3 Ways To Creating Effective Online Inductions

You don’t get a second chance at a first impression. This is why it's so important to create an effective induction programme. Whether it's for new starters, contractors, or visitors to your site - an induction is the first impression your company will make.

Induction programmes are the first opportunity you have to educate your employees and site visitors about your company practices, values and company culture.

It's also your opportunity to deliver vital health and safety information. An online induction programme is especially important where there is a reliance on temporary workers. For example, construction sites, oil & gas or, mining and energy generation.  Worksites of this nature have a higher risk of injury, accidents and contain more dangerous hazards. Having orientations that cover all the correct safety procedures is key to maintaining a safe workforce and safe working environment.

The traditional way of carrying out inductions is to have a site manager, or a dedicated member of staff acting as a trainer, leading a classroom style session. These sessions are usually centered around a powerpoint presentation and outdated, generic, health and safety videos. Managing contractors who have been inducted and who need to be inducted on large sites, traditionally, is an admin nightmare. Having to keep track of spreadsheets, checklists, and printed materials.

An online platform, such as Intasite, makes the induction process far more efficient. Induction programmes can be customised and made bespoke to fit the needs of your workers or site visitors.

In 2010, construction site work based injuries caused $51.1 billion in workers’ compensation, according to research from the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety. However, designing the right course for your workers is one of the most important steps in managing your contractors and getting it right keeps your workers safe and saves you money.

Keep your workers safe and incorporate these four steps into your online orientation:

1) Place A Focus On A Culture Of Safety During Your Online Induction Programme

Inductions aren't just about informing an employee about what they should and shouldn't do. Inductions should also focus on getting across the organisations safety culture. Providing this is made a priority, a collective workforce are far more likely to buy into this, and if everyone buys in, the more accepted it becomes. Any safety culture should be positive. It should be made clear that it is for the benefit of the staff, and that employees are rewarded for being active parts of the organisations safety culture.

• Lines of communication should be open and easy between all employees and management.
• Standardised, clear reporting processes an incident or near accident.
• Safety committees are a great way to get workers engaged with safety and encourage the reporting of hazards.
• It should be made clear that there is no tradeoff between production and safety.
• A clearly laid out, fair, discipline program is in place for those who break safety policies or procedures.
• It should be clearly communicated that the company places a focus on safety and as such, this should be a priority within each workers role, not an afterthought

2) Understand Your Business In Detail

Inductions are designed to bring an employee up to speed with the organisations and to also show workers how they do their job safely, in the context of the company. Workers should leave their induction with a thorough understanding of how the business operates, familiar with their surroundings.

Starting a new job always comes with a sense of wondering and maybe even anxiety. A good online induction should ease any anxiety before the new starter even arrives to work.

When designing an online induction programme, it is important to cover all aspects and areas of the business. Bring department managers from the business together to get a sense of what the most important information to get across to a new employee or visitor might be.

Getting input from on-site workers is also of benefit, as these are the people who are carrying out the jobs daily and know the site inside out. Workers should be able to give an additional layer of insight compared to managers or health and safety personnel. 

You should include the following in your online induction:

• Information about hazardous substances and dangerous goods on site
• Instructions and guidance about working in confined spaces, and the locations of confined spaces.
• General housekeeping
• Material handling and manual handling
• Safety advice about working at heights

3) Engaging Content = Engaged Inductees

The desired outcome of your orientation is clear: Preparing your contractors to be safe and productive members of your workforce. If your course content does not engage your inductees, then they will not be entering your site with the knowledge they need to stay safe.

With this in mind, you need to include information on the correct safety and general working practices to follow, as well as specific information relating to a site location and a worker’s role. However, after putting together what you want to include, it is vital that your workers actually engage with the material.

The Intasite online induction platform caters for a range of multimedia, from videos to slides. You can quiz your inductees at various points through the induction, to ensure they are engaging with the content, and learning what they need to.

Here are some tips to help make your online orientation content more engaging:

• Include videos that are filmed on-site (this makes the content more relatable)
• Get current workers to record some videos to show day-to-day working conditions and an insight from the people carrying out these roles
• Include quizzes throughout the course to ensure there is engagement.
• Make your content site-specific as much as possible
• Make content as relevant to as many people as possible including different languages

In Conclusion

By applying these above tips, you will be able to create your induction programmes to be far more effective. An online platform such as Intasite automates many time consuming manual processes. Applying our above tips, along with using an online platform means your inductions will be far more engaging, resulting in less work based accidents and a cheaper and faster induction process.