skills like mediation or other tactics.
The types of roleplays relevant to your new hires will totally depend on your industry and their roles.
2. Roleplay scenarios that revolve around orientation training
Aside from technical skills, you can also leverage specific roleplays for employee onboarding to solidify the knowledge new hires learned during orientation. For example, many orientation programs review the necessary tools, programs, and company resources folks need to succeed. They might learn how to officially request time off, how to access HR materials, or other relevant resources.
You can use roleplaying to give them some hands-on experience doing simple tasks like requesting a sick day, checking their vacation time balances, or finding the company holiday schedule.
3. Team collaboration scenarios
Having solid collaboration skills is crucial for any kind of team. Teamwork is another difficult skill to practice which makes it a worthy roleplay scenario.
For example, give your new hires a light task that requires all of their efforts to succeed. It could be something creative like solving a puzzle or it could involve technical skills. Regardless, this “forced” teamwork can help build their ability to connect in meaningful ways and work together to solve problems.
4. Conflict resolution roleplays
Workplace conflict is a universal challenge in any industry, in any role. It’s only natural to experience some conflict here and there. But practicing conflict resolution skills is famously difficult because it’s challenging to simulate conflict. That’s what makes it perfect as a roleplay for employee onboarding.
Imagine there’s a disagreement between two coworkers. It could be over a deadline or a miscommunication or something else entirely. Have your new hires work on their mediation, active listening, and communication skills during the scenario. Depending on the company policies, you could also incorporate some organizational workplace conduct guidelines.
5. Scenarios that revolve around company rules and expectations
On that note, implementing scenarios that help new hires understand company rules and expectations are also great for onboarding and orientation. For example, most companies have policies on things like reporting employee misconduct or specific practices for what to do if you encounter spam or phishing emails.
Have your new hires better understand these expectations with some “hands-on” experience through roleplay. Imagine a scenario where your new hire witnesses some questionable employee conduct. What’s the protocol they should follow when dealing with a situation like that? Engaging in this kind of roleplay can really nail down important procedures and company protocol.
6. Working under a tight deadline
No matter what industry your team works in, working under a tight deadline is a pretty common experience. Whether you’re writing a report, crafting a sales pitch, or knocking out some other project, chances are, there will come a time where you’re working under pressure. This type of roleplay for employee onboarding can help folks prepare for situations like these.
To get creative, you can assign new hires a task they need to have completed during a specific time frame, say in under 10 minutes. This can simulate the pressure of working under a tight deadline to produce a deliverable, whatever that may be.
7. Addressing common challenges in the workplace
Roleplays for employee onboarding can also help you address the most common challenges new hires might face in the workplace. For example, you can have scenarios that revolve around challenges like:
- Remote work etiquette
- Prioritizing tasks
- Time management
How to Use Yoodli to Design Roleplays for Employee Onboarding
One of the best tools to use when designing roleplays for employee onboarding is Yoodli.
Yoodli is a next-level roleplay platform and communication coach that uses AI to offer intelligent, realistic roleplays for employee onboarding. Top companies like Google, Dale Carnegie, and Korn Ferry have already used Yoodli for at-scale training and enablement.
Yoodli makes it easy to practice core skills for new hires by providing an extensive library with existing roleplay scenarios. From skill straining to performance review simulations, employees can choose relevant scenarios to practice their skills and abilities.
But unlike other roleplay solutions, Yoodli allows folks to create custom roleplay scenarios that fit their every need. Its Builder tool helps people design intuitive roleplays for employee onboarding that tackle key components of a company’s orientation program. Once they’ve created or selected a roleplay scenario, new employees will go back-and-forth with an AI-generated partner who responds and communicates just like a human would.
These AI partners — like the scenarios — are also totally customizable. New employees can practice interacting with different types of coworkers to get a more wide range of experiences.
But Yoodli’s benefits don’t end there. After the roleplay is over, new hires get an in-depth report that has personalized insights and metrics around their listening, delivery, and speaking patterns. Using those data points, Yoodli offers teams feedback and actionable tips they can use to improve their skills.
Plus, you can adjust Yoodli to fit your company’s methodology and needs. With enterprise-grade privacy, including SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and more, you can’t go wrong.
Learn how you can start designing roleplays for employee onboarding for free at https://yoodli.ai/ to better train your new hires.
Implementing Roleplays for Employee Onboarding into Your Training Programs
If it’s your first time using roleplaying as an enablement tool, don’t worry. Here are some tips and tricks to implementing roleplays for employee onboarding for your company’s orientation and training programs.
Making sure your roleplays are relevant to your company
First and foremost, the most important thing to keep in mind is making sure your employee onboarding roleplays are actually relevant to your company. It might sound obvious, but you don’t want to use roleplay scenarios that won’t ever come up down the line.
In fact, you could ask current employees what challenges they faced as new hires in their role to narrow down the most realistic, helpful scenarios to practice.
Employee onboarding roleplay best practices
When it comes to best practices, a good place to start is identifying core objectives so you can better understand how effective your employee onboarding roleplays are. For example, drafting some SMART goals can help you pinpoint objectives that are specific and measurable. Implementing other guidelines — like assigning roles to participants, setting expectations, and providing context — can help new employees stay on track.
Roleplays for employee onboarding should be part of a larger orientation or new hire training program, but for them to be effective, team leads need to ensure they’re setting up the newest employees for success.
Delivering constructive feedback post-roleplay
Part of a successful roleplay implementation, especially for new employees, is leveraging constructive feedback. Many AI roleplay tools incorporate instant feedback, for example. However, folks in charge of employee onboarding should plan to deliver meaningful (and constructive!) feedback to program participants.
Being able to pass along feedback in a constructive way can help correct mistakes, reinforce knowledge and skills, and encourage new employees to self reflect.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Roleplays
Knowing how to assess and evaluate the ROI of roleplays can be tricky. It usually depends on your use cases and needs for roleplaying as well as your industry. Here are a few ways you can measure the effectiveness of your roleplays for employee onboarding. .
Get feedback from new hires
One of the easiest ways to judge how successful your roleplays were is to ask new hires. After they’ve completed your roleplay program, you can get feedback in the form of a 1:1 meeting or via an anonymous survey if you think newly hired employees might be hesitant to share feedback.
You can also send follow-up surveys down the line to the same new hires once they’ve been in their roles for a few months and ask if there’s anything they would change looking back.
Choose some key performance indicators (KPIs) to track
Key performance metrics (KPIs) also provide a pretty straightforward way to evaluate roleplay effectiveness. The only “catch” is that you need to ensure the metrics you choose are relevant.
For example, with sales onboarding training, you could track metrics like sales cycle lengths and win rates before and after trainees are onboarded to look for signs of improvement.
Tweak and adjust roleplays as needed
To make sure your employee onboarding roleplays are as effective as possible, have a goal to constantly refine and improve them. For example, based on new hire feedback, you might forego some scenarios that were less helpful for more common scenarios. This will help your team continuously improve and will make the employee onboarding program more valuable.
The Main Takeaway
Leveraging roleplays for employee onboarding can revolutionize the way your onboarding program functions. It helps new hires prepare for real-world workplace challenges while also highlighting company policies and expectations in a more engaging way that traditional onboarding materials. Plus, Yoodli can facilitate your implementation of these programs to offer at-scale training.