Did you know that 25% of new employees decide to stay or leave an organisation in their first week? A quarter of new employees will choose whether to stay or leave your business in the first week of employment. Therefore, it’s important that businesses implement key practices to motivate staff to stay onboard. A staff induction program integrates new employees and helps them understand the systems and procedures followed by the organisation. In other words, induction training helps new employees settle into the new work environment, and gives them a sense of belonging.

An induction program for new staff benefits a new employees. In addition, it provides a range of benefits back to your business, such as:

• Saving time and money
• Reducing employee turnover
• It ensures operational efficiency
• Makes the new employee feel valued and respected
• Helps establish good communication lines
• Minimises potential misunderstanding of guidelines, policies, and procedures
• Promotes a healthy workplace culture

First Impressions Matter

We all know the saying “first impressions matter”. Even before a new employee starts their first day, they are already building an opinion of your business. For example, they may wonder what their time with your company may feel like. In addition, it’s important to be open with expectations, streamline your communications and gather the required information from them.

• Clear communications with starting dates, hours of business, key contacts, and their details
• An online New Employee Form shows a professional and easy way to obtain key information for onboarding. This includes emergency contacts, uniform sizes, payroll details, relevant certificates, and clearances
• An outline of what to expect during their first days and weeks in their role, including their onboarding training program

Key Training to Complete During an Induction:

There is key training content that businesses should be training their staff on when they start in a business. This training should be accompanied with a specific business policy that outlines the minimum standards and best business practices in your organisation.

• Workplace Health and Safety: Understand some of the issues relating to health and safety that workers may face in the workplace.
• Bullying and Harassment: Provide managers and staff with an understanding of workplace bullying and harassment and what they can do to prevent and manage it.
• Cyber Security: Understand and apply established security measures to ensure organisational and partner security online.
• Management Duty of Care: Give your managers an overview and understanding of Workplace health and safety (WHS) responsibilities a practical understanding of how to fulfill them.
• Diversity and Cultural Awareness: Recognise potential preconceived bias in the workplace and equip managers with the tools to overcome and celebrate diversity.
• Equal Employment Opportunity: Provide managers and supervisors with an understanding of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws and discrimination.
• Competition and Consumer Law: How Competition and Consumer Law applies to your business in relation to customer and B2B engagement.
• Privacy Law: Provide an understanding of the Privacy Act and how to apply it to your organisation.
• Electronic Communications and Social Media: Provide your expectations of electronic equipment use and online behaviour.
• Security Awareness: Provide knowledge of business processes regarding the protection of physical and informational business assets.

Reporting for success

Staff training is crucial to the success of any organisation; for training to succeed it must be appealing, be assessed, and be easy to do and manage. 

Throughout a staff member’s induction, you’ll want to be regularly updated and have access to how they are tracking and what training has been completed. If there is a completion timeframe allocated to the training, you will need to know if they are overdue with their training requirements.

A great staff induction program should incorporate a reporting element. In addition, it should streamline the process to gather relevant information on performance and completion. Therefore, managers can check in with their new starters, discuss what they have learned during their induction and follow-up anything outstanding.

Where certificates and key competencies are required as part of a team member’s induction, a system needs to be in place that tracks these competencies and certificates and reports back to managers when and if these are due to expire.

What to look for in an LMS

Choosing a Learning Management System can be overwhelming – there are literally thousands to choose from. Our blog The Power of Online Learning delves deeper into LMS system requirements.

 When looking for an LMS, you need to ensure the system has the following features:

• Flexibility – it needs to be accessible on any type of device.
• A Creation Tool – Each business is unique therefore you need a tool to allow you to create and customise your own organisation’s needs.
• Competency Tracking – To ensure you’re across the require skills and certificates for each position in your organisation
• Learning Pathways – Each team member can have a customised training set based on their circumstances
• Customisable Reporting – Managers and supervisors can then have access to the reporting that’s relevant to them
• Automated Allocation of Training – It’s about streaming your processes and giving time back to you.
• Cater for Each Method of Training – Where face to face events and seminars do occur, you must be able to track and report on this.
• An Online Forms System – ensure you create custom New Employee Forms, collect information, and store it safely in the cloud.
• Document Management System – It is important to have an online automated document and policy management system, that allows staff and contractors access to vital organisational documents and policies while automating the organisation obligations.
• A Contractor Management System – Some businesses employ contractors to work onsite so it’s important they are inducted and trained, like an employee.

To see further how dita Solutions can help you implement effective staff,  manager and supervisor inductions with quality training content, contact us here.