3 Ways to Ensure School Employee Orientation Success

School employee orientation is meant to inform, inspire, and welcome new employees to your team. There is a big difference, however, between just having an orientation presentation and having a successful school orientation program. For one thing, you don’t want to waste your time, and the employees’ time, with a mundane offering that fails to communicate your purpose or achieve the school district’s goals. Here are three ways to ensure that you have a successful and effective school employee orientation program.

1. Create a dynamic presentation.

One of the best ways to draw your employees’ attention (and hold it) is to create a dynamic school orientation program. By combining a variety of engaging techniques such as audio and video, your presentation will appeal to different learning styles and preferences. Some successful school orientation programs even incorporate learning games to increase interaction and knowledge retention. By including an assortment of mediums you will make your presentation more engaging and thus more effective.

2. Make the orientation process more accessible.

In many cases, it is extremely difficult to ensure 100% attendance at an in-person school employee orientation. Whether employees are moving from far away, encounter an emergency, or simply have a scheduling conflict, many school districts are forced to offer multiple sessions of employee orientation in order to accommodate as many people as possible. To combat this problem, you might consider creating an online version of your orientation program that can be used as needed or in place of the traditional orientation presentation altogether.

Online school employee orientation programs offer many benefits that cannot be derived from the traditional presentation style. Aside from being more convenient, eLearning experts argue that online training, when executed correctly, is more effective than in-house training. Online platforms also offer the ability to easily add dynamic features like audio, video, and interactive games to engage your employees to the fullest extent.

If you decide to develop an online school employee orientation, either to replace or supplement your current presentation, consider these tips to maximize its effectiveness:

• State your goals early on and frame the content around them, avoiding irrelevant information, abstract wording, and excessive graphs.

• Avoid over-crowding the content with unnecessary data and statistics.

• Make the orientation accessible across all mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) so it can easily be completed from anywhere at any time.

• Supplement your online presentation with additional resources and references by embedding video and links in the content.

• Keep the content as brief and to the point as possible to avoid boring or confusing your employees.

• Make the orientation program easy to navigate by breaking the information into short modules (which also allows employees to learn each chunk of information at their own pace).

• Consider including a quiz at the end of each module to measure progress and ensure that the necessary information has been absorbed.

3. Collect constructive feedback.

One of the best tools you have at your disposal is feedback on past school employee orientations. Along the same lines, make sure to include an opportunity for every employee that completes your orientation to provide specific, constructive feedback about the entire presentation. It’s typically recommended that you ask employees to provide details about which portions of the orientation work, which do not, and what improvements they suggest for future school employee orientation programs. One other thing to keep in mind—anonymous feedback submissions encourage honesty. You might also consider reaching out to other local school districts to find out what has or has not worked for them.

Put simply, your school employee orientation is your first real interaction with your new employees and you should never underestimate the power of first impressions. These tips will help you create a successful school employee orientation program or improve the one you already have in place. However you decide to approach your school orientation, remember that you’re asking for your employees’ best work, so it only makes sense that you show them your best work in return.