An orientation program offers you the opportunity to efficiently train your contract workers before they start work, allowing you to speed up the on-boarding process and reduce any associated risks during the first few weeks of employment. The orientation program will be your contract worker’s first contact with your company, and should provide them with total understanding of your company’s brand, culture, mission and health and safety rules. It will also ensure your contract worker is instilled with key knowledge regarding their own role, responsibilities and who they will be working with. For this process to be effective, you should ensure your training content is relevant and engaging. This means providing information that is easy to understand and delivered in a fool-proof format. Having gone through the content preparation process with hundreds of Health & Safety and HR executives, GoContractor shares best practices below.
Step 1 Consider Contract Worker Characteristics
You should consider the characteristics of the workers you bring on-board, as different groups of contract workers will require varying sets of training. Let’s say you hire a welder and a laborer, both contract workers may require different orientation training, depending on their current EHS knowledge and the types of activity they’ll be engaging in. Here are some of the factors to consider:
- Location: Consider the location of your contract worker. Maybe your firm has a number of contractors spread out over a number of regions. Local legislation, weather and the surrounding environment as well as many other factors, could affect the content of the orientation they should get.
- Language: Do some of your contract workers speak a different language? How do you cater for Spanish speaking workers on a site in California? Language is something you should consider when you have a diverse workforce. It’s important that everyone understands the information particularly when it relates to their own safety and that of their co-workers.
- Role and associated hazards: You should consider the particular risks and hazards associated with each of your contractor’s job. There are a few things to consider including day to day risks, the type of equipment they will be using and the working environment. By identifying the different hazards, you will be able to hone your orientation content appropriately. It would probably be worthwhile to conduct a risk assessment to help with this process.
During the above steps, you can use a spreadsheet to move your contract workers into particular groups, which will make it easier for you when you are designing your orientation content.
Step 2 Plan Out Your Orientation Program Content For Each Group
Your next step is to plan out your orientation content for each group. As we said before, keep in mind that each of your contractors may require a different set of training – a contract cleaner in Mexico will need a different set of training to a construction worker in New York! Here are some topics you should cover in your content:
The Culture: Your orientation content should speak about your firm’s vision and mission, it should also touch on your commitment to your customers and include some messages from senior management regarding their own roles.
Health and Safety: Your health and safety content should be specific to each role and location. Again, this means that you should have an understanding of every role you have recently hired for, understand what your contractor will be required to do. Once you have an understanding, you can start to build your health and safety content towards a particular role. The Health Safety Executive (HSE) published some helpful guidelines in terms of what topics you should cover regarding health and safety. They include stressing the “importance of good housekeeping” to prevent slips, trips and falls and appropriately dealing with any rubbish or waste on your construction site.
Their Expectations: Your orientation program content should speak to your contractor’s expectations. They already have an idea for who you are and what your company is all about, now it’s time to fill in the gaps. Do you have a safety focused contractor workforce? You should expand on this in your orientation content.
Community and Environmental Impact of Their Work: Maybe your construction project is rebuilding a pivotal icon in the local community, or the project could have a significant impact on the local environment. This is a good time to include those snippets of information within your Orientation content.
It’s really important to make sure you have the right departments and stakeholders involved in the process, to make sure your new contract worker is getting a full view of the company. Which leads us to step 3, consider your approach.
Step 3 Consider Your Approach
You should decide on the best medium to deliver your orientation program training, for example, will it be instructor-led, online or blended? The approach will be massively influenced by the topics being delivered. For example, training on high-risk heavy equipment may require face-to-face practical guidance. However, due to interactive technology, many topics can now be delivered online, very effectively. According to research by RainmakerVT, technology-based technology enhances retention rates by 25-60%, while the retention rates for classroom-based training has a retention rate of only 58%. You could however go for a blended approach, which means you use a combination of technology and the classroom to deliver your orientation training.
Step 4: If You Decide on Online
Ok, so you’ve chosen to conduct you orientations through our online platform here’s what you should consider. When you conduct your orientations online, you may consider changing between different mediums (such as those listed below) to keep your contract worker’s attention and improve information retention. Consider your usage of the following, for best results:
- Video
- Text
- Audio
- Diagrams
- Images
- Test Questions
Overtime, it’s likely that the focus of your orientation program content will change. So, you should consider the skills required to create and adapt your content. While you may be expert in health and safety or how to operate machinery, you may not have the skills in-house to create video or illustration. But you could start. Your orientation content will also need to adapt between instructor-led to a more blended approach, or a solely online approach depending on your requirements. For instance, you may have forgo some slides to enhance your orientation content and translate your activities in an online format, according to the site.
It’s worth putting significant effort into your orientation content, as this will ensure that your contract workers get sufficient training and will be less likely to suffer an accident on site. It will also help increase productivity and ensure that your company is legally compliant with local legislation. You can find more tips on how to properly design your orientation content here developing a checklist will ensure you haven’t left anything out. Furthermore, by ensuring your content is short, concise and snappy, you will be ensuring they are ready for work on day one, reducing your onboarding worries.
