Secrets of New Starter Success - Less is more
Catriona Malcolm
Learner Advocate focusing on proven practice learning design and creating great learning experiences.
Part of being an Enterprise Design Practice Manager is surfacing evidence-based approaches, proven practice and insights from experts.?In this series of short articles I have gathered the experience of my network and collated it into some useable insights. Feel free to add your New Starer secrets in the comments so that everyone can benefit from our experience.
Ultimately the goal of Role Ready is to help new starters contribute to their team as quickly as possible.
This article is part of a series. Feel free to read it as a standalone or refer to the others.
Secret #3 – Less is more
It feels counterintuitive when you have a long list of priority job tasks and ABCD Objectives; to look for the simplest solution. In any job there is so much change for your new starter that the last thing they need is to be bombarded with information that they may or may not be able to make sense of. Overwhelm is one of the most common feelings in the first weeks on the job.?So as people, people we need to show some compassion for the new starter. If we have recruited right, we know they have what it takes so now we just need to help them demonstrate that they can meet the probation standards.
Start with the end in mind.
Work with your business experts and stakeholders to create some robust Objectives (see It’s all about Performance for more on this). Once you are happy as a group, then look at the methods of evidencing that the new starter can meet the objectives. The key here is to choose assessment methods that require minimal effort from the leader or coach and provide the new starter with useful feedback and evidence that they are progressing their skills.
Patti Shank PHD ’s book Write Better Multiple-Choice questions to assess learning is a great resource for working this through.
Write the assessments before you create any other resources. This is the best way to ensure that the assessment is aligned to the agreed objectives and standards.
Once you have the assessment you can go back to your audience analysis and work out what tools, resources, coaching and feedback are needed to help them pass. Only curate and create resources and activities that align to the objectives and will contribute to the new starter meeting the defined standards.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Remove
Reduce overload for employees. One fifth of an employees' day is spent searching for information . Work with your SMEs, recent New Starters and experienced employees to find the tools and resources that are most useful to them and promote them. ?One of the best ways to do this is to point the employee to the resource at the point of need for example as a “more information link” in an assessment task or a problem-solving activity.
Reuse content and resources that already exist and work.
Recycle – are there checklists, videos, or how-to guides that could be upcycled into a learning experience that will build skills and aid performance?
!!! Remove previous iterations of the Role Ready program content and resources as well as outdated business resources and tools from all the repositories where they might be stored or linked.
Find or create ways to practice safely.
Present your New Starters with a challenge, problem to solve or process to follow that is as close to the real-world job task as possible. This doesn’t have to be a high-tech flight simulator or VR experience. Using scenarios and case studies* aligned to the objectives, the real-world tasks can be just as effective. ?Cathy Moore has some great examples of plain text scenarios that are really powerful on her site.
The scenarios can be used for both learning and assessment. Often, new employees can problems solve a well written scenario using the tools already available in the business (e.g. SOPs, Policy documents, Quick Reference Guides). They just need help in finding the right tool or resource at the right time. You can reduce friction for them by serving this up at the point of need.
*Be mindful of privacy when creating scenarios and case studies. Training materials should not contain customer or employee data. Take care to work with your SMEs to de-identify any data before it goes to the learning designers and developers.
People who are learning need connection and support but not always facilitation.
If the new starter is an experienced professional changing organisations, they may not need much support to meet the probation standards. Similarly a team that recruits one person every 12 months isn’t going to need a “training course” to support their new starter to become proficient. You may find that a checklist based on the objectives of tasks and subtasks to be learned is sufficient for the leader, coach and experienced team members to plan and manage the organisational specific skilling needed to meet the probation standards.
Your new starter will need access to a support community of experienced practitioners, Subject Matter Experts and technical coaches and their leader to ask questions, get help and receive feedback. (See Secrets of New Starter Success – Formal Training is only a small component ).
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Sometimes a new starter playbook, SharePoint site or campaign of emails or texts can introduce the newbie to the tasks, key resources with how-to videos, Quick Reference Guides, decision trees and practice scenarios. This coupled with observation, guided practice and feedback will help them to achieve the probation goal.
Entry level new starters often need some underpinning knowledge aligned to the priority job tasks.
Curated reputable resources are great for this. At Westpac Group, we often refer new employees to the knowledge articles on the company public website , the Davidson Institute or government MoneySmart site.
Generally entry level roles are recruited in groups, so a guided experience is useful. To foster connection within the group balanced with individual independence, we tend to use a blend of
Synchronous facilitated conversations. We tend to connect with the group 3 times a day
These facilitated conversations can be run by a facilitator, coach or leader depending on the business set up and the degree of subject matter expertise required to debrief the activities.
Asynchronous conversations via a discussion board. We use MS Teams. This keeps the group connected to each other and the “facilitator” and provides an opportunity to ask questions and keep the group on track. We also use the asynchronous channel for discussion based on caselets as a form of practice.
Small group research activities (we find that 3 in a group means that everyone is held to account)
Scenarios, simulations or case studies (first in groups and then individually)
Observation either in real world or with de-identified audio and video
Assessment activities.
This more formal learning can be tapered off as real-world practice begins and new starters ramp towards probation productivity and quality KPIs.
Spaced recall and practice are interleaved throughout the journey to probation and beyond so that employees are reminded of the task elements that pose most risk. These spaced activities develop in complexity with the employee to build confidence and keep the degree of challenge aligned with experience.
Contextualise compliance
It is common for new starters to be greeted with a long list of mandatory compliance that needs to be completed in the first few months on the job. It makes for a poor employee experience to be left in front of a computer doing hour after hour of eLearning with no context about why it is important or how it applies to the job role they have just begun.
Once your new starter has covered off Health, Safety & Wellbeing, Code of Conduct, Privacy and Technology code of use they are “safe” and can be allowed some breathing space to complete the remainder of their compliance.
We have found that drip feeding the compliance in the context of the task skill learning works well. For example a new starter who is customer facing needs to be RG146 Tier 2 accredited. We would introduce this as part of the customer service and customer conversation tasks along with behavioural training in sales and service, product research, system navigation and input into the CRM and record keeping procedures. This approach helps the new starter to feel how all the elements fit together to ensure that the customer is receiving the best service possible and meets bank and governmental standards.
Less is more
The more content you produce, the likelihood of your new starter using it diminishes and the greater the maintenance burden to keep it current and aligned to proven practice on the job. Remember new starters didn’t join the organisation to consume learning. Their prime focus is contributing to the team by doing the job the best they can.?
The last article in the series?is about operationalisation and continuous improvement of your solution so there will be more on maintenance then.
Many thanks to my team and the many designers, capability managers, business SMEs and new starters that I have worked with over the years.
Any views expressed in this article or by me in any social media or other forums are mine alone and do not represent the views of any organisation or community with which I am associated.