What You Don’t Know About School Employee Orientation May Hurt You

Despite the age-old adage that ignorance is bliss, when it comes to preparing your school district’s employee orientation, it’s critical to have all the necessary information before you get started. If you take the orientation itself and break it down into what it is at its core, you basically have a presentation with a set of supplementary tools. And we all know it’s impossible to properly prepare an effective and fully informative presentation without all the necessary facts. Bottom line: You can’t include what you don’t know; ergo, what you don’t know about school employee orientation may very well hurt you. With that in mind, and with the goal of maximizing your materials for effectiveness, let’s explore the type of information you should research before preparing your school district’s employee orientation.

Do You Know Your Audience?

As young students are taught time and time again in English and composition classes, it is critical to know and understand your audience prior to even putting pen to paper. You have to know their motivations—what makes them tick. The same is true of your school employee orientation audience. Ask yourself, “Why they are there,” “What they are hoping to learn or gain from the school employee orientation,” and “What will help them achieve those goals”? Perhaps even write all these thoughts down so you can refer to them when you begin gathering your school employee orientation materials.

Additionally, you should take all those answers into consideration when you decide what supplemental materials you use, including any visual and auditory aids or online tools. Remember, if you create a school employee orientation that is completed entirely online, audience makeup is especially important because your message needs to be properly transmitted via a more remote source.

Do You Know What Works?

Whether this is the first school employee orientation you have prepared or the hundredth, you should take time to sit down and look over old orientation materials. If you have past experience preparing a complex employee orientation presentation for a school district, review your previous materials and ask yourself:

• What went right in the past (and why?)?

• What went wrong in the past (and why)?

• What can I do to improve?

Past school employee orientation presentations are the most valuable tools you have when it comes to maximizing your current program for effectiveness.

Do You Know Your Goals?

Before and throughout the entire process of preparing and delivering your school employee orientation, it is essential that you are aware of and stay true to your goals. The best way to do this is to write your goals in advance and keep them handy as a reference when you are writing and editing the content. You should also clearly state the goals early in the presentation so employees know what to expect from the orientation program. As you prepare, continue to ask yourself whether each slide, aid, video, or graphic truly contributes to your goals, or if any of it is just fluff. Because you want to keep your orientation program concise, anything that doesn’t contribute direct value can be cut out. If you leave in too much expendable information, your audience is likely to get bored or bogged down with all the excess information and fail to absorb the critical points you’re trying to drive home.

You may recall the “The More You Know” television PSAs that featured relevant educational issues. The same can be said of employee orientation programs: The more you know before you prepare your orientation program, the better off you and your employees will be.