All Aboard! (II): Go Granular!

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Is your “onboarding” content a giant block of granite, a monument to “the way we have always done it”? Even if you are just now developing your message to new employees, providing basic orientation and explaining essential values and processes of your organization to new hires, it is all too easy to stay at the “big picture” level when a more granular or modular approach—working in smaller bits and pieces—could dramatically increase your impact.

Your company wants to run as lean as possible, which means getting new employees up to speed quickly. And efficiency means avoiding the most costly approach of all—having to redo training and communications around topics that don’t “stick” the first time.

Take that massive pile of information for new hires and cut it down into modules, along these lines:

• Break the content into the smallest units possible, each one focused on a single idea that new hires need to understand. If you’re having a hard time tackling your existing “syllabus,” start with the schedule and cut it into one-hour, or even half-hour, blocks that will help you see the components of your message.
• Associate each unit with an outcome. What will an employee who completes that unit do differently than one who doesn’t? How will that contribute to the organization’s success?
• Identify units with weak outcomes, or no outcomes and eliminate them! Sometimes you have to be brave about this. Take that wonderful half-hour on the beloved founders of the company. If that unit directly connects their early experiences to values or practices in the company today, perhaps it is valuable. If that unit is just a sentimental tribute to the past, consider dumping it.
• Rank order the remaining outcomes, starting with the ones that make the greatest contribution to the company’s success. In second place, put the units that are “prerequisites” to the highest ranking outcomes, units you have to understand to tackle the units that deliver the biggest payoffs.
• Design a communication/training module at the level of each unit. Remember that delivery is a design issue, and put effectiveness before efficiency for the highest ranking outcomes. If a content unit makes a big contribution to your organization’s success, more live, personal approaches to training may do more to produce the behaviors you are looking for, from your new hires, than will self-study or online training. Don’t sacrifice impact to saving a few bucks on delivery, where the outcome is truly important. Save your most efficient delivery for outcomes that are less crucial to the company’s bottom line.
• Identify units that absolutely must be delivered exactly the same way, every time, everywhere. For example, training that helps you avoid lawsuits, regulatory action, ethical problems or public relations crises often depends on a fairly precise understanding of “the rules of the game.” For those units, a combination of “canned units” (online, printed manuals, podcast/video recordings) that ensure consistent delivery with a strong, personal endorsement from the leadership can be your best option.

Effective onboarding is a delicate (and constantly changing) balance, a balance between impact and efficiency, a balance between crucial content and other subjects that are helpful, but less essential. A key step in achieving the right balance, and in eliminating wasted time and effort that few companies can afford to lavish on new hires, is to cut the content into sufficiently “granular” units to allow you to assemble the pieces, not into the biggest, most complete picture of the organization, but into the optimal picture to drive results.