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Bringing new people onboard is an important process, and should be done with care and planning. New workers should be brought up to speed, given the tools they need to be successful, and made to feel welcomed by the company.

What you should avoid, however, if you are in human resources, is a very long and very boring orientation session, something, for example, that usually runs for more than three hours. If it goes longer than that, says human resources specialist Meredith Soleau, you are going to fall victim to the law of diminishing returns. Some HR orientations run long because they show videos, some covering areas that may not even be all that important.

In fact, showing videos may signal to your employees that you don’t think their time is that important, especially if the videos are some generic, bland and boring production. More effective would be a presentation made by someone in human resources about the pertinent issues, presentations that have been well thought out, that are simple, clear, and direct, telling the employees what they need to know and why they need to know it.

An effective and efficient presentation would focus on a company’s major policies first – things such as accepted norms of behavior, harassment issues, professionalism, and performance goals. Covering the benefits package should not take hours either. If it does, it is probably too complicated.

For those employees who work on a shop floor, obviously safety is a primary concern, and there should be a safety manual to go over with the employees.

For job duties employees will perform in their departments, those should be left to the managers to introduce.

This emphasis on streamlining the process is meant to increase efficiency, not to downplay the importance of the onboarding process, which for the most part does not get enough attention from employers. But a lot of the onboarding process should be done by managers – things such as bringing the new hire up to speed on the job’s duties and what is expected of on the job, making the new hire feel welcome and an important part of the team.

If you’d like help with your orientation process, contact Winston Resources. We can help your Manhattan company look its procedures and suggest ways to make them more efficient. Contact us today!


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