Bridging the gap between induction and production
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Matt Pierce, training manager at TechSmith, explores how technology can help new starters hit the ground running. Weather you’re an employer running your own small business or a new employee at an innovative start-up, there is a distinct challenge on both sides of the employment fence: how to become productive as quickly as possible. Induction programmes are a great way of welcoming a new employee to a company. There is, however, a downside for the business.
A small business with four people could be operating at 100% efficiency when a fifth is drafted in to handle new business. On the surface this seems great, an influx of business puts a greater strain on employees and the obvious way to relieve this is to employ someone new.
However, getting the new joiner trained up on company policy and processes can be a challenge. Any specialist in-house applications will need to be explained and demonstrated, as well as the usual health and safety and office orientation.
Bridging the gap between induction and production quickly is vital. While the fifth team member is learning the ropes, the efficiency of the business drops. Aside from the new member’s limited productivity in the early days, other workers also have to take time away from value-add activity to give required pointers and tips.
How to handle the induction process
A dedicated HR person can handle inductions along with day-to-day office administration. This is ideal but not always possible for small businesses with tight resources and tighter budgets. In these instances, the task often becomes ad-hoc and in the case of technology falls to the recognised ‘techy’ person or people in the office.
The drawback here is how quickly the techy’s time will be cannibalised. Trying to meet a tight deadline can be tricky enough, and stopping every few minutes to demonstrate the navigation of the client database makes it near impossible.
The element businesses miss is the distinction between induction activities that need one-on-one tuition and those that can be learnt through self-tuition, with the aid of online demonstrations or video tutorials.
Technology training can be dealt with simply by adding a little more technology to the mix. The potential to complicate things further may make this unappealing, but a little time investment could make all the difference to an induction programme. E-learning tools can be used to capitalise on existing in-house knowledge and create a set of training aids tailored to the business.
Screen-recording technology can be used to record the process of using complex software and then edit it into a video tutorial. This kind of screen-recording software does not require specialist knowledge and a short amount of time invested in producing a tutorial can save many hours of face-to-face instruction.
The human element of induction can never be fully removed but the addition of tutorials allows new employees to be given ‘how to’ instruction once and then use the videos as a re-fresher when needed. These can also be used by anyone within the company who suffers a lapse in memory too.
As technology becomes increasingly vital to the workplace, small businesses need to introduce more effective and efficient methods of induction and training. Short term time and monetary investment in creating training tools tailored to the business, combined with traditional induction, ensures new recruits are brought up to speed quickly and keeps business productivity on track.
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