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Optimising Employee Induction: Teamwork, Online Training, and Workshops

Table of Contents

Optimising Employee Induction is essential for setting new hires up for success, fostering collaboration, and building engagement from day one. In this blog, we’ll share four practical tips to strengthen teamwork during induction, explore three compelling reasons to prioritise online training and offer guidance on when and why to move traditional workshops online for a more efficient and scalable onboarding process.

3 key reasons to prioritise online induction training

Starting a new job is one of the most challenging experiences in life. While we can encounter 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 that 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.

Optimising Employee Induction

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 that 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 that 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 that 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 organisation’s policies, including asking employees to confirm acceptance of 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 ongoing 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!

Check out our free guide to help you optimise employee induction

Four tips to build teamwork during employee induction

One of the hardest parts of employee induction is integrating them into a team. Teamwork is a critical element for the overall success of new employees, but employee induction often overlooks this issue.

Employee induction often focuses on the new employee in isolation. They learn facts, processes, locations and tasks. Most employees will not work in isolation. They will form part of a team or, at the very least, work with other people or impact the tasks of other staff.

The faster new employees integrate into a team, the better their induction process goes. In particular, improved teamwork helps the new employee pick up best practices and tips from other employees. It accelerates their employee induction process. So let’s consider four practical tips to specifically build employee induction teamwork.

Building teamwork

1 – Introduce the new team to the new employee

Your existing staff may be curious about your new employee. So give your team an introduction to their new team member well before the new employee starts. Then remind the team again a couple of days ahead of the start date.

Sharing the new employee’s name, start date and role is great, but you should also try to give the team some insight into the new employee’s professional background and personal interests. Make them a real person, not just a name.

It’s also important to include team-building activities in the induction process. This might include welcome morning tea or lunch with the new employee’s team on day one.

Finally, it’s hard to feel part of a team when you don’t have the same tools and workspace as the rest of the team. Turning up on day one to find that you don’t have a desk, computer, access, email, or tools makes the new employee stand out, rather than fit in. So the induction process should ensure their workspace is set-up, building access has been arranged, any induction pack is prepared and everything IT-related is working.

2 – Introduce the new employee to their team

Changing jobs isn’t easy. As new employees wait for their start date to come around, they may have questions or anxieties building in their mind. This is where a welcome pack, provided in advance of day one, can go a long way. A welcome pack also helps reaffirm that they made the right decision.

Ideally, the welcome pack – or welcome online course – should be practical and relaxed. It should include some ‘inside information’ from the new employee’s team. This information should help the new employee feel ‘like part of the team’. This might include the best places to park, the favourite lunch spots, any employee benefits (like discounts at local shops), the team seating plan, local public transport timetables and so on.

The welcome pack can also include an overview of the induction program so the new employee knows what to expect during their first few days.

3 – Focus on team relationships

The key to your new employee’s success will be how well they integrate into their new team and understand your organisation’s culture. The early days of your induction program should, therefore, provide an overview of how your organisation works, including the values, behaviours and attitudes that characterise the culture.

You should also outline local and global reporting lines so the new employee understands their relationship to key people. New employee induction should proactively help to develop relationships and contacts within the company to accelerate their sense of acceptance and belonging.

4 – Ensure there is context for induction teamwork

To help engage your new employee, they must understand how they fit into the bigger picture. Often new employees don’t fully appreciate how their work helps, or hinders, others.

So new employee induction needs to balance information about tasks with an explanation of how their role contributes to the broader goals of the organisation. Explain the broader structure of the organisation so they understand where they fit it. This also provides insights into future career progression opportunities.

Tribal Habits and Employee Induction

Ultimately, new employee induction must equally look outwards as well as inwards. It isn’t enough to just educate the new employee on their tasks and responsibilities. It might allow them to see the linkages to others, gain the support from their team and quickly feel like they fit it.

With a platform like Tribal Habits, you can easily create this customised information for your organisation and have it available to any new employee, in any location, at any time.

