Few areas are as important as a proper orientation. According to Charles Caldwell, author of New Employee Orientation: A Practical Guide for Supervisors, "If new employees have to wait a month to be oriented, they are no longer new. It's unlikely they'll have already discovered everything presented in the orientation, or worse, they'll have been largely unproductive for that month." [1]

Mr. Caldwell is right. Orientation matters.

The good news about orientation is that today's technology makes it so easy to create and implement a winning orientation strategy. At Westwood Dynamics, we specialize in creating these strategies. Our strategies are custom fit to you. No off-the-rack solutions will make the grade when it comes to orientation, so we are very intentional in the planning, design and implementation of your custom solution.

I feel so strongly about orientation that I just completed a survey of online orientation best practices in North American organizations. The results of this survey, and the insights gained by being intimately involved in the process, only heightened my sense of how vital a great orientation solution is to all companies.

Several years ago I formed a strategic alliance with Leanne Johnson, a person I respect and trust, in order to focus more intently on orientation. Together, we have conducted research and written on just how critical a great orientation system is to your success.

In our research we uncovered nine keys necessary to create and implement a winning strategy. These are covered in our how-to guide, "Take Orientation Online", but I want to share them with you now so you can see how our thinking has developed in this area. Click here to read our Nine Best Practice Orientation Design Principles.

When it comes to online orientation, a comprehensive design strategy is all-important. A well thought out design will save countless hours of effort by streamlining processes, and will protect budgets too by making sure that all factors have been considered.

Whether you need to evaluate your current orientation practice for areas of improvement or want to design a state-of-the-art program that will make the maximum use of today's technologies, I hope we can be of service to you.


You can click on the links below for:
Roberta Westwood's orientation experience
Leanne Johnson's bio
Results of our North American survey on Online Orientation Practices
Our recent publication, Taking Orientation Online

Source:
1. Caldwell, Charles, author of New Employee Orientation: A Practical Guide for Supervisors, as quoted in "Taking New Employee Orientation Off the Back Burner", Kathryn Tyler Weeks, HR Magazine, Society for Human Resource Management, May 1998