In this week’s issue of BRW magazine, there is a helpful article called “It pays to be Nice” that offers companies insightful tips on how to usher new recruits into your company.

Jeanne-Vida Douglas interviewed me for the tips and to give readers extra information, here is some extra detail about how to design a great induction program (that didn’t get printed).  Let’s call it the director’s cut.

Designing a Great Induction Program

Overall, a great induction program needs to be well thought out and planned right down to the daily induction tasks required during orientation over a 1-6 month period.  Those involved in inducting are thoroughly trained in all the right steps and can easily find all the induction materials required.  It should not differ from one industry to another as all these steps are crucial.  Important elements are:

1. Start inducting the new employee before they start their job.  Send a letter welcoming them to the company.  Let them know what is expected of them in their role and the steps involved with their induction process, so they know what to expect on their first day.
2. Make new starters feel welcome.  First impressions aren’t easy to erase.  Take them on a personalised tour of the company and introduce them to everyone.  Encourage other staff to be friendly to new workers.  Spend extra time introducing them to their new team members.  Assign them to a mentor or buddy.  The best inductors also have the CEO or other senior person take the new starter out to lunch in their first month.
3. Have their workspace ready.  This includes a desk, a computer with personalized logon information, telephone which will improve their ability to be productive.
4. All HR forms, policies and procedures are ready.  Administration tasks that are required by HR are ready to go and help is given to the new starter with filling this out.  Ideally, before they start their job new starters are told what information they need to bring in (eg: tax file numbers, bank account details etc).
5. Have their direct supervisor available.  Care is taken so that their direct supervisor is available on their first day to make them feel valued as an important addition to the team.   This is the same with the mentor or buddy.
6. Provide visually engaging induction training.  Avoid sitting the new starter down with a big, boring manual to read on their own.  The best induction training programs are structured and include a face to face component, vivid presentation techniques (photos, diagrams, videos and lots of colour), assessment and senior management involvement.  Ensure they are not overwhelmed with too much information.
7. Communicate company core values.  Great companies start aligning their core values and culture on the newbie from Day 1.  While part of the induction training and mentor/buddy effort, pains are made to get the new starter living and breathing company core values as quickly as possible.
8. Train the trainer: ensure that those involved in the process have been trained and know what is required of them.  Make sure they are able to communicate the company’s core values and have the knowledge to answer questions.

What do you need to improve in your induction training program?

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1. 10 Ways to Improve your Induction Training Inductions represent the most teachable moment companies have with new...

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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.  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?

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1. 10 Ways to improve your Workplace Safety Communication Everything we do is communication.  And it is no wonder...

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Image courtesty of: Jusben/MorgueFile

When it comes to inducting people from a training perspective into any organisation, as important as this process is, unfortunately far too often not enough thought or preparation goes into it.

Organisations can become obsessed with running induction/orientation programs (with these terms often misinterpreted as being one and the same) on a new employee’s first day. Now I am certainly not saying that being given an OH&S overview or understanding the organisation’s mission statement isn’t important. But what about a true induction – and I am not referring to systems or database training, being allocated a new e-mail account, shown where the biscuits are, or being added to the kitchen roster.

These days it is not uncommon for people to move not only from one job to another, but also from one industry to another. And these people need to experience an in-depth induction, which can often go for an entire week.  But for someone new to both the organisation and the industry, when is the best time for them to be inducted?

From my own experience as a manager and having often hired people from outside my sector, I am a firm believer in having them sit within the business for at least 3 – 4 weeks observing the other staff, shadowing the experts, and getting an insight into the true goings on of the business.

After about a month, I think this is then the best time for them to be formally inducted (either by a facilitator from the within the business or an external expert). However the key word here is formally. Not just sitting at a desk, but being in a classroom environment – experiencing industry-specific training as well as performance support, role-plays and true simulations.

By waiting the month, new staff will have become more familiar with industry lingo, they will have watched their more experienced colleagues in action, and that way what is covered in the formal induction will actually make far more sense and be less likely to result in information overload.

