Three Tips to reduce the time to Induct New Starters (Part 3)

<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/28909412">http://www.vimeo.com/28909412</a> If you’ve read the previous two articles in this series, you will know that to reduce induction time you need to use more visuals in your training and reduce the amount of words that you use.

The third and final tip in this series, is to include a demonstration in your induction training.

Research has found that trainees learn better when they are shown what to do. Where possible, they are also given a go and are coached on how to improve.

As Kris Cole mentions in her book, “Crystal Clear Communication” you need to do show and tell, twice. Once so people can see what they need to do. And the second time to help people to see exactly what happens or precisely how something works to determine exactly what is to be done.

For most companies, long inductions include a lot of reading from lengthy induction documents. People are told what to, but are not shown. This means people are being trained with abstract concepts which are often difficult to understand. The key is to turn abstract concepts into concrete examples.

The majority of companies use abstract concepts because they don’t realise that showing what they want the person to do is the best way to educate. This can easily be done with traditional safety induction content which might include information on wearing the right Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), traffic management, emergency response etc.

Let’s face it this type of content can be difficult to demonstrate during a training session (and time-consuming). But trainer’s will vastly improve understanding of the content if shown how these safety topics are done, rather than just being told about them.

This is why using training videos are so effective. By showing (visuals) and telling (narrator), the viewer instantly knows what to do. Both visuals and audio when combined together during training, has been found to increase recall from 10% (from reading alone) to 50% for both seeing and hearing.

The benefit with this is three-fold: it is highly visual (see tip 1), by using more visuals you can easily reduce your word count (see tip 2) and it includes a demonstration which can be missing from most induction training (tip 3). A training video can quickly and easily show the right PPE to wear.

The above video excerpt is a an example of how a procedural based instruction such as “Arriving at the Designated Dock” can be made much easier to understand by using visuals to explain. This example was recently produced for Bulla Dairy Foods and is being used to train truck contractors arriving on site. If you imagine it in written form, it would be difficult to grasp. But this short highly visual video quickly educates.

You can see another excerpt from an induction training video we have done for Conundrum Holding which shows how we were able to visually demonstrate how to undertake their tasks. This type of induction training reduced induction training time down from 47 minutes to 14. This not only saved time and money, but it also made the quarry managers happy as they are now doing more of what they want to do (managing the quarry rather than inducting).