Starting a new job is one of the most challenging few experiences in life. While we can encounter are events filled with physical concerns – sky diving, bungee jumping, mountain biking – starting a new job brings a different set of concerns. The anxiety of fitting in, concern at having made the right choice, the uncertainty of the unknown and fear of not meeting new standards. It’s those thoughts which fill the minds of new employees the night before they start a new job.
It is an equal mixture of excitement and uncertainty for employers too. While someone may have impressed in interviews and assessments, now is when you will find out if they are really up to scratch. Realistically, new employees don’t ‘hit the ground running’ on day one. There is just too much they don’t know to allow them to be 100% productive. To a certain extent, you wouldn’t want them rushing into new tasks or suggesting changes until they took the time to understand the culture, history and people of their new organisation.
That being said, you do want to close the gap between day one and ‘100% productive’. You are making an investment in each new employee, and the faster they can integrate into the organisation, the quicker they can show a return on their investment. The speed of this process – your induction process – is very much within your control.
By taking your induction process into a digital, online environment, the time required to get to ‘100% productive’ can be further shortened.
Let’s examine three key reasons to prioritise online induction training in this article.
Bring consistency to all employees in all locations
As you create your induction training, in any format, it is best to consider its delivery across your entire organisation – not just for new employees. Great induction training should be available regardless of position, employment time, division or location.
Rolling out induction training across your organisation helps create consistency. Training in internal standards requires that those same standards exist outside the training environment. Induction training fails when new employees complete the training, only to find their team operates differently from the training!
As you create induction training for new employees it can, therefore, be beneficial to ensure all employees go through the same training and learn the same material. This process creates an unambiguous team environment. All employees understand the same messages and the same policies.
Now I know what you are thinking – how are existing employees going to respond when asked to undertake induction training? That’s where online induction training has a huge advantage over instructor-led induction training. Online training reduces resistance as it allows for greater flexibility in training completion. Existing employees can complete online training in small parcels (assuming it is structured into 5-10 minute modules) and go at a pace which suits their existing knowledge.
The cost per employee for online training is also extremely low. Unlike expensive workshops, extra users in online training have a tiny, incremental cost. Given the benefit of having consistency in induction across all employees, this low cost creates a huge return on your training investment.
Online induction training creates common standards across teams
- Consistency of training occurs within a team – everyone in the team completes the same induction training.
- Standardising of training occurs across teams – everyone in the organisation completes the same induction training.
Certainly, each team or division will require specialised induction training (something which Tribal Habits excels at via our Creator toolset). However, induction training also involves training on standards which apply across the entire organisation. These standards drive common behaviours and set common values – they build your culture.
For example, the history, values and structure of your organisation must be understood by all employees, regardless of team, role, experience or location. Further, new employees must learn these cultural values quickly. If they have to wait months for the next induction workshop, it can be too late – they may have already developed values or knowledge which is incorrect. Providing that amount of training to every employee in every location is only feasible through online induction training. It can be rapidly distributed to every location and every employee.
These standards also include behavioural and safety topics. These are concepts which benefit every employee and help your organisation avoid bad behaviours from the start. These topics are ‘compliance’ style topics, where your organisation has a duty to ensure employees are aware of regulatory or legal requirements. Tribal Habits’ Compliance library can be a fantastic resource here, giving your organisation an instant, approved and branded set of induction modules. You can even combine these benchmark topics with topics you have created about your organisations’ policies, including asking employees to confirm acceptance to your internal policies.
Reduces administration time, effort and cost
If you are in charge of managing new employee induction, then you will know how much energy is required to implement successful induction processes. This same administration burden applies to on-going training, but the issue is magnified for induction training.
- New employees often have a lot of induction training to complete in a relatively short period of time.
- Completion records for induction are often important to authorise or accredit a new employee into their role.
- The induction training is often the first chance for a new employee to see how well organised their new organisation is.
Once again, online induction training can address these issues. A cloud-based induction portal, like Tribal Habits, can easily automate induction training. This can include discreet enrolments into topics relevant to that role, dynamic due dates for completion, automated reminder emails (with automatic escalation to managers) and comprehensive training records (dates, results, contributions and more).
Detailed and in-depth reports are available online and offline, to both administrations and managers. It’s a simple, fast and easy way to manage induction training across any number of employees and locations, every single day and week of the year.
If your induction training is still face-to-face, reliant on time-consuming individual coaching or delayed until minimum training numbers are met (so you can justify the expense of a workshop), then its time to consider moving to online induction training. You can reduce your costs, accelerate results, engage the entire organisation at any time and in any location, ensure consistency and standards and dramatically reduce your administration overhead.
Tribal Habits gives you an amazing combination of ready-made training in Development and Compliance topics, along with the ability to rapidly create custom induction training for any role.
In addition, all training appears in your branding, with a consistent interface and with a range of automated features. If moving to online induction training sounds like a possibility for your organisation, contact our team or request a free trial site now!