Team Management: Importance of Induction Training

Once someone has joined the organisation, there are approaches you can use to understand what motivates them and work on keeping them engaged. But sometimes things go wrong. Dealing with poor individual performance can be one of the most challenging aspects of being a manager. In this article, you'll get ideas on the best ways to explore performance issues and to create a positive, healthy team environment that motivates people and encourages growth and development.

Let’s get started, with a look at induction.

Induction is the first stage of welcoming someone into your organisation. It’s designed to help a new team member to settle in, become productive and make best use of their skills and potential.

Induction should begin on the employee’s first day – or even earlier! It should do four things:

• make new employees feel welcome
• help them to understand the organisation in its wider context, as well as key policies and procedures
• make clear what the organisation expects of them
• start the socialisation process into the organisation’s culture and its preferred ways of behaving and doing things.

Thinking back to your own experience of taking on a new role, how effective was your induction? Did it deliver on the four aims we outlined above?

Think of induction as an extension of the selection process and the beginning of an employee’s development programme. It is the process which supports the integration of a new employee into the organisation.

They learn about its corporate culture, its policies and procedures, and the specific roles and responsibilities of their new job. Induction should be planned and paced over several days or weeks. In some parts of the world, induction is known as orientation.

Download this action checklist to help you examine how well induction works in your organisation, or another one you choose.

If you are asked to plan an induction for a new member of your team, what good ideas from the checklist will you include? Post your views in Comments, remembering to consider confidentiality.