Today I am stuck with preparing, organizing and facilitating orientation for new hires. The reason I say stuck is twofold. One, everyone else in my office is conveniently on holidays (I need to better plan my holidays). Two, we do the same old routine month after month, PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation, and paper copy after paper copy. Oh it is so dull. We are amazed time and time again that the staff that attend think it’s great. They actually like it and say it is quite informative. We know it’s boring. We know you want to fall asleep during the day. Please someone tell us so we can make a case to change the whole day!?!
Okay…well know one is saying it, but we’re going to do it anyways. Our day consists of one speaker after another showing nothing but PowerPoint slides mixed with an occasional video now and then. HO-HUM. We know that the content is necessary, but we also know that the format is unexciting.
My team is going to have a brain storming session text week on how we can spice the day up and make it more interactive rather than such a classroom base format. One suggestion we’ve already bounced around is turning some of the content into a scavenger hunt. New hires will have info they need to find and clues about where to find it within the hospital. One idea I posed was to purchase (and we have a very limited budget) cheap digital cameras that the groups could take and go and find selected info, but take pictures as they find it. They could then come back and present their findings and photos to the rest of the orientation group. Another idea finds our new hires going to our intranet and conducting an electronic scavenger hunt of particular items we would like to teach them about.
We have seen examples in other facilities where participants play games, use scanners, ipods, etc. All in an attempt to make the sessions more exciting, engaging and interactive. We believe that this will become and increasingly important line to follow as more and more of our new hires are of the X, Y, Z generations. People that are more technically adept and less intriged when spending an entire day in a classroom based training environment.
I’ll let you know what we come up with. Hopefully it will be something that is even more exciting for the presenters as well.
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Hi Tracy,
I sighed with relief when i read your post – things are pretty similar all over the world! I have worked in 2 large corporations here in Australia and their orientation days are exactly the same as your current one ! We too have a brainstorming session coming up so that we can inject some new life into the whole process! I’ll be keen to hear how your planning goes !
Cheers
Thanks Gaby for taking the time to read my posts and even more for responding. I think many of us in the training/orientation world take this approach and it’s getting very stale. We certianly need much more ingenuity and interactivy in our presentations, yet still find some balance of making sure the facts new staff need to know is delivered to them. We are also thinking of using the LMS to deliver some of the much more dry material (policies) that have to be seen but not necessarily in the classroom. I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks again.
Tracy
Here with my fingers crossed hoping you have come up with some exciting ideas to share? Please say you have!