HR & Personal Development Training
The stakes are the morale of the new hires. They can limp along without any training, but you need to have them feel comfortable in their new company. Employee morale is directly related to employee productivity and turnover.
Each employee needs to learn the basics of working in your company. They need to know about policies, procedures, sources of information, etc. For example, each new employee needs to learn how to fill out an expense account and select benefits options.
The new hires will initially be very interested in this training, but as their job pressures increase, they will be inclined to take only that training that’s immediately applicable to their day-to-day responsibilities.
The solution approach here could center on having the new hire take a lot of self-directed training, which could be tracked to ensure completion, and then putting the new hire in touch with a mentor.
You can use self-directed, on-demand e-learning that the new hire can take online through a Web browser. The student can learn company history, company policies, and also things like sexual harassment and health and safety issues. Part of this solution is also a virtual library of key policy and procedure documents, so the new hire can go back to a Web page and get reference docu¬ments at a later time.
You might want to include “self-check quizzes” so the new hires can tell what they’ve learned. You want to avoid too much emphasis on tracking and quizzing of the new hires. You don’t want to turn off your employees by making them take quizzes that they can’t always pass. Remember that the real goal is to get each new hire to feel comfortable so they can be more productive sooner.
You also want to avoid the complete lack of a human touch. You can build in the human feeling with mentors, occasional face-to-face sessions, collaborative online sessions with new hires, or other personalized communications with the employee.
Furthermore, you probably want a tracking system that shows whether the new hires actually completed the training, and you might want some short quizzes to determine whether they are actually learning or just turning the Web pages.
Another important part to new hire training is to assign a mentor to each new hire. This mentor should he an experienced employee who communicates with the new hire by e-mail or by phone—the mentor and the new hire do not need to be at the same physical location.
You also might want to consider the following:
- You can get courses on standard business issues (like sexual harassment, health and safety, etc.) from industry vendors. You do not need to create your own.
- Web page with frequently asked questions (FAQs) for new hires is a nice touch, as is a help line that’s answered by a knowledgeable human being. Sometimes a new hire will need to talk to someone in person.
