Rethinking Inductions - Transcript

Philippa Lamb: We all know how important first impressions are but for far too many
people inductions are little more than a quick tour of the coffee machine, the loos and
the fire exits before being issued with an employee handbook and shown to their desk.
What a missed opportunity. At the start of what could be a long and rewarding rela-
tionship between employee and employer it really is essential to get that relationship
off to the best possible start with a truly excellent induction.

Paul Turner is an author and academic who’s given a great deal of thought to induc-
tions and he believes they’re a unique moment for both sides.

Paul Turner: One of the new approaches, if you like, to induction is the fact that it’s
become more of a two-way process. So whereas before it was more about organisation-
al identity - this is what we are as an organisation - where inductees were seen more
as an audience, I think now it’s about personal identity, less of an audience, more of
a community. So we want to get feedback as well. We want to find out with new em-
ployees what they can contributed to the organisation. So in the past it may have been
where induction, after the induction process I receive my t-shirt with the organisation’s
name on it, I think in future the t-shirt will have my name on it as an employee as well
as the organisation.

PL: Inductions are a great opportunity for HR to get creative. Along with face to face
contact, many organisations make tech and multimedia a central part of the mix with
great results, especially when the workforce is very large or very diverse. Here’s Paul
Turner again.

PT: Nowadays, organisations aren’t the traditional hierarchy, one site organisations.
They can be global, multi-site. The nature of employment means that people could work
part time, some people could work from home, work remotely, so how do we engage
those in the induction process? And I think technology is a great way of doing it.

PL: Technology can be used to help unify the process when you’re inducting different
types of people into your business. As an added bonus combining technology and
social media can help you initiate a good relationship with new employees even before
they join. Here’s Paul Turner.

PT: The use of social media in every aspect of people management has really grown in
the last year or two years and I think it’s a very valuable contributor to the induction
process. Some people say that induction is about making people feel welcome on the
first day, I think really it should start before then, it should start with the offer letter if
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you like. Using technology and social media in particular to engage people before they
actually step into reception I think is a really great way of helping to induct.

PL: United Coffee, now known as UCC Coffee, provides coffee machines, beans and
other coffee products to a wide range of customers from big commercial clients to
independent businesses and individuals. It’s one organisation that’s engaging with new
starters even before they walk in the door. Naomi Godwin is HR adviser for UCC. She
told me how their induction process works.

Naomi Godwin: The induction process is quite key to the first point of contact with
any new starter in the business and it’s quite critical that that first point of contact is
actually the one that tells them who we are, what we love, and how we work. So we
rejigged the new starter process so that when new starters are offered they get a call
from the HR director to give them the offer, so actually the verbal offer comes direct
from the top.

PL: Nice.

NG: They then get their offer pack which we have a culture pack in there which gives
them samples of our coffee, we have samples for tea, biscuits, a USB stick with a little
welcome box and there’s lots of new starter information on that. And then before they
start there’s quite a lot of contact with the HR department so that they feel, not that
they’re loved, but feel that they’re part of the organisation already.

PL: And you call them the day before they join don’t you?

NG: We do.

PL: Which I think is a really nice idea.

NG: We do yes and we get an awful lot of really good feedback about the culture pack
and about the first day call.

PL: A good induction might start before day one but the process should continue well
beyond the first day too. Here’s Paul Turner again.

PT: It’s possible I think to look at induction in three stages. I think firstly there’s what
we might call ‘operational induction’ that is the basic things we have to do to get some-
body into the organisation. That can be anything from a payroll number to an email
address, to a desk or a workstation. The second part I think is more orientation - who
are the people I work with? What does the organisation look like? What are its values,
beliefs and so on? And I think the third thing is the onboarding, that’s a term that’s
increasingly used now. Onboarding is a longer process, it’s the process that embraces
all of the operational induction orientation but it makes sure it isn’t just a one-off hit,
that people come in, they see the chief executive or watch a video and then that’s it.
It’s a process over time. The conventional wisdom suggests that there’s a 90 day peri-
od in which we can really engage employees and so therefore it’s worth looking at the
idea of a 30, 60, 90 day onboarding plan where we can have regular reviews, regular

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dialogue and it has to be two-way if we’re going to engage as a community rather than
an audience. The three month onboarding review is one way of ensuring that continuity
but even beyond that, even six months and even a year so that we can make sure it’s a
process rather than an event.

PL: BBC Worldwide is a diverse organisation employing around 2,500 globally with 65%
here in the UK and the rest in around 30 other countries. Anna Charleston is head of HR
operations there and she talked to me about the challenges they face when it comes to
inductions.

Anna Charleston: I think the biggest challenge is how do we design something which
is fit for purpose for everyone, from a cultural perspective, particularly international-
ly where the BBC brand just isn’t really well known. I think it’s very easy for UK new
starters to have a good understanding about our parent company the BBC but if you’re
brought up and living abroad then licence fee payer, the actual remit of the BBC isn’t
that familiar to you so our challenge was really how do we create something which
sticks with our UK audience, our new starters, but also can be adapted for our local
global requirements.

PL: I asked Anna Charleston how BBC Worldwide set about tackling this.

AC: Originally we had a very basic what we called ‘Monday induction’, and that’s all
new starters used to get and it was really sort of hit and miss whether our local cham-
pions, our induction champions, delivered anything internationally or not but because
what we were doing was taking people from reception and literally taking them into a
room and almost in a way ‘sheep dipping’ them in information we thought they needed,
after a couple of months we realised that all we were getting were glazed looks, they
weren’t taking anything in at all.

PL: Slightly panicked?

AC: Yeah. And all they were thinking about was, ‘What’s my manager going to be like?
Where am I sitting?’ There was really no engagement at all. So what we decided to
do was do something quite different and start engaging with them from the time they
first received their job offer. So we worked with a small company called One Fish, Two
Fish, on trying to design the programme and they came in and looked at our culture
and thought what would really work. We’ve got fantastic brands, fantastic television
programmes which we’re immersed in on a day-to-day basis; how can we make the
induction stick and be engaging and more of an experience rather than a deluge of in-
formation being passed to new starters? So how we designed it was that from the time
someone received their job offer they receive an email from our Chief Executive Officer
welcoming them, giving them links to videos, to corporate information about the com-
pany and also supplying some anecdotes from other new starters internationally.

PL: Okay.

AC: So we’ve got the UK version plus also an international version. What we also did
was we created a bit of a cartoon like animation video for our managers to help them

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with the soft skills required to actually make a new starter feel welcome. And then
what we do in the UK is that we do what we call just a Monday morning meet and
greet. So when new starters come into reception we bring them up to a room really
just to make them feel welcome. We give them very, very basic information just to help
them get started like for example their log in, how to use to the phones, and also ori-
entation around the building. We then don’t do anything else until the end of the first
month because what we wanted to do is to help them settle in to get them a bit of a
context about their role and the company and then offer them quite a unique induction
day. How we do that internationally is it’s not a day but it’s a lot shorter and we have
inductions champions in the overseas offices and they have taken the basic format of
our induction day but adapted it so it really sticks locally, so it makes much more sense.

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