INDUCTION & ORIENATION
Definition 1: Planned Introduction
“It is a Planned Introduction of employees to their jobs, their co-workers and the organization per se.”
Orientation conveys 4 types of information:
1. Daily Work Routine
2. Organization Profile
3. Importance of Jobs to the organization
4. Detailed Orientation Presentations
Purpose of Orientation
1. To make new employees feel at home in new environment
2. To remove their anxiety about new workplace
3. To remove their inadequacies about new peers
4. To remove worries about their job performance
5. To provide them job information, environment
Types of Orientation Programs
1. Formal or Informal
2. Individual or Group
3. Serial or Disjunctive
Prerequisites of Effective Orientation Program
1. Prepare for receiving new employee
2. Determine information new employee wants to know
3. Determine how to present information
4. Completion of Paperwork
Problems of Orientations
1. Busy or Untrained supervisor
2. Too much information
3. Overloaded with paperwork
4. Given menial tasks and discourage interests
5. Demanding tasks where failure chances are high
6. Employee thrown into action soon
7. Wrong perceptions of employees
What is the difference between induction and orientation?
Induction referred to formal training programs that an employee had to complete before they could start work
Orientation was the informal information giving that made the recruit aware of the comfort issues - where the facilities are, what time lunch is and so forth.
How long should the induction process take?
It starts when the job ad is written, continues through the selection process and is not complete until the new team member is comfortable as a full contributor to the organization's goals.
The first hour on day one is a critical component - signing on, issuing keys and passwords, explaining no go zones, emergency procedures, meeting the people that you will interact with all have to be done immediately. Until they are done the newcomer is on the payroll, but is not employed.
After that it is a matter of just in time training - expanding the content as new duties are undertaken.
We only employ new people one at a time - how can we induct them?
There are some issues, which cannot wait - they vary according to your situation. Perhaps a buddy system on the job may be the best way to deal with these. Other subjects may be incorporated with refresher training for current staff, or handled as participant in an outside program. Perhaps some can wait until there are groups of people who have started in the last few months.
This may take some creative thinking, but the answer is quite simple - until the new people are integrated then they are less useful. The math is often amazingly simple - not taking the time to train consumes more time than the training would.
What levels of staff need induction?
Everybody. The CEO needs to know different things to the temporary concierge, but everyone needs a planned program of induction and orientation.
PLACEMENT
Placement is allocation of people to jobs. It is assignment or reassignment of an employee to a new or different job.
MULTI SKILLING
Multi Skilling is The Integrated Skills Program that has been developed to build on the existing skills of the current work force to reduce redundancies and avoid downsizing situations. The objective of this program is to gain total integration of skills.
The program is based around ‘on-the-job’ & ‘off-the-job’ competence. That is the ability to do the job on the shop floor (training to gain work experience) and ‘off-the-job’ (training in the classroom) to gain underpinning knowledge.
The program requires the individual to demonstrate competence in a number of different skills and this competence is measured and assessed on the job.
Multi-skilling of course works best with more advanced skilled workers because their individual skills levels are developed enough where they can fluidly transition from one skill to the next without degradation of a skills performance. If you are multi-skilling and a great percentage of your workers are having problems executing one of the skills effectively it is probably a good signal you need to go back to basics with that skill and pull it out of the multi-skilling sequences. Another advantage of multi-skilling is the positive effect of what is called "contextual learning". Contextual learning involves discovery and improvement from two skills, which don't, on the surface, appear to have a direct relationship.
The disadvantages of multi-skilling include the obvious danger of moving on to quickly toward advanced skills and combinations without sufficiently drilling basic skills. While there is a great desire to learn quickly I think this is one of the reason we are seeing better skilled from some of the best workers. The consequence is that we become "partially skilled". The greater the number of partial skills we develop, the less chance we ever have of reaching our full potential.
