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More and more organisations are choosing to complement their face-to-face inductions online or move to an entirely online induction model.  Here are 3 reasons why…

“The Day 1” experience

Sometimes it’s the time it takes to set new starters up on your systems or finalise the paperwork, sometimes it’s not having enough people start around the same time to justify the cost and resource of running a face to face induction session.  Whatever the reason, it’s rare that new starters experience a consistent, formal induction on their first day.

Sure, there’s the office tour, the meet and greets, but how do they understand where your organisation is headed, the values that drive you, and what’s expected of them… from day one?  Or even before their start date?

An online induction means these all-important messages that set the scene and communicate who you are and what you do are delivered from the get-go. This can include video of your CEO or MD talking conversationally about what your organisation’s vision and values mean to them. From Day 1, your new starters can have the impression that senior leaders are approachable and accessible.

Streamlined content

Often the content that new starters need to be aware of is housed in multiple locations: your web page, your intranet, your shared drive, in old emails, in people’s heads.  A new starter needs a map.

An online induction corrals all that must-know, or must-know-where-to-find information in a cohesive way.  It signposts people to the places they can access the information now, and return to later as needed. And if they need to find it later… it’s the most up to date version, not a new starter manual that is out of date as it’s too hard to maintain.

Getting connected

There is so much opportunity to connect new starters to each other and encourage that sense of belonging to a ‘cohort’.  Consider allocating someone the responsibility of being your “Induction community manager” and taking advantage of the discussion groups on your LMS, or standalone social networks. 

This means you can dish out work-integrated challenges or activities for them to complete, and come back to post and share their insights amongst the group.  Moving your induction online means new starters can form connections with colleagues across geographical and departmental boundaries – at a fraction of the cost and potential time lags involved in achieving this face to face.

To read more about moving your induction process online click here. And see a vignette of one of our Inductions.

Learn more about how to move your induction online

Sarah Davie is the Global Design Lead for The Learning Factor. Sarah has a passion for Onboarding and Induction solutions. She is an experienced learning consultant with a demonstrated history of delivering for clients from large Corporate organisations, Government sectors, global Consulting Firms and boutique Learning Agencies. 

You're blurry-eyed and slack-jawed at your desk, staring at a to-do list so long you feel like you could wrap it around the entire earth -- twice. Yes, we've all found ourselves in this stressful situation every now and then.

Facing a to-do list that feels completely unmanageable isn't fun. In fact, it's usually enough to make me want to curl up under my desk in the fetal position and hide until all of those pesky tasks dissolve away.

But, unfortunately, that tactic has yet to work out for me. So, I've had to find another method to deal with my mile-long list of assignments.

I've tried my fair share of productivity tips, tricks, and hacks that promise to help me grab the bull by the horns and conquer my to-do list with confidence and a healthy dose of strategy. However, I've found that most of those (although, not all!) really only manage to serve as a distraction and slow me down.

Instead, I prefer to keep things basic, simple, and intuitive. So, when looking at my overwhelming to-do list, I always ask myself this one quick and easy question to pare down my tasks and channel my focus:

Does this absolutely need to be done today?

I know, it's so straightforward and obvious, you're likely groaning and rolling your eyes at me right now. But, it's actually an important inquiry that most people skip when creating their own lists. Humor me and allow me to dive in and explain why this question is so effective.

We live in an age of increased complexity, velocity and demand for multidisciplinary thinking. So much of what we do today requires the careful balance of both generalists and specialists to make great work happen.

It excites me to see more and more organizations embrace this approach by bringing together people from multitudes of fields and perspectives, enabling a new depth and diversity of visioning and problem solving. Optimally, these multidisciplinary teams are further supported through evolved organizational and management-thinking that favors meritocracy over rigidity. Organizationally, this can be achieved by constructing horizontal networks where there were once more stacked seniority-based hierarchies.

In practice, managing people and teams of this sort requires every bit as much care and rigor as more traditional structures, but the energies are directed differently — there's more attention directed toward supporting relevant possibilities and valuable outcomes than reinforcing structure. The investment is worthwhile, because when it works, the results and cultural implications are magnificent.

