10 Ways to Improve your Induction Training

Inductions represent the most teachable moment companies have with new starters.  They are an ideal time to align staff and contractors with what your company stands for and how you like to do business.

Companies that fail to impress newbies risk losing them pretty quickly with research pointing to 25% of new starters deciding to leave their new company within the first week. This increases to 47% deciding to leave after three months with a poor induction process being blamed for those wishing to leave early.

First impressions aren't easy to erase. 

Before you start your induction training, it's also important that you have clear HR Policies and Manuals that are standardised to your company and make the induction process a breeze.  Make sure they are constantly updated and include new policies such as social media.  If you need to update your policies, we recommend the Instant HR Policies and Procedures Manual.

So to harness the power of induction training, here are ten tips to consider including:

1. Use lots of visuals - avoid heavy text based training.    Educational researchers have found that 83% of human learning occurs visually.  Our right brain prefers visual information and can process pictures hundreds of times faster than the left brain can process words.  Use video, photos, diagrams and colour.
2. Tell stories - Stories and metaphors provide an emotional connection to information and can be an ideal when trying to get people to remember numbers.
3. Be Positive - Use positive language.  Tell people what they can do, rather than what they can't.
4. Involve senior management - Senior leaders drive the culture of the company.  They need to be seen and involved with induction training as a way of welcoming new starters.
5. Answer why questions - Too often companies teach staff how to do something but not why.  Company processes get perpetuated without people ever questioning why they need to do something.
6. Participative learning methods - Ensure training is active rather than passive.  Give demonstrations and get workers to have a go and coach them.     Ask learners questions that get them to relate to the training in terms of their own experiences.  Think of ways to involve all of the senses during training.   Avoid a lecturer telling people what to do.
7. Test - Using quizzes in induction training improves message recall and retention.
8. Communicate your Core Values - Great companies have staff that clearly know what the company does and does not do.  Spend a lot of time indoctrinating staff on your core values and culture.
9. The importance of safety - Poor inductions undervalue the importance of safety.  It's crucial to let new starters know from the outset how important safety is to the company.  Without this, a poor safety culture gets tolerated which ends up being difficult to change.  Make sure you inform new starters at inductions how important safety is to the company and why.
10. Standardize training - Induction training must be structured.  This ensures consistent, standardized training throughout the company.  Only if you have standardized training can you have a buddy system.  Otherwise, workers teach new starters bad habits and wildly different standards of training.

What can you do today to start improving your company induction training?