Meaningful induction or information overload! you choose

I took a slight detour to share my experience of being an immigrant job seeker, now I am back to the tread of meaningful discussion at work.
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Our long-awaited team member has eventually joined the team. There is a pile of work that has been placed on the desk for the staff to crack on with. Let’s imagine that its Sally (Sally will be with us for a while and we will be learning from Sally’s journey). Sally’s manager booked her on the corporate induction. A combination of online and classroom learning, a speech from the CEO or a director about the organisation. Lots of information is thrown at Sally, she is new and enthusiastic, so she is trying to store as much information as possible.
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​You ask Sally a week after induction about the information she received, she recalls about 10% of what she was told. So again, we have defaulted back to “cascade information” sharing with Sally in the crucial period of her employment when there is innate engagement and possibly the excitement of starting a new role.

I started to think about conferences and how the content of the conference drives whether we book again the next time the conference is on. How about we adopt the conference approach to organising induction.
 
Ideally a conference has 2 key stages

• Planning the event
• Hosting the event

Conferences bring people together, enables us to learn new things, share information, possibly enables us to bond, and sometimes try new technology. Most of the above applies to Sally apart from trying new technology. Using the key activities of a conference to show a meaningful interaction with our new staff member to commence the engagement journey of the staff.
 
Planning the event- a conference would ideally have a schedule, that schedule would be a mixture of the events. The event would usually include short sessions, workshops, team building activities, networking. There is usually a short brief about each of the sessions, about the speakers. The event organisers know that content is king, so a lot of effort is put into the content and the speaker. Usually speakers are experts in their field who are passionate about the subject area.
 
Hosting the event- There is no reason why our inductions shouldn’t be a mix of activities that bring the new starters together to network with how to sessions. Topical sessions could be delivered by the experts of the subject, not necessarily the senior managers. There is room for our executives either at the Q and A’s session or at the welcome session. Our new staff should be able to choose the sessions they would like to attend. This is not to exclude mandatory learning especially in a regulated work environment, this should be done with a mixture of other forms of learning.
 
How often do we evaluate our induction programme? How do we know that it has been a successful on-boarding event? Following the induction, feedback should be sought from the attendee to assess the success of the event which informs the next round of induction and gratitude for their time should be expressed. I guess sometimes in the bid to keep corporate activities similar we keep the same set agenda year on year. The interactions in the organisation should be an iterative process, utilising feedback to check the pulse of the organisation or an individual at every point to enable incremental positive change. It’s interesting that this is a piece of work that I would be working on soon, perhaps I may be able to share some insights in future post or perhaps readers could hold me to account on how I fared. 
 
Let’s create experiences at work rather than processes or traditions.