Everyone has had a bad induction training experience. Whether it’s not knowing where to go on your first day, being left with nothing to do for a week or playing an awkward game of ‘spot the big boss’, these first experiences in a new role can be uncomfortable at best and damaging to long-term productivity at worst. Many organisations go wrong by assuming that the induction training period spans only the first few days or weeks in a new position. In fact, the onboarding process is much further reaching than this. LEO Learning’s ASPECT model details how you can create an onboarding programme which starts at the recruitment phase and continues on throughout their time in their role, ensuring they become fully integrated, high-performing members of the team as quickly as possible.
Attract
You can start to align your onboarding process with your wider business strategy at the Attract phase. There is no need to do anything complicated here – this is essentially a simple communications exercise. Ensuring your company website aligns clearly with your brand and the message you want to convey to potential applicants is an important part of attracting the right people to your organisation, to help you find people with the right talent and attitude.
Select
Once you have a pool of interested applicants, it is time to enhance the selection process. Here, you will need to whittle down the candidates to those with the qualities you are looking for, which may be difficult when armed with an inbox full of almost-identical CVs. Using selection activities such as games, simulations and diagnostics can help you identify the applicants with the key skills they will need to succeed in the role. This is a useful way to assess potential employees before they have had any formal contact with your organisation, giving you a better idea of their core abilities earlier on in the process.
Prepare
Once your chosen candidate has accepted your job offer, now is the key time to start preparing them for their new role. They will most likely be working out a notice period in their current job, so any preparatory learning shouldn’t be too time intensive. Now is the time to start reinforcing the brand and equipping them with useful knowledge ahead of their first day, enabling them to hit the ground running. Setting them up with a login to your training portal is useful, as it means you can give them access to short modules of pre-induction e-learning, and some video scenarios to help them build their confidence and understanding of what the role entails.
Engage
The first few days and weeks are crucial in a new role. A vast amount of information needs to be communicated very quickly to get new starters integrated into the workplace and performing at a high level as fast as possible, making video an ideal way to compress complex content into as short a space of time as possible. Now is also the time to start clarifying their purpose in the context of the organisation, and giving them an idea of what they are working towards, making storytelling an important part of the Engage phase of induction training.
Connect
After starting to learn the ropes in the first week in a new role, it is time to encourage your new starter to connect with their colleagues and get to know people both inside and outside their team. A significant amount of learning takes place informally with peers, making the Connect stage of induction training especially important, by facilitating these all-important introductions. Giving new starters access to internal social learning platforms or inviting them to webinars with experts and service leaders within the organisation is an effective way to get people talking and sharing knowledge more readily.
Tune
The final stage of the ASPECT induction training process is the Tune phase. This is the ongoing learning that takes place throughout the learner’s time with your organisation, and the transition from the induction period through to the Tune phase should be seamless. Having access to all the resources they may need enables learners to remind themselves of induction training material, develop their skills and challenge themselves, hopefully leading to improved retention rates as staff feel supported in their roles. The key here is to ensure you have constructed an effective learning architecture which supports fine-tuning of learning in the long term. With more than 30 years’ experience in creating highly effective induction training, LEO Learning fully understands the challenges faced in global organisations every day.