Does your company have excellent induction?
Do you think your induction programme is a little bit different... perhaps even fun?
Would you like to help a collleague of mine achieve her qualification and perhaps help our organisation to deliver better induction at the same time?
If yes then I'd be really keen to hear from you... perhaps its a company you work for now, or one in your past that has stuck in your mind... any help gratefully received.
Ian Stone
2 Responses
Online Induction Program
Several years ago I worked for an Australian Government agency with 35 offices across the Australian continent, many of which were in remote/regional areas.
With relatively high turnover, it was difficult providing induction at the right time and place. Costs of travel and accommodation and meant that it wasn’t cost effective to induct in a group setting.
I designed an online induction program on our intranet. As training manager for the Northern Territory I received advice about new starters at our six offices and emailed them a welcome letter with links to the intranet induction program. With the email was an attached checklist for local induction along with a building plan on which new starters had to write the positions of fire exits, fire appliances and so on and fax back to my team within the first three days.
The program took them on a walk through of links to various organisation information eg, corporate plan, diversity policy, conditions of service etc and had several fax back questionnaires that had to be completed.
It was the best approach available to us given the challenges we faced. Feedback indicated that it worked provided supervisors of new starters were involved and encouraged it.
One of my training officers would be allocated supervision of specific staff and would keep in telephone and email contact during the process.
We had three main occupational types, each of which took a slightly varied exposure to rules and procedures depending on what they were using in their jobs. For example, the project officer group needed to learn about our Grant Funding Procedures; administrative staff needed to know about our Financial Delegations and the Financial Management and Audit legislation.
While your circumstances are probably quite different, the essential thing is that with imagination you can create something suitable for prevailing circumstances.
Not fun, but effective
Hi Ian,
I designed an induction programme in a global technical consultancy of 7,000 that was rated as an excellent and effective process by an IIP assessor.
We took the view that the aim of induction was to ensure new starters became fully effective as soon as possible. With an extremely diverse geography and professional expertise, along with continuous recruitment at all locations, we couldn’t run “events”.
The process involved managers and a “buddy”. The roles were defined and a loose timetable suggested. Most contact and intensity happened in the first week, reducing in activity as the person became more involved with their work.
The roles focused on helping the person understand what was expected, introducing them to all the systems and key contacts and (for the mananager) agreeing development agaiinst the companies competencies.
I’ve seen a few excellent e-learning packages (particular one for Channel 4) but strongly advise that managers and “buddies” are more important.
If you want to know more, please send me an email
Carole