Streamline Employee Onboarding
Getting new employees up to speed quickly is critical to workforce productivity, engagement, and retention. But traditional onboarding programs are often fragmented across systems and reliant on outdated training methods, overwhelming new hires instead of empowering them.
WalkMe can change that. This guide shows how to use WalkMe to deliver a seamless, digital-first onboarding experience that reduces ramp time, improves employee satisfaction, and accelerates time-to-value for new hires. We'll walk through each step using our 4 Ps framework for business value alignment: Problem, Possible, Probable, and Provable.
Problem
What are the challenges and issues your employees face?
Most organizations underestimate the complexity of onboarding. New hires must navigate multiple unfamiliar systems, understand internal policies, complete HR tasks, and learn role-specific workflows - often all at once. Without real-time support and a centralized onboarding hub, they're left to figure things out on their own. The result? Slower ramp times, early disengagement, and overreliance on help desks or peers.
This fragmented experience delays productivity, increases support costs, and puts employee satisfaction and retention at risk.
Possible
What should you focus on to address this problem, and how might you solve it?
To improve onboarding, don't just digitize training. Identify what's causing friction in the new hire experience. Focus on where employees get overwhelmed, confused, or stalled during their first weeks. The goal isn't to overwhelm them with content, but to deliver the right information and guidance at the right time.
Start by answering these questions:
- Which parts of onboarding are consistently confusing or time-consuming for new hires?
- In which systems do new employees make the most mistakes or request help?
- Are there opportunities to automate repetitive setup tasks or guide users through key workflows?
- How could onboarding be personalized by role, department, or location to increase relevance?
- Do support tickets or repeat questions from new hires reveal gaps in onboarding content?
The answer to these questions will reveal opportunities to improve employee onboarding with WalkMe. Continue reading for tactical guidance on how to tackle those initiatives.
Step 1: Build an Onboarding Hub
One of the biggest hurdles for new employees is knowing how to find the systems and processes they'll use in their new role. Use the WalkMe Menu for desktop to create a digital onboarding hub for employees that unifies your organization's knowledge and processes in a single interface. In the WalkMe Menu, new hires can access:
- Onboarding tasks: A curated checklist of everything a new hire needs to complete in their first weeks.
- Enterprise search: A unified search connecting multiple tools and knowledge bases, so employees can access organizational knowledge quickly and efficiently.
- ActionBot: A conversational assistant that guides new employees through key workflows and answers common questions on-demand.
Step 2: Guide New Hires Through Key Systems
Unfamiliar workflows and systems can be overwhelming to new hires. Use Smart Walk-Thrus to guide them step-by-step through critical processes like benefits enrollment, time tracking setup, and CRM training.
For example, one Smart Walk-Thru might guide new sales hires through opportunity creation in your CRM, with steps explaining your company's unique custom fields. Another Smart Walk-Thru might show new HR hires how to interpret workforce analytics in your HCM system. Assign Goals to each flow to track progress and ensure completion.
Step 3: Monitor Sentiment and Optimize Over Time
There's more to onboarding than tasks and Smart Walk-Thrus – it's an experience. Use surveys to measure engagement, clarity, and satisfaction during and after the onboarding process. Ask questions like, “How confident do you feel navigating our systems?” or “Is there anything missing from your onboarding experience?” to uncover gaps and improve the journey.
In addition to monitoring employee sentiment with surveys, you can also use WalkMe Insights to identify opportunities for improvement. DAP program managers might use Insights to monitor goals and task completion across teams, getting a birds-eye view of how effective your onboarding content is. If a particular onboarding task or Smart Walk-Thru sees consistently low completion rates, it's worth reviewing and revising.
Meanwhile, people managers can use Insights to see a more granular view of their direct reports' progress. Knowing where new hires are in their onboarding journey can help managers ensure their reports have everything they need to be successful.
Probable
What are the outcomes you can expect from your solution?
Now that you know what's possible and how to achieve it, your organization can expect meaningful improvements from your employee onboarding experience:
- Accelerated onboarding timelines, as new hires receive proactive guidance from day one.
- Fewer support requests, thanks to real-time answers and embedded walkthroughs.
- Higher confidence among new hires, empowering them to complete tasks independently.
- Improved knowledge retention, driven by contextual learning at the point of need.
Provable
How do you measure whether your solution achieved the desired outcomes?
At this stage, you'll measure the impact of your WalkMe solutions using both WalkMe data and broader business KPIs.
Here are some low-effort ways to start gauging the effectiveness of your WalkMe content:
- In Insights, look at Total Interactions, Unique Users, and Goals to measure the effectiveness of your WalkMe content, including common searches in the WalkMe Menu, and uncover whether users complete desired actions after interacting with your guidance flows. Review Menu & Search
- Use a survey at the end of a guidance flow to ask users if they found it helpful, and collect regular employee feedback with an eNPS survey.
- Tag your content to workflows, then create custom dashboards to view the performance of all your onboarding content in one place.
- Use WalkMe's pre-built Engagement by Item report to view engagement metrics and estimate the value of your employee onboarding solutions. Analyze this data to develop your own impact calculation.
- For example: Number of content plays for your change management solutions x assumed time saved per process x average hourly wage.
- Since this approach can sometimes overestimate results, consider assuming that WalkMe contributes to 10% of the total savings. Align with your stakeholders to confirm the assumptions that make sense for your business.
Follow these steps to get deeper insights about user behavior:
- Enable DXA (Digital Experience Analytics), then generate Engaged Elements or Tracked Events to create a baseline of how users engage with relevant processes before deploying WalkMe solutions. This helps you track process adoption and completion before and after deploying WalkMe.
- Use Flow Analytics and Flow Comparison to see how engagement and conversion have improved relative to your initial baseline data. This helps you compare the drop-off rates and measure time saved before and after adding WalkMe guidance.
- One example calculation you can use is Productivity Savings = (Time before WalkMe – Time with WalkMe) × Hourly salary
Use these best-in-class methods to truly understand the business impact of your WalkMe solution:
The best approach is to combine WalkMe data with your own business data. You can connect WalkMe data with your organization's business systems through a data integration. WalkMe supports both outgoing data integrations and incoming data integrations, enabling you to analyze WalkMe's influence alongside your own KPIs and business outcomes. By integrating WalkMe data with your core business metrics, you can clearly demonstrate measurable value and ROI across your organization.
Consider connecting your WalkMe data with:
- HR or HCM systems to correlate WalkMe engagement with improvements in employee process completion time, HR data accuracy, and compliance training completion.
- Service management tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Zendesk, Jira Service Management) to measure reductions in internal support requests or rework related to onboarding processes.
- CRM systems to measure how WalkMe guidance influences data quality, sales process adherence, and deal cycle length for your new sales hires.
Even if you don't connect your WalkMe data with your business data via an integration, you can look at things like ticket deflection and productivity gains before and after WalkMe to correlate how your solutions influenced the outcomes that matter to your business.