Employee Induction: Are You Doing It Right?
Chances are, the answer is no. Most people have an employee induction programme in place, but more often than not it’s not achieving the results required to improve an employee’s understanding of workplace safety and operating procedures. It almost never provides a company with an understanding of how well employees understand the induction content. And that is central to a training process that actively improves workplace operations and safety. We are all familiar with passive forms of employee induction – videos and booklets in particular -that provide very little reliability for assessing an employee’s comprehension and retention of the induction content. Face-to-face training can sometimes provide this information if there is a questioning process included as part of the course. But even then, results are almost never recorded.
How to achieve better comprehension
An inductee’s ability to understand and retain the information you place within an employee induction is influenced by a number of factors, including the ability to interact with the material being presented, and the ability for the inductee to learn at their own pace. So if your employee induction involves a training video or a training manual you’re probably not delivering these capabilities to your employees. Studies have also shown that when people’s knowledge is tested during the training process, they are more likely to comprehend and retain information because they are actively engaging with it.
How to deliver better training
In an ideal world we can imagine a training scenario where every employee is individually inducted in a face-to-face situation, where the delivery of the training can be tempered to suit the inductee and live questioning can be used to determine comprehension levels. But that’s simply not realistic or cost viable. However, there are employee induction software solutions on the market that base themselves on precisely this ideal. And because they can be hosted online, inductees can learn at their own pace and, more often than not, from their own home. The best ones also include the ability for you to create an appropriate questioning process within each employee.
The proof is in the reporting
It is one of the most useful aspects of an online system is its ability to track and report on all information, including time spent on each page, difficulty of each question, pass/fail rates, and more. When the solution provides a comprehensive reporting component (and you should insist that it does) then you are able to continually improve your employee induction content and questions. Without this information, you are, for the most part, flying blind. We provide a range of proven HSE software, designed to actively improve workplace safety through better HSE management.