Onboarding theme

David,

In my experience, people new into the company see these "themes" and "games" for what they are..."Aha! HR trying to make it interesting..."

Now there may be some personal preferences here, or perhaps UK vs. Europe vs. US here - but the best inductions I ever had were those that explained WHAT the role was, HOW it fitted into the rest of the business, WHY and WHEN certain things were important to the individual, WHO people were, why they mattered and your route to them if needed, and WHERE to go for further, easily accessible information.

I really do not see the need to sugarcoat this particular pill - frankly....what % of inductions do most people remember anyway?

The first time I had this explained from a VP very clearly was when I was suggesting an "...induction programme", and he said "Nope...I want you to reduce my hire-to-bill latency". In other words - get people productive, and feeling they belong, as quickly as possible.

We reduced the time by many % points.

I hope you find the "right way" for you, and completely accept that I may be in a rather hard-nosed-business-focused minority with this opinion.

Thanks for your feedback Bruce.

The theme is more for engagement as we already cover their role, how it fits in, why, when, etc but there is a lot of process based learning where our agents need to learn how to follow certain processes, which after a while becomes a little boring. We ran some training last year that integrated the FBI/detective theme and the agent engagement level shot up and far exceeded anything we expected.

We don't see the theme as the be all and end all of the course, just something that helps add a bit of engagement to it.

OK - question then...you say engagement levels shot up - did they also learn more, better, faster, change-behaviour more effectively etc?

I have had courses where the client said "Oh yeah..people LOVED the courses, but learned b*&%&r all from them".

If the agent roles are "sales" based, then perhaps some sort of competitive elements would work.

The agents productivity/behaviour did change however that was the aim of the course so we can't directly link it to the "theme" we integrated, however the some of the agents that I personally trained commented that the way in which it was delivered was lot easier to remember.

Maybe have the theme revolve around something that is popular in your neck of the woods. How about sports related?

Hi, David:

Jackie Van Nice created a "quest template" that David Anderson built a challenge around. You'll see 20 or so takes on the quest theme. Might spark an idea or two. Best, Daniel

A "lord of the rings" theme is one that lends itself quite nicely to gamification and would be fairly easy to gather online resources for. I found one quick link to some fonts... (I haven't tried these, so please be careful when downloading and honoring copyright) http://www.fontspace.com/category/lord%20of%20the%20rings

the Harrington font or even Lucida Calligraphy also works well with it.

We have toyed with a travel/quest theme in the past for smaller modules. May have a look into it again and see if it will work.