If You Want Orientation Done Right,
Involve the Owner
Few small businesses employ full-time
trainers — and few have the resources to bring in
experienced consultants to conduct comprehensive orientations
for a limited number of new hires. But small businesses have one
thing the big guys lack: hands-on owners. If you’re
reluctant to ask your company’s owner to take an active
role in orienting new employees, consider these advantages:
• It shows you care.
By personally conducting new-employee orientations, business
owners demonstrate that they care about their organizations — and
about the success and development of each employee.
• It
reinforces values. Who better to
articulate the organization’s mission and values —
those intangibles that are often difficult for outsiders to
understand — than the person with the greatest stake
in the company’s success?
• It
makes good use of talent. By taking
on some of the training tasks, owners help other key
personnel — managers and supervisors — remain
focused on their daily duties rather than letting them become
distracted with showing newcomers the ropes.
Adapted from “How to Prevent Staff
Burnout (And Your Own!),” by Hillary Rettig, in Home Automation Times.
Match New Hire Orientation to Changing
Work Force
To halt rising turnover, Federal Express
conducted a top-to-bottom revamp of its new-employee
orientation program. The aim: To match its old-line approach
with the needs of its younger staff recruits and to boost
management’s involvement. Among the changes:
“Welcome to Our World” videotape. This 30-minute fast-paced, high-energy
production is designed to appeal to the “MTV
generation,” the company says. It covers safety and
benefits, features tours of the company’s Memphis hub and
international facilities, and highlights comments from senior
executives who began their careers as couriers, secretaries,
clerks and hub handlers.
“Passport Plan.” This small passport-shaped booklet features a
series of “stops” that new hires are expected to
make within their first three months on the job. As the
employee accomplishes each step, a manager signs his passport.
Included are things like, “Today, you need to meet your
vice president,” or “You need to make sure you know
where the break-out rooms and fire exits are.”
“New Hire Orientation Kit.” This colorful box, depicting a FedEx plane
is targeted at managers. Inside is everything related to their
role and responsibilities in the orientation process-spelled
out in excruciating detail. Direction are provided that guide
them through what should occur during an
employee’s first day and week, as
well as at 30 days, 60 days, and the end of the first year.
FedEx added orientation success to managers’ performance
ratings.
Results: Targeting its primary new hire
pool and focusing on manager responsibilities enabled the
company to increase job tenure and cut new hire turnover.
Source: “FedEx Expresses Concern for
Turnover Rate” by Julie Cook, Human
Resource Executive, April 2002
How to Make Online Orientation Work
New employees often feel overwhelmed
during their first few days on the job. Online orientation
programs can get them up to speed more quickly.
Example: Greg Schaeffer, a trainer in
Web-based education at aviation electronics company Rockwell
Collins Inc. in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is looking into a program
to orient new hires online.
Schaeffer’s adventurous plans: An
online scavenger hunt on employees’ first day, during
which they’ll search for information about corporate
topics such as the CEO’s name and background and the
company’s products and services. The game allows new
employees to navigate Rockwell Collins’ intranet at their
own pace while getting a feel for the company’s history,
culture and leaders.
Because the company hires about 400 new
people every year, and about 10 percent of them work at sites
across the country, Schaeffer is betting that online
orientation will help solve the coordination hassles he often
faces.
Orientation means making employees
comfortable so they feel an immediate sense of belonging, says
Les McKeown, CEO of Tiburon, California-based Yellowbrick, a
training-consulting firm.
McKeown offers these three tips:
Do it right away. Some companies wait weeks, even months, for enough
new hires to fill a classroom. Meanwhile, questions go
unanswered, skill gaps are not addressed and confusion mounts.
An online program can let new hires become familiar with
company policies and technology right away.
Make it job-specific. Don’t drown new hires with gobs of
irrelevant information. Give them the facts they need to do the
job they were hired to do.
Stop second-guessing. If a new employee learns that his job requires a
working knowledge of a market or product with which he’s
rusty, start training immediately. Don’t leave him
second-guessing his ability to do the job. Start teaching him
the basics about how your firm approaches that market, get him
interested-and get him working. Online courses and archived
company research on its intranet can help.
Source: “Breaking Through the
Fog” by Kevin Dobs, OnlineLearning, Bill Communications Inc., Minneapolis, 2001.
