Significance of Orientation for New Employees!
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Posted by Asma Zaineb, Manager Marketing Communications
Thu, Sep 30, 2010 @ 05:04 AM
Integrating employees into your unique work culture cannot end with merely hiring them. Employees come with several apprehensions about their career in the new company. They will be anxious about your policies, procedures, work culture and, most importantly – your other employees. There are several advantages of a well-conducted employee orientation program.
It makes your employees feel valued: Employee orientation is an opportunity to convey that you value your employees and their services. This keeps them interested in the company and their positions.
It helps you reduce start up time and cost: A properly planned orientation program helps you educate the employees on your policies, procedures, and work culture. Besides, you can also convey your expectations so that the new employees get to learn the work and give you the required dividends. Thus, you can reduce the learning time and the associated costs. Otherwise, your managers would have to spend their time in teaching work procedures.
It boosts Productivity and Retention: Orientation plays a crucial role in eliminating initial confusion and increasing the speed to perform the job as per expectations. Since you make it clear in the very beginning what you expect of the employees, they start working towards that goal from the beginning. When what your employees do and what you target are in the same line, it will be easy for you evaluate their performances and reward them accordingly. This not only enhances the employees’ productivity but also their job satisfaction. Satisfied employees are more likely to stick to the company for a long time.
In spite of its invaluable benefits for organizations, employee orientation is a much-neglected strategy. Many organizations treat it as an HR process which includes briefing the new hires about their business, values, history, and employee policies. Orientation ends up being nothing more than a program that introduces new hires to their reporting managers and colleagues, many a time within their own departments. This can cost the company dearly in the form of resource wastage and employee productivity since employees attempt to learn the actual work through a trial and error method.
Sometimes, small organizations avoid conducting orientation programs because these take the employees away from work for a long time and the organization cannot afford it. However, they can handle this problem by planning the orientation program in such a way that it goes alongside regular work. They could divide the orientation program into different segments and conduct them in harmony. In the process, they can use online learning resources wherever possible.
A well-planned and executed orientation is required to keep your employees motivated right from the start. Less satisfied employees are more likely to quit. It is, therefore, your responsibility to alleviate all the fears that your new employees undergo, through proper orientation. This facilitates their getting comfortable with the new workplace and focusing on their job faster. So plan your program well.
Do share your thoughts on the same.
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Tags: conducting orientation programs, enhance employee performance, new employee orientation programs
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Not only do I believe that orientation programmes (we call them “inductions” in the UK) work, but they are absolutely essential. If as a business you have spent significant time and money recruiting a new talent into your company, you have got to make sure that their first few days / weeks are incredibly clearly laid out, and cover off several key elements:
1. Housekeeping – HR / Personnel paperwork, health checks, protective equipment / PC / company car (depending on role), swipe cards, entry codes, etc, etc
2. Meet & Greet. Ensure that they get to see (face to face) their line manager, the HR manager, and any other relevant personnel, including future team members.
3. Site tour. As it says – show them canteen, toilets, entry/exit routes, car parking, and brief tour of departments so that they can find the post room, HR, accounts, and so on.
4. Job Role. Where will they be working, what is their job, what are their bosses expectations of them? How these things are captured. measured and reviewed. A clear plan of action for the first few days / weeks (depending on complexity of role)
You’ll have noted that very little of the above focuses explicity on motivation or engagement with company culture. If you do all of the above things well, that in itself sends a very strong message to your new employee about the implicit values and behaviours of your organisation.
Phil.
An effective induction program usually covers few broad areas – Company’s profile, policies and procedures and the KRAs of the new hire. However, merely briefing an employee on these areas is just the first step and in order to effectively utilize the talent it is essential to assess as to how he / she sees himself / herself contributing towards the organizational goals or in other words finds himself / herself motivated to carry out the responsibilities efficiently.
In order to achieve the above stated, an orientation program can be so designed so as to provide the new hire an opportunity to create his / her own “Plan of action” for achieving the KRAs. For, every employee walking through the doors of an organization is a fresh bundle of knowledge and ideas and needs to be provided an appropriate platform to utilize these to the best of his abilities for realizing the organizational goals. A survey can be carried out for this purpose in order to gauge the level of understanding of the new hire with respect to his responsibilities and how he / she intends to carry them out efficiently.