Principles for designing active and adaptable onboarding experiences for library employees

Abstract

The development of an active, adaptable, culture-centric experience for new library employees is a crucial first step in building effective teams. Establishing a culture of teamwork has long-lasting benefits and can be accomplished by thoughtfully scheduling the onboarding experience and considering ways to show trust in new employees. Using your organization’s designated technologies to guide employees through their onboarding serves to efficiently train the employee and concurrently establish a template for future iterations. Creating an active process optimizes the onboarding experience by employing such techniques as competency-based training, flexible content delivery for various learning styles, and conversational evaluation. Academic libraries encompass substantial variation among types of work, types of staff members, and rates of evolution in the associated fields of practice. A library that has developed adaptable onboarding materials that prioritize early integration of new employees into the team and that incorporate the principles of training design in this chapter can then update or improve its training as quickly as the field of librarianship changes.