Enabling your people starts with the end in mind.
Purpose of induction. An effective induction ensures that new staff can quickly learn the [people], policies, processes and practices of an organisation.
University of Edinburgh.
I believe at the core of many training strategies is a flaw that is contributing to a $3.8 billion cost in employee turnover every year in Australia (Australian Human Resources Institute, 2015).
Organisations need to enable their new employees to succeed in their role much faster than ever before. Job-specific training needs to start from the very beginning, at your inductions.
Organisations that fail to use training as an enablement strategies limit their ability to grow. They risk disengaging vital human capability before it can even take root, destablising continuous improvement initiatives, weighing down HR departments and driving up recruitment costs.
Think about what it costs to on-board a new employee
Training and induction costs are literally the price paid for new employees to ‘learn the ropes’. All good business leaders seek to minimise these time/productivity costs whilst maximising their organisation’s performance (PwC, CEO Survey, 2016).
Inductions should focus on sharing the culture and people of the organisation. This can be enabled and optimised by online learning content. However, many online induction strategies miss on-boarding new starters into more complex politics and systems.
This is a fundamental issue with the philosophy behind the design and implementation of the business strategy for learning.
Many learning strategies may be summarised like this:
‘What do I need employees to know for them to be successful, empowered and productive?’
The plan is thrashed out, communicated down the line. Following the plan, the induction and on-boarding program is built.
The plan forms the basis of performance reviews in the on-boarding process.
So why is it, that most working groups I have engaged describe their experiences of reaching the end of the probation period like this?
Employees are telling us that their inductions rarely set them up for success. Realities of the workplace are that employees start doing their role-specific far sooner than the organisation prepares them for. It does not visualise what success looks like or share the stories that really matter. It focuses on cognitive goals, not actual business goals. You know, the ones your employees are trying to reach.
I accept the 70:20:10 model of adult learning. In this model, existing leaders and employees are essential components of employee development (Deakin Prime, 2013).
Inductions should enable our existing front-line leaders and staff to provide coaching and feedback to ensure that the total sum of the learning experience is connected with achieving confidence and competence.
To change this, business leaders could start visualising their learning strategies differently. We need to focus on helping new employees solve the challenges that they need to overcome to execute their role. An induction shares a business’s culture and stories. That culture and story is defined by how well an organisation sets its people up for success.
These wicked problems require induction strategies to consider more than modules and videos.
The learning experience needs to be embedded across all pillars of an employee’s journey through an organisation. It should be emblematic of the culture and people by sharing stories but also connecting people with performance.
To do this, I encourage business leaders to embrace design-thinking methods to create, implement and sustain change that will improve learning design implementation and truly support the people and productivity of their organisations, right from the start.