In the ideal meeting, all attendees participate, contributing diverse points of view and thinking together to reach new insights. But few meetings live up to this ideal, in large part because not everyone is able to effectively contribute. We recently asked employees at a large global bank a question: “When you have a contribution to make in a meeting, how often are you able to do so?” Only 35% said they felt able to make a contribution all the time.

There are three segments of the workforce who are routinely overlooked: introverts, remote workers, and women. As a leader, chances are you’re not actively silencing these voices — it’s more likely that hidden biases at play. Let’s look at these biases and what you can do to mitigate their influence.

The unconscious bias: Smart people think on their feet.

What happens: A program manager calls a meeting to think through a resourcing issue. She summarizes the situation, shares results of a recent staffing analysis, and then tees up the discussion. This works great for extroverted thinkers (those that talk to think). But from the get-go, the introverted thinkers (those who think to talk) are at a disadvantage....

You don't have to be in managerial role to be a leader. Follow these tips to inspire your colleagues and reap the benefits of a happier workplace.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a negotiation doesn’t go your way. Perhaps a customer pushed for a steeper discount than you wanted to give, or a potential client went with a competitor’s approach to a project. In the face of a disappointment — one where you might appear to be the “loser” — how do you save face? How do you make sure your reputation isn’t damaged and the relationship with your counterpart is intact?

What the Experts Say
Don’t worry too much about your negotiating prowess just because you lost this round. “A reputation comes from consistent behavior,” says Jeff Weiss, founding partner at Vantage Partners, a Boston-based consultancy specializing in corporate negotiations, and author of the HBR Guide to Negotiating. If you learn from the experience, there’s value to be had. A good way to start is by abandoning the adversarial mindset. “If all you’re thinking about is saving face, you’ve already made the negotiation and its aftermath into a battle,” says Margaret Neale, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and coauthor of Getting (More of) What You Want. Think instead in terms of solutions so that your approach “becomes about problem solving rather than someone trying to win.” That’s where real win-win scenarios begin to emerge. Here’s how to bounce back when a negotiation doesn’t go your way.

How do we improve who we are? The most effective--and often most difficult--way by far is to self-analyze. When we deconstruct our notions of ourselves and who we think we are, we are able to overcome potential obstacles standing in our way to becoming a better person.

By answering these 5 questions you can begin the journey of becoming your best self.

1. If you had one day left to live, would you be ready to go?

Although it's very easy for us to reach temporary states of complacency, reaching a level of complete fulfillment at life's end is a totally different story. So many of us end up going through the motions instead of actively enjoying what we do on a daily basis. Making sure we are content, right this moment, is a great way to keep this tendency in check.

Not so long ago, the idea that an employee could connect anytime, anywhere, was seen as a revolution in work–life balance. You could get home in time for dinner or go on vacation even when a project was at a critical point. Your smartphone could turn wherever you were into your mobile office.

But now many believe this unlimited connectivity has gone too far. Studies have concluded that late-night smartphone use has an adverse effect on employee productivity and engagement. A growing number of companies, such as Volkswagen and Atos, have enacted email policies intended to mandate unplugging. An agreement in April 2014 between French employers and unions created an “obligation to disconnect” for contract workers to ensure that they don’t burn out, and Germany is currently considering legislation that would ban communication from employers to their workers after hours.

We can't be the alpha dog all of the time. Whatever our personality, most of us experience varying degrees of feeling in charge. Some situations take us down a notch while others build us up.

New research shows that it's possible to control those feelings a bit more, to be able to summon an extra surge of power and sense of well-being when it's needed: for example, during a job interview or for a key presentation to a group of skeptical customers.

"Our research has broad implications for people who suffer from feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem due to their hierarchical rank or lack of resources," says HBS assistant professor Amy J.C. Cuddy, one of the researchers on the study.

