Preparing the Future Workforce with Innovative Employee Orientation

Situation

A GP Strategies®’ client, a leading maritime manufacturing company, is seeing significant increase in demand due to recent submarine contracts. These submarines use the newest technology and are going to be manufactured for the next 30 years and beyond. Due to large contracts and an aging workforce (30% of the experienced workforce is approaching retirement), they expect to hire 15,000 employees over the next decade. As a result, recruitment and onboarding are paramount to meet these significant growth targets, prompting them to enhance their new employee orientation program to build excitement and loyalty and impact their new hires in a positive way.

Realize $1.7 million in cost savings with a customized blended learning orientation program

Challenge

The new employees are expected to span several generations, each of which has their own unique learning needs. In addition, these new hires will have varying levels of work experience and educational backgrounds. Therefore, the client needed to develop a robust program that would also enable their young future workforce to learn effectively and efficiently to support the company’s long-term viability.

The client, along with GP Strategies, determined that the most effective way to engage, excite, and inspire their new workforce was to develop a robust blended learning program that offered a variety of components to maximize impact. Additionally, if they wanted to ensure smooth onboarding and support their people to deliver their best every day, the learning could not be siloed in each business line. It needed to be streamlined across the organization.

Solution

The New Employee Orientation Program is designed to engage multiple generations with a modern learning environment and encourage a spirit of collaboration. The project team made special effort to engage the existing workforce to ensure key skills and attributes are passed on.

The New Employee Orientation Program has 11 critical components that align orientation topics with the audience and best modalities in its process flow structure.

1. Introduction to the Organization and Mission, Values, and Purpose
   • Delivery Method: Welcome, Reflection Activity, and Video
2. Introduction of Organization and Leadership
   • Delivery Method: Blended * This ILT is facilitated by dynamic and dedicated instructors and a robust participant workbook. This is combined with a virtual tablet scavenger hunt.
3. Standards of Business Ethics and Conduct
   • Delivery Method: Scenario-Based Matching
4. Organization Fundamentals
   • Delivery Method: Custom Board Game
5. Core Values
   • Delivery Method: Purpose Infographic, Core Value Ranking
6. Onboarding Guide
   • Delivery Method: Chatbot
7. Welcome Aboard Icebreaker
   • Delivery Method: Submarine Origami
8. Leadership Frameworks
   • Delivery Method: Leadership Café with Leadership Concept Cards
9. Supervisor Meet-and-Greet Icebreaker
   • Delivery Method: Conversation Bingo
10. Visual Reinforcement of Key Concepts
    • Delivery Method: Custom Posters Used in the Training Rooms
11. Learning Journey
    • Delivery Method: iPDF

The variety and innovation of training modalities motivated new employees to quickly embrace the history and culture of the organization.

Results

After completion of the New Employee Orientation Program rollout, a measurement study was conducted to compare 2018 pre-program results to 2019 post-launch results. The client was able to show significant improvement in all of their defined success criteria.

• Learner satisfaction scores increased by 76% from 2.5 pre-program in 2018 to 4.39 in post-launch in 2019
• First year attrition was reduced by 63%. Prior to the program in 2018, they were experiencing high attrition rates at 19%. A 2019 review of 711 new hires showed an attrition of 7%, resulting in approximately 85.32 “saved heads,” or employees that would have left the company in the first year before the New Employee Onboarding Program.
• On a scale of 1-5, the overall satisfaction rate of the New Employee Orientation Program is at 4.39
• On a scale of 1-5, new employees are rating their first month at the organization at 4.36

Our new orientation program is ’night and day‘ from our old program. We are now showing employees on day one they chose the right company to build their career. The program truly reflects the pride we have in building and protecting America’s freedom.

Director Workforce Development