Paul Slezak is our guest author this week who is the Director and Head of Learning and Development for Recruitment Academy – www.recruitmentacademy.com.au, one of Australia’s leading providers of induction, training, and consulting solutions to the recruitment industry.

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This safety poster has helpful manual handling tips but fails by showing the wrong behaviour. Only show the behaviour you want.

Effective communication is vital to get staff and contractors aligned and working towards a positive safety culture.

Yet, just providing training to work safely is not always enough.   How we communicate about safety influences whether or not people will accept or reject our safety messages.

A lot of companies produce training about a particular safety topic or  communicate awareness with lacklustre results.

We have found that the following issues often let safety communication down:

1. Infrequent safety message reminders – Multiple message placements are the key to getting staff to remember new safety messages.  Try and get workers to engage in your safety messages in different formats (such as watching it, hearing it and reading it).  People learn in a variety of ways, so an effective safety campaign needs to use a variety of communication methods.  Messages need to be distributed in multiple ways and multiple times. Workers will need six or more separate exposures to your message to remember.  Use video, newsletters, posters, meetings, events and training sessions.  The more the better.
2. Messages aren’t credible - Senior management play an integral leadership role in establishing the culture of a company including safety.  Effective safety leadership needs to be led and driven from the top.  Staff look at senior leaders actions to see whether new safety messages are being taken seriously.  Are your senior leaders really supporting the new messages or are they just playing lip service?
3. Messages aren’t consistent – Good safety communication campaigns have alignment with all departments who are all working towards the same outcome.  This means working with all departments before you launch your safety messages and ensure that they will work with you and not against you.  A common example is that the production manager will push for speed, while the safety manager will tell people to work safely and cautiously.
4. Overuse of negative language – When writing your safety messages, it is important that positive language is used that focuses on the behaviour you want and not the behaviour you want to avoid.  It also needs to communicate the issue in friendly language rather than rule-based or blame-centric writing.  You will get little traction of your message if you blame workers for the current state of affairs.
5. Lack of consequences – It is important to introduce the new safety initiative by first explaining to everyone what the current problem is and the issues it is causing.  Then, managers need to explain the new rules of the game and the expectations.  It is also really important to let workers know of the consequences of not following the new guidelines.  This means letting staff really understand that poor safety behaviour not only puts themselves at risk, but the safety of other workers.  Let them know the effect this will have on their personal life and their family.

Of course, there are a lot more mistakes, but these are the main ones.

What can you do to improve your safety communication?

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It’s smart for companies to be worried about staff training videos and how to tackle them correctly.  There are so many choices.  Quite frequently, training videos are produced that just don’t get used.  Now, working out what components to include in your training video just got easier.

Melbourne, Australia (August 26, 2010) – Digicast Productions, a training video production house, today released the “Best Practice Guide: How to Produce Staff Training Videos that get Results”.   Developing the right training video for your company isn’t easy.   This guide is a useful resource for anyone involved in the challenging and complex task of producing a company training video that performs.
In this 4 page guide, discover:

• The key components required for the best induction training program
• The causes of a poor performing training video
• Issues to avoid during the production of a training video

This guide is suitable for anyone wishing to produce a company training video that will be used for many years.  It is a companion guide for the Training Video Buyer’s Kit.

For a complete copy of the kit, visit http://info.digicast.com.au/best-practice-guide-to-training-videos

About Digicast Productions

Established in 1991, Digicast is an Australian vendor of customised safety and induction training videos.  Thousands of people each year worldwide are trained with Digicast training videos. For more information, visit Digicast at www.digicast.com.au or The Workplace Improver blog for training tips.

Contact Marie-Claire Ross

Digicast Productions
+ 61 3 9696-4400
mc@digicast.com.au

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It’s smart for companies to be worried about staff and customer training videos and how to tackle them correctly.  There are so many choices.  Quite frequently, training videos are produced that just don’t get watched.  Now making the right decision has just got easier.