In "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance", Cuddy shows that simply holding one's body in expansive, "high-power" poses for as little as two minutes stimulates higher levels of testosterone (the hormone linked to power and dominance in the animal and human worlds) and lower levels of cortisol (the "stress" hormone that can, over time, cause impaired immune functioning, hypertension, and memory loss).

The result? In addition to causing the desired hormonal shift, the power poses led to increased feelings of power and a greater tolerance for risk.

"We used to think that emotion ended on the face," Cuddy says. "Now there is established research showing that while it's true that facial expressions reflect how you feel, you can also 'fake it until you make it.' In other words, you can smile long enough that it makes you feel happy. This work extends that finding on facial feedback, which is decades old, by focusing on postures and measuring neuroendocrine levels."

The habits of the best leaders are well documented. They’re self-aware. They admit mistakes. They take care of, recognize, and communicate well with their teams.

But what do these inspirational people do on their own time? What goes on behind the scenes that helps them be so effective on a day-to-day basis?

"I’ve definitely noticed some things that great leaders tend to do," says Danielle Harlan, founder and CEO of The Center for Advancing Leadership and Human Potential, an organization that helps individuals and organizations maximize their impact. And the things they do behind the scenes make all the difference when it comes to their professional leadership ability, she says. Here are five such common habits.

Tributes to the work of Prince continue to appear, more than a week after the legendary songwriter and performer passed away at age 57.

A recent story showcased Prince's strengths in the realms of creativity and talent development--and revealed how his passion for music was the key to his prolific career. Here are five highlights: 

1. Prince had a work ethic born of passion. Even after he was a famous and rich superstar, Prince's work ethic never waned. "He'd come to rehearsal, work us, go work his band, then he'd go to his studio all night and record," is what James "Jimmy Jam" Harris, Prince's high school classmate and producer, tells EW. "Then the next night he'd come to rehearsal with a tape in his hand and he'd say, 'This is what I did last night.' And it'd be something like '1999,' and you're just like, 'Who does this?'"

2. Prince was a molder of young talent--a superboss. His proteges included Scottish singer Sheena Easton, dancer Carmen Electra, and his former drummer, Sheila E. "He loved working with women and helping them and encouraging them and saying, 'Hey, I think this would be a good song for you,'" Sheila E. tells EW. Like Miles Davis and other "superboss" artists, Prince prided himself on being the foundation of a talent tree, and watching his branches find their own paths. 

If the answer to these last two questions is “rarely,” it wouldn’t surprise us. We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

But this inherent complexity shouldn’t deter leaders from trying to use culture as a lever. If you cannot simply replace the entire machine, work on realigning some of the more useful cogs. The name of the game is making use of what you cannot change by using some of the emotional forces within your current culture differently.

Have you ever worked hard to improve a valuable skill and made real progress, only to have your development go unnoticed by the people who told you that you needed to improve? Perhaps this led you to look for a new job. Or maybe you’re a manager who’s been disappointed by poor performance and concluded that your low-performing employees are simply over-entitled? So you gave up on trying to help them improve and vented your frustration with colleagues behind closed doors.

Both of these commonplace experiences point to problems caused by a fixed mindset, in which we find it hard to believe that people can change. In the first scenario, an employee is judged as having low potential—and this assessment blinds leaders to the progress he’s made. In the second, the manager’s conviction that her employees will never change makes her less likely to engage in leadership behaviors that support development. The bottom line in both cases is that employees are less likely to reach their potential.

They said computers would make us all a lot more productive, and free up our personal lives.

Is it just me, or was that all a big, fat porkie?

The technology that was supposed to bring us this gift of freedom has entrapped us, eroding valuable time, energy and attention. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology. But let's take a reality check and go back to using it to help us do our jobs, not to dictate and distract every waking moment.

Here are seven key productivity traps to be mindful of:

Are you a high flyer in your 20s or 30s? Looking to add a board appointment or two to your CV now, rather than waiting another 20 years?

Seats at the big table have traditionally been the preserve of older men – and a growing number of women – who've earned their stripes in decades on the corporate battlefield. Opportunities for up-and-comers to join them can be sparse.