- May 22, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity, Safety

When you’re inducting new people into your organization, it’s not uncommon to present them with a lot of information, reading of the manuals, showing them how to operate the company software, and to actually perform their job.
In fact, the first few days of most onboarding processes are all about the rules, policies, and procedures of an organization. It’s more like drinking from a firehose, and it’s not surprising that people get overwhelmed with everything they have to do.
As a result, people forget 90% of what they were taught because now they’re so immersed in performing their actual jobs, they don’t even realize what they’ve forgotten.
Then, when they violate a policy, they’re often told, “But you were taught this on your first day.”
“Yes, along with 5,000 other things I was supposed to remember.”
What the new hires should actually have been learning was how to find the information they needed.
Teach People to Learn
No two business systems are exactly the same. And what will frustrate new associates will be their lack of understanding of the systems that exist in their new organization.
If the new associate is really progressive and aggressive, they will want to achieve and accomplish in their new job.
So a robust training process will bring the individual up to operational standards and make them self-sufficient in as short an amount of time as possible. Then, there should be a quantifiable means of measuring their output so they can develop a sense of personalized accomplishment.
The interesting thing is that almost everything an individual requires to excel is self-taught. It’s not what they got blasted with in the first week of onboarding. It’s going back and relearning that information, process, policy, or best practice later on.
Which means your onboarding training should be about where they need to go and how to get there to get what they need. The self-taught part is intellectualizing that information and executing it.
For example, if a salesperson is putting together a quotation, knowing where to get the necessary product information and how to put it together is the how-to. But it’s entirely up to the salesperson whether or not they’ll analyze that information by checking to see what the same item was sold for the last three times.
That’s the part where they intellectualize the information and execute it. If you were to hand the salesperson the sales list and say, “Go forth and sell!” you haven’t done them any favors. But if you teach them that they need to look at past sales prices and where they can find that information, you’re teaching them how to learn the information they need.
And that’s how you create an environment of excellence, where you get everyone to teach themselves. By doing this, you could even reduce the onboarding time and costs associated with it.
I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Photo credit: DLPqatar (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 1.0)