Melbourne, Australia (August 11, 2010) – Digicast Productions, a training video production house, today released the “Training Video Buyer’s Kit”.   Developing the right training video for your company isn’t easy.  Nor is choosing the right company to help you.  This kit is a useful resource for anyone involved in the challenging and complex task of deciding upon producing a staff or customer training video and then how to go about it.

Using a four step process the buyer kit includes:

• A list of questions to decide whether or not a training video is right for an organisation.

• The critical questions to determine what the training video needs to achieve, in order to write the brief and how to best manage the project internally.
• A valuable checklist to evaluate the suitability of a video production house.
• An additional checklist to measure the effectiveness of training videos already produced by production houses.

For a complete copy of the kit, visit http://info.digicast.com.au/things-you-need-to-know-before-buying-a-customised-training-video
About Digicast Productions

Established in 1991, Digicast is an Australian vendor of customised safety and induction training videos. Thousands of people each year worldwide are trained with Digicast training videos. For more information, visit Digicast at www.digicast.com.au or The Workplace Improver blog for training tips, www.digicast.com.au/blog.

Contact Marie-Claire Ross

Digicast Productions
+ 61 3 9696-4400
mc@digicast.com.au

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Getting Training Messages to stick can be Tricky. This New Report reveals the Key Factors behind Successful Staff Induction Training and how to implement them.

Melbourne, Australia (July 26,2010) – Digicast Productions, a safety and induction training video production house, today released a new white paper “Optimising Induction Training: Reduce Costs, Improve Quality and Talent Retention”.   Around the world, many companies train new starters and contractors ineffectively often finding it difficult to get training messages to stick inside people’s heads.  This paper outlines the impact of poor induction training, the high cost of face to face training and the growing importance of including visuals in training materials.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of human learning occurs visually, yet the majority of companies produce text based induction training materials that have a 10% effectiveness rate on recall levels.

Smart organisations who regularly need to train contractors and new staff are looking for a more streamlined, engaging and cost effective way to ensure staff absorb training messages.

This exclusive white paper addresses the various pitfalls of a poorly designed induction training process and what can be done about it.  The report looks at:
•    What current induction training programs are really costing companies
•    The importance of avoiding a poor safety culture
•    The emerging trend of using more visuals in communication
•    How to make training messages sticky
•    A little mistake that cost a Quarry $20,000 a year

For a complete copy of the whitepaper, download it now.
About Digicast Productions

Established in 1991, Digicast is an Australian vendor of customised safety and induction training videos.  Thousands of people each year worldwide are trained with Digicast training videos. For more information, visit Digicast or The Workplace Improver blog for training tips.

Contact Marie-Claire Ross
Digicast Productions
+ 61 3 9696-4400
mc@digicast.com.au

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1. Use more Visuals - 83% of human learning occurs visually.  Use lots of photos, videos, diagrams and colour to present training information.  Avoid relying heavily on text based training.  After all, we only recall 10% of what we read compared to 50% for what we both see and hear.

2. Tell Stories – During training, tell stories of exemplary staff behaviour that typify the type of action you want staff to do.  Stories help people make emotional connections.

3. Lead by Values – Let staff/contractors know what your values are.   Using values, empowers workers to make decisions based on company values.  Difficult for staff to make the right decisions if they only have rules to follow.

4. Positivise it – Remove negative language.  Tell people how you want them to behave, rather than telling them what you don’t want.  Remove words such as ‘no’, ‘can’t and ‘don’t’.

5. Involve senior management - Senior management play an integral leadership role in establishing culture.  Effective leadership whether it be concerning safety, a new sales method or business structure must be led from the top.  They must be involved in the induction process.

6. Reduce complication - Get rid of long sentences, jargon and big words in training materials.  Keep it short and tweet.

7. Ask more why questions - Teach people why they need to do something, so they can always figure out the how.  Otherwise, company processes keep getting perpetuated without people ever questioning why they do something.

