Depending upon your personal experiences, the very mention of the word orientation may invoke either great memories of being warmly integrated into a team, or may bring unpleasant memories of confusion, boredom or outright horror.

While new employee orientation has the potential to be a powerful tool, its contribution to the organization is often overlooked beyond rote communication of policies and procedures. How can so many organizations get a good thing so wrong?

While many organizations continue to neglect orientation, and fail to see its value as a strategic tool, the tides are shifting. Organizations that put a focus on recruitment and retention are realizing that they can't possibly achieve their objectives without keeping orientation on their radar screens. In fact, ASTD reports that in 2002, best practice organizations are committing 3% - 8% of their overall training and development budgets to new employee orientation. [1]

There is little doubt that an effective new employee orientation can make a difference.

Two often-quoted studies prove the point. Research at Corning Glass Works revealed that that new employees that went through a structured orientation program were 69% more likely to be with the company after 3 years than those who did not. Another study at Texas Instruments found that employees who were carefully oriented to the organization and job reached full productivity two months sooner than those who weren't.

Beyond these important retention and productivity indicators, orientation can play a significant role in helping new employees understand the business, learn about vision and values and how they are applied every day, and immersing new employees in the culture. Today, more and more organizations are recognizing the difference that can be made by a well designed orientation program.

Reflecting this renewed interest in orientation, in recent years two key trends in new employee orientation have been emerging: the utilization of online tools in orientation, and leveraging orientation as a cultural tool. This first in a two-part series will look at the trend towards online orientation.

Taking Orientation Online

One of the biggest challenges of traditional new employee orientation approaches is that, for many organizations, there is often a gap between when new employees start and when they attend a group orientation. In some organizations with smaller workplaces and infrequent hiring, sometimes as much as three months can go by.

By being available to new hires from the get go, online orientation is a wonderful tool available to today's organizations to ensure timely delivery of orientation information.

In a recent survey of North American Online Orientation Practices, conducted by Westwood Dynamics, 25 organizations that have implemented online orientation cited the following top four reasons why their organization decided to put orientation online: [2]

• Improved consistency of the orientation message (100%)
• Ability to provide orientation to all employees, regardless of start date (96%)
• Improved timeliness (96%)
• Ability to deliver to a geographically dispersed workforce (75%)

Additional benefits of online orientation include: better employee preparedness, improved connection to the organization, support for the organizational culture, flexibility and convenience, compressed delivery time, ability to test for understanding, reduced workload for trainers, ease of updating and positioning for rapid organizational growth.

The Trend to Blend

While it is still early days for online orientation, one best practice is clearly emerging: a blended approach that combines online orientation with face-to-face elements. Used alone, online orientation runs the risk of lacking the interpersonal touch that is so important to welcoming a new hire onboard. But when online orientation and group orientation are used together in an overall blended strategy, the results can be impressive.