"World's Greatest Gadget" or Instructional Design Industry's Greatest Technology?
(Both. Definitely both.)
After hours of research, I sat down to begin drafting this case study and I tried to think of a good attention-grabbing hook to rope you in. You see, all great stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But, to quote the literary goddess, J.K. Rowling "no story lives unless someone wants to listen." How do I make an audience care about a method of instruction without a flashy app in an industry where we are constantly looking for the newest, latest, and greatest technologies to use as methods to drive learner engagement and instill knowledge into the minds of our learners? How do I motivate you to care about a method of instruction that can be seen as a method as antiquated as a stone tablet and a chisel when you all have been exploring new and exciting apps and learning management systems or e-learning module add-ons and extensions? I need to borrow an analogy from the 2001, cinematic masterpiece, Spy Kids:
Special Agents Carmen and Junie Cortez are about to hack into the OSS system in order to crack a case when they enlist the help of their Uncle Machete, the greatest spy gadget maker in the world. Machete presents them with the latest and greatest
gadget: a watch equipped with all the latest technologies. However, the watch is
missing one crucial element: it doesn't tell time. Machete, sensing their displeasure of
having sub-par spy gadgets presents to them the greatest gadget of all: a Machete Elastic Wonder. It is nothing more than a rubber band, yet that is the genius behind the invention. It has hundreds of uses-- you just have to be creative enough to figure it out.
What does this have to do with instructional design? I’m glad that you asked! Back in 2017 when I first started out in the training industry, I was given the freedom to come up with my own curricula and training philosophy from on-the-job experiences working my way up the corporate ladder. Because I started with the company at an entry-level position, I had experience in the very positions that I was now responsible for creating a training and new employee onboarding experience for. So, I took my experiences and created a high-quality deliverable in the form of a unique, hands-on, and experiential learning focused program. How did I do it? And why did it work?
I’ll explain by highlighting some principles that I utilized without ever studying instructional design or learner engagement. I knew from experience that sitting in a classroom and listening to a training facilitator drone on and on about tax code and customer service fundamentals that the fundamentals that I needed to cover in my curricula were rather dry and dull. However, from working with the company for years, I was able to reflect and draw on real-life experiences outside of a classroom setting and truly prepare my new hires to enter their new position armed not only with product knowledge and customer service skills, but advice from senior leadership, their own managers, and seasoned employees who had once been in their shoes.
New Hire Orientation VS. New Hire Onboarding (Yes, there is a difference.) Before designing my curriculum and e-learning modules, my first task was to design the entire employee onboarding experience in order to jumpstart my new employees’ careers and to make them feel at home with the company. New Hire Orientation typically entails a full day of meetings with management, HR, and a ton of paperwork. But onboarding can last anywhere from several weeks to several months according to experts at The Alternative Blog. In a 2021 article titled “Employee Onboarding Tips that Help Boost Retention,” the distinction between new hire orientation and the onboarding experience was clearly defined. The tips included include making a big deal of a new hire’s first day, introducing them to their team, management, Human Resources officials, etc, (Alternative Blog, 2021). All of these tips were steps that I took in building my onboarding process. I wanted to make it clear to my new hires that they were joining a family, a team. New hires were not nameless, faceless seat-fillers, but unique and valuable assets to the company and to the benefit services team. Through employing these onboarding practices, I was able to take my benefit services department’s new hire turnover which had been at a staggering 75% prior to my time as trainer and whittle it down to virtually zero. Of all the new hires that I trained in my first year of training, 99.9% of my trainees remained with the company for two or more years. Heidi Lynne Kurter, senior contributor at Forbes, did the math and wrote that employers lose 17% of their new hires within their first 90 days. (Kurter, 2018). Under my leadership and employing storytelling techniques in new hire training, I never lost a new hire. (One of my trainees was arrested, which accounts for the .01% of employees that I “lost.’ But I digress. Creating a welcoming environment and ensuring that new hires feel like a valued part of their new team is a sure way to boost learner engagement and employee retention.
“Water Cooler Chats” and Learning from the Seasoned Vets
When I began at my company, my manager sat me down with three other new hires and used a projector on the white wall of his office in order to show us the systems that we would be using in our new positions and he taught us about employer sponsored pre-tax benefits like Flexible Spending Accounts, Cafeteria plans, Health Savings Accounts, and the IRS Tax code surrounding the use of these pre-tax benefits. (I warned you that the material was dry! But stay with me here: I have a point.) Though this training experience was not technologically advanced, John, my manager did his best to prepare us to go live on the phones and to serve customers. I learned a lot from John. I was a new college graduate, and this was my first “real” job, that is a job that wasn’t at the local mall. However, upon entering my position as training manager and having the freedom to develop my own all-new training program to be used in offices throughout the country, I remembered my own experience as a trainee, and I made sure to include things that I wish John had prepared me for when I had first started in the call center. The first strategy that I employed in my curriculum was to institute “Water Cooler Chats” with my new hires who I facilitated training for both live in our corporate office and over Zoom at our satellite offices throughout the United States. These “water cooler chats” would consist of exactly what one might imagine it would: a break from traditional classroom learning and a shift to storytelling and learning from seasoned employees. Every Thursday and Friday of New Hire Training, I would invite an assortment of employees from offices throughout the country to share tales of their toughest calls they’d ever taken and things that they wish they had been told in training. It was a fun and engaging product that helped my new hires prepare and go beyond the curriculum to experiential learning. I had my new hires sit with seasoned employees for an hour or so each day when we weren’t in training class so they could start to bridge the gap between the content they were learning in my classroom to the situations they would find themselves in when they completed training and went live on the phones.
References
Curricula. (2021). How to Make Training Awesome: Your New Employee Onboarding Checklist [Ebook]. Retrieved from https://elearningindustry.com/free-ebooks/new-employee-onboarding-checklist-how-make-training-awesome
Kurter, H. (2018). 10 Simple Ways To Improve Onboarding For Increased Retention. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/heidilynnekurter/2018/12/03/10-simple-ways-to-improve-onboarding-for-increased-retention/?sh=82958844b35f
The Alternative Board Blog. (2021). Employee Onboarding Tips that Help Boost Retention. Retrieved 11 October 2021, from https://www.thealternativeboard.com/blog/employee-onboarding-tips-that-help-boost-retention
Yugo, J. (2017). Four Ways to Use Storytelling to Boost Employee Retention and Engagement | Corvirtus. Retrieved 11 October 2021, from https://corvirtus.com/boost-employee-retention-engagement/
Concept 1: Identifying when to engage
Some topics of the learning content aren’t going to be exciting, the example provided in the post was New Hire Orientation and New Hire Training. Orientation focuses on the details of the job hiring process and things that the learner has to know. Training is more exciting because it details how you will are expected to perform the job. Yet learning required material doesn’t have to be boring, for example if the expectation is that learners have to understand and live by an employee handbook, it would makes sense to incorporate storytelling in a way that will help the learner connect meaning to the information that was presented.
Concept 2: Storytelling, as told…
With this approach I researched what onboarding is, not being familiar with human resource practices I did not know the difference between it and orientation and learning that has helped me see the importance of it. “Onboarding involves a special, conscious effort to make a new employee quickly become a productive member of the organization, laying a solid foundation for a long-term relationship. “ (Hillman). I know how integral the importance of this process is when retaining an employee versus a job with a high turn over ratio. Being able to promote the key factors when starting the onboarding process more employees have a desire for success with in the company. The feelings of “Excitement! Anticipation! Sharing! Learning! Contributing…