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When new starters, contractors and even customers are required to start training with you, the interaction they have with your company will determine how long they want to stay and how long they will do business with you.

After all, first impressions aren’t easy to erase.

That’s why it is important with any staff or customer training that the training materials are written in friendly and welcoming language.

Yet, many times we see evidence of induction training manuals written in jargonistic corporate speak that seems keen to scold new starters for possible misdemeanors before they have even begun.

It is important that all training materials exclude negative terms such as ‘no’, ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’.  Not only is it unfriendly, but negative language can often be hard for the brain to understand.

Take this sign, for example.  This was placed at the back of a cafe that I enjoy going to.  It has very friendly staff, great coffee and a queue to get in (not my favourite part).

While waiting for my table and walking around the neighbourhood, I found it.  My attention was grabbed for the wrong reason -  I really couldn’t understand it.

My first impression was that no deliveries were allowed.  That seemed strange to me, so I read on, only to be amazed that they were allowed but I couldn’t instantly grasp when.

It is quite amazing how the word ‘no’ at the start of a sentence can really throw you off the true meaning of a message.

So I have decided to  positivise the sign in an attempt to show you, dear reader, how easy it is to make communication messages easier to understand .  And yes, I know that positivise isn’t a real word, but I really like it.

All Deliveries Here

We accept deliveries:

Before 7am and after 6pm Mon-Fri &

Before 9am and after 6pm Saturday

Ah, isn’t that much better?   My brain feels happier now.

Of course, this sign isn’t for staff or even customers.  But as a customer I gathered that they didn’t like their delivery people very much.

However, the point of this example is how negative language can be so much harder for the brain to take in.  While using positive language makes messages so much easier to understand.

Perhaps, it’s time to positivise your training materials?

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According to Steven Bell, senior associate with law firm Freehills, in January 2012 the new Australian OHS laws will expect companies to drive safety management internally and push greater alignment between key messages and action.

The new laws will introduce a level of personal responsibility that will help drive the changes needed for better OHS.  This means that senior managers will be expected to foster a positive workplace culture, receive regular safety reporting and a practical understanding of what is happening on the ground.

This is a great step forward as senior management actually drive the safety culture of a company.

Currently, most companies promote a safety culture, but send out mixed messages when it comes to a safe workplace.  For example: A fairly standard grumble by many workers is that they are expected to work safely, yet at the same time they are told to work faster or in a way that involves safety risks, to drive productivity.

So with the new requirement to promote safety messages and show evidence of a positive safety culture, what is the best way to communicate workplace safety messages?

With any communication program, it is important to take into account that people absorb messages differently and the more they see it, the more likely it will be taken on-board.  Therefore, any workplace safety communication messages need to include a variety of communication approaches such as posters, training videos, staff newsletter and ‘toolbox’ talks.  They all need to be branded with the company’s unique safety messages.

In addition, the workplace safety communication must be personalised to the company.  Generic safety messages won’t cut it.  Instead, it needs to be formulated according to your culture and demographics.  And then it needs to be followed up with action.

A lot of companies that we have worked with have successfully used a customised training video as the main communication medium to drive OHS behaviour change. They have then supported the training video with posters, newsletters and other safety specific materials.

A staff training video is an ideal way to connect with staff.  Made correctly it will positively and believably demonstrate your company commitment to the healthy and safety of your workplace.  After all, research has found that training videos are more persuasive than written material which is perceived as less important and credible.

In order to take into account the new laws, consider creating a customised training video that includes:

• An introduction by senior managers talking about the importance of safety to the staff and company.
• Safety rules/explaining that poor safety effects the viewer and other workers
• Procedures
• Summary

Of course, just playing a training video doesn’t automatically ensure that staff will know your training messages.  It needs to be followed up with a consistent workplace culture that always considers the safety rules/message in every activity.  Not just when played on a training video.

More importantly, senior management must support and agree with all the safety communication tools.  And refer to them often.

After all, staff won’t believe that the company backs its safety messages, until they see the proof of action.

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