You can even have teams take responsibility for building ‘Welcome to our team’ topics. This is a terrific induction teamwork exercise on its own. With Tribal Habits’ guided topic creation processes and building block editor, a team could build their own induction topic in just a few hours. It’s then easy to update as the team evolves and allows the team to take ownership of their welcome processes for new members.

When you combine rapidly created custom topics for your organisation on culture, roles and team induction with selected topics from our Compliance library, you can have a customised new employee induction process available for all staff and locations for limited time and effort.

Click here to read reviews about Tribal Habits has improved employee induction for these companies

Why & When To Move Workshops to Online Training – Unlock Flexibility and Benefits

Despite the internet existing for over 25 years, many organisations are still highly reliant on face-to-face workshops. Indeed, there are times when face-to-face workshops are valuable. However, it can be a mistake to apply the same solution to every problem, particularly when there are many reasons to consider new solutions.

In this article, let’s consider when you may want to move workshops to online training, and then look at a series of steps to guide you through the process to move workshops to online training both efficiently and effectively.

Women doing online induction training

Why transform move workshops to online training

No doubt, there is a place for face-to-face workshops. Workshops have been the foundation of training for decades and will no doubt remain an important training delivery method in the future.

They have many strengths when it comes to learning, but also many weaknesses which become more apparent as other training delivery methods arise.

Strengths

  • Takes participants away from their jobs, potentially reducing distractions and improving focus.
  • Allows body language to play a part in the training, which can be critical for certain modules.
  • Provides opportunities for group discussion in a way that everyone can understand and contribute to.
  • Can be easy to organise (see weaknesses as well) as it only requires a suitable location and little or no technology.
  • The physical interaction can boost teamwork and make internal connections.
  • Can provide some excitement or ‘event’ status, which may boost morale or help engage participants.
  • Can, in theory, handle large volumes of information and long programmes (half-day or full-day). However, this must be balanced against the overall success of the experience; more is not always better.

Weaknesses

  • While group discussion can be easy, it can also be difficult. It is common for participants to feel anxious about public discussion, and strong personalities can dominate discussions.
  • Can be very difficult to organise. It requires a physical location. It can be restrictive or difficult to organise for distributed teams and expensive to bring participants together.
  • Is typically the most inefficient training delivery method, particularly if participants have to travel to the event and external venue hire is required. A large portion of the cost is spent on expenses that do not impact the training result.
  • If external facilitators are used, it can require long sessions to justify the cost. Long workshops are even harder to coordinate, and participants become anxious about being away from work for too long.
  • Is at risk of being viewed as an ‘event’ – an activity that is fun but not effective. Requires careful preparation and, particularly, a good follow-up to ensure learning is embedded. Else it is a once-off hit and leads to no real change.

When to move workshops to online training

For many organisations that have relied on workshops, it may be time to reconsider that reliance.

  • Workshops are expensive. The cost of a two-day workshop can easily exceed the cost of an entire annual subscription to a learning platform. That’s two days of learning vs 365 days of learning for the same monetary investment.
  • Workshops are inefficient. Much time is lost in organisation and travel, not to mention time in attendance. A high proportion of overall costs are spent on items that do not impact the training outcome (room hire, travel, food, printed workbooks).
  • Workshops are often ineffective. Delivering theory via a workshop is not only the single most inefficient way to deliver theory, it is also ineffective. It can be inconsistently delivered, boring for participants and offer no ability to skip or repeat content.

Unless your workshops are 100% focused on group interaction, then it’s time to move workshops to online training. You will only get outperformance from a workshop when it is focused on teamwork, full group discussion or application of ideas. Even then, small group virtual workshops can replicate many of those outcomes at a much lower investment too.

Another time to reconsider your workshops is when they are causing delays in training. If your workshops need 5-10 or more employees to justify running, then you are creating bottlenecks in training. New employees might need to wait 2-6 months for a workshop, by which time they have been forced to learn on the job, often picking up bad habits. Online training removes that bottleneck immediately, allowing learning to be accessed 24/7.

If your organisation needs to reduce training costs or travel, online learning is a powerful solution too. This is particularly true when online training is blended with small-group workshops. When you move workshops to online training you can get the best of both worlds at a significantly reduced cost – and often with much better training outcomes!

Further Reading