We would all like new additions to our organisations to be effective and efficient as soon as possible. Unless you’ve employed that person previously, no matter how much they research, they won’t have intimate knowledge of your workings. Yet, induction training is a tool that we often overlook when creating better processes. This practice needs to stop, however, because we run the risk of reducing the potential new staff have to perform.
Induction training has multiple goals
When you go about creating or improving your new employee training schedule, consider the goals. Ask yourself whether achieving them will help align new staff with your values. Above all, make sure you have the means of evaluating just how good a fit they really are. This will give you an instant indication of where they may need additional assistance when starting up with you.
You’ll want to visit every aspect that is important to your organisation, whether it involves culture, skills, history or strategy. Finally, don’t forget to try and learn just as much about them as they are learning about you.
Make it personal
People tend to relate far better to individually tailored approaches than to a wad of text. Given this, it’s fairly important to pad the training sessions with relevant content, lively people and lots of interaction. For times when you are only welcoming one or two people, conduct it as informally as possible.
A good way to accomplish this is to learn what you can about the individuals concerned. If they happen to have knowledge of or prior experience with any of the subject material, that’s great. You can use that to turn a training session into a discussion. If not, you may wish to add some supplementary material to introduce the topic instead. If they do have a history with the subject matter, they may even be able to enhance it for you.
Include the soft skills
You would expect incoming staff to have at least a core set of competencies for their role. With that in mind, you may not think it necessary to include basic soft skills as part of induction training. This is a common error, but thankfully it’s easy to rectify.
Having all new employees go through the same soft skills training as the rest of your staff accomplished two things. Firstly, you set the standard for quality they must apply those skills at. More importantly, though, you are helping them to understand what everyone else already knows. This creates a mechanism for checks and balances. Your staff can now help newcomers adhere to standards. What’s more, newcomers can more easily point out if established employees are not adhering to those same standards.
Introduce your strategy ASAP
It is critical for new staff to grasp your company’s strategy at an early stage. For starters, it enables them to immediately ask what they can to to start contributing towards it. Better yet, a fresh set of eyes can often help you see inconsistencies or better approaches to forward strategy.
Don’t forget, though, that you should be communicating your business strategy to all your staff periodically. Introducing new staff to it from day one will help bring them officially up to speed with minimal disruption.
Fitting the culture
Finding the right individual for your company’s culture may or may not be part of your hiring process. Regardless, ensure new staff are aware of the culture and how they can add to it. This provides an instant sense of belonging and camaraderie. A successful culture integration also has a vast synergistic effect, because culture determines behaviour when carrying out tasks towards strategic achievement.
Ask for feedback
It’s far easier to improve when people tell you what needs improvement.
During and after induction training regimens, be sure to ask whether your new staff enjoyed the experience. This can take place informally via chats, or formally via rating surveys and forms. Either way, it’s an invaluable way to find out how to improve the efficacy of your staff intakes. Don’t forget to tailor the mechanisms to provide an optimal feedback experience.
Adept believes in having a superlative induction training process, with excellent training materials and highly informative modules for the job at hand. Our new employees benefit from day 1, and quickly become valued team members ready to provide the best client experience possible.