HR Training Hacks: Create Content Fast With Templates

From stretched thin to streamlined

If you’re an HR professional, you know exactly how daunting it can be to manage all of your training responsibilities. Whether it’s launching onboarding for incoming hires, making sure current employees meet compliance deadlines, or customizing learning modules for individual departments, you’re already stretched thin. Yet for training to be effective, it has to be as engaging and intuitive as possible.

Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch each time you need to develop new training materials. Much of the content you create is universal—think ongoing professional development modules and explainers on company culture. With the help of ready-to-use templates that cover the gamut of human resource management topics, you can save hours—even days or weeks—of work without sacrificing quality.

In this blog post, we’ll look at a range of template options and explore practical tips and other HR hacks that will not only streamline your workflows, but also help you deliver high-quality training that leads to greater organizational success.

Onboarding templates: Get new hires up to speed fast

There are several reasons why HR teams might need to revamp onboarding processes and materials. What worked when you had 15 employees won’t necessarily translate to 150 employees—let alone 1,500. Even if you’re not scaling up, you might notice that new hires aren’t retaining key information and procedures after the first few months on the job.

Making the switch to onboarding templates can help you develop scalable, repeatable processes that boost employee engagement and foster continuous improvement.

Benefits of onboarding templates

• Consistency. Templates help standardize information, ensuring that each incoming employee, regardless of position, receives the same messaging about company policies, culture, and expectations.
• Personalization. Customizable templates allow you to tailor training for different roles, departments, and individual learning paths.
• Efficiency. Pre-built templates make it quick and easy to create content for general onboarding materials such as welcome messages, mission statements, and first 30-day checklists.
• Insights. When you integrate templates into your e-learning platform or LMS, you can track data on course completion, compliance, and engagement to identify potential problems that might arise.

See examples of onboarding templates built in Articulate 360 here.

Compliance training templates: Safeguarding your interests

When organizations scale, it often means expanding into new territories. Each new state, region, or country means a new set of location-specific laws and regulations. Even relatively minor oversights in these areas can lead to hefty fines, litigation, or permanent damage to your brand image. Compliance training templates help guard against these risks by ensuring that all employees, regardless of location, complete their compliance training and are up-to-date on industry standards.

Regulations constantly evolve, and templates enable HR leaders to quickly and easily update training to reflect the newest standards and requirements.

Examples of compliance training templates:

Harassment policy

Covers warning signs, appropriate conduct, reporting procedures, and legal obligations.

Information security

Educates employees on privacy best practices, handling sensitive information, protecting against data breaches, and complying with data protection regulations.

Health and safety protocols

Includes general safety guidelines, hazardous materials handling, and emergency procedures.

Code of conduct

Clarifies company policies related to workplace conduct, ethics, and overall company values and expectations.

See examples of compliance templates built in Articulate 360 here.

Soft skills templates: building a more versatile team

Pretend you’re the manager of the HR department at a major university research center. Your team’s data gathering and analytical skills are off the charts. But when it comes to communication and leadership, there’s a lot left to be desired, and it’s starting to lead to delays, lower-quality work, and negative morale. It’s soft skills like these where training can make a big difference.

Soft skill development is an underrated aspect of talent management. In fact, a recent LinkedIn study found that 69% of executives plan to prioritize hiring candidates with strong soft skills.

Try these templates to improve your team’s soft skills

Effective communication. Focus on active listening, conflict resolution, and better collaboration.

Leadership and mentoring. Develop skills like meeting facilitation, motivational techniques, and peer mentoring.

Emotional intelligence. Equip your team with strategies to manage emotions, build empathy, and navigate difficult interpersonal relationships.

Time management. Offer techniques for greater productivity, prioritization, and staying focused under tight deadlines.

Collaboration and problem solving. Provide tips on fostering better teamwork, expanding critical thinking skills, and driving innovation.

See examples of soft skills templates built in Articulate 360 here.

Department-specific training templates: Tailoring learning for maximum impact

If you’ve ever had to create training for different departments, you probably realized pretty quickly that generic content won’t cut it. A sales team, for example, needs training on value selling, handling objections, and deal negotiations, while a customer support team needs training on complaint resolution and dealing with rude customers. This is why department-specific training templates are so crucial.

Role-based templates offer the flexibility to create training tailored to fit individual needs. Whether it’s helping the operations team improve cross-functional collaboration or making sure the marketing team is up to date on the latest digital trends, templates save time and ensure consistency.

Popular department-specific training templates:

• Customer service guidelines. Give customer support reps tips and tools for resolving complaints, knowing when to escalate issues, and staying friendly and professional under pressure.
• Marketing strategy and best practices. Help the marketing team manage campaigns, optimize content, and track and analyze data.
• Sales enablement. Educate sales reps on product knowledge, active listening in sales conversations, and closing techniques.
• IT security. Ensure IT professionals stay up to date on compliance requirements, data protection best practices, and cyber threat assessment.
• Finance officer training. Keep finance team members current on internal auditing processes, fraud prevention, and regulatory updates.

See examples of various department-specific templates built in Articulate 360 here.

Empower your team with smarter training templates

Don’t let clunky and outdated training methods become a roadblock to your organization’s success. With the right templates, you can create training that streamlines workflows and is consistent across the organization without a huge time commitment from HR managers or a reduction in quality.

With the flexibility to customize templates to different departments and easily make updates as your company grows and evolves, you’ll deliver the top-notch training your team needs and leave a lasting impact on your business and your bottom line.

Are you ready to learn more HR best practices? Check out our guide, The Practical Handbook for Next-Gen HR Training.