“Training or Draining”
When I reflect on the training or onboarding I’ve received over the years of employment, one situation that sticks out for the positive way it was done is when I joined a landscaping company to run their office. I had no previous knowledge of landscaping and the overall process that went into the business. Being a very small business the boss took me under his wing for the first month. I shadowed him during appointments, he walked me through nurseries, taught me how to load a trailer, pick out plants and brought me around the work teams so I would establish a connection with them. In addition to this, he brought me through all the office operations and made sure I felt confident and had the big picture of the business, before releasing me on my own to do these tasks by myself and also gave me the freedom to innovate and redesign new processes for the overall benefit of the business. The onboarding he provided was really key to my success in the business, really he was key to my success and took the time to really show me the business. As it mentions in Your New Hires Won’t Succeed Unless You Onboard Them Properly, the manager and the socialization of the new employee can make all the difference in making sure they are not part of the three month turnover statistic of 17%. In addition to this, even though the sole purpose of my role was running the office, he took the time to walk me through the whole business and explain the “why” similar to the strategy UPS uses as they onboard drivers(Hira, 2007). This allowed me to get a bigger picture of the business, see how the decisions I make in the office would impact the team and made me feel a part of the business as a whole, not just one small isolated piece of the puzzle.
In contrast to the previous experience, I had an interesting onboarding for another job at a different company. I got promoted from within and was sent to another location of the company for training as a manager. The only problem is my trainer seemed to not want to train me or was not properly trained on how to train me. I was at this other location for two weeks and my trainer, didn’t really take the time to explain tasks and the big picture of things. She constantly would push me off to others, the computer or told me to go find something to do. It created a super awkward experience and it was also, very frustrating because I didn’t feel like I was being provided a good training opportunity. Thankfully because I had already worked for the company and had an idea of the tasks I needed to learn, I kind of took the training into my own hands and partnered with others at the location to learn the things I knew I needed to learn. I could not imagine if I was completely new to the company and had this trainer, it would have been a deal breaker. When reflecting on the training design process of “ADDIE”, I see the failure in this experience at the “Develop” phase. The company failed to select the right person to lead the training and didn’t provide the correct tools needed to do so.
Hira, N. A. (n.d.). The making of a UPS driver. CNNMoney. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/11/12/101008310/
Your new hires won’t succeed unless you onboard them properly. Harvard Business Review. (2020, November 3). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2017/06/your-new-hires-wont-succeed-unless-you-onboard-them-properly
