Reduced time spent hands-off training from 2 months to 2 weeks, saving approximately $1,590 per employee, and streamlined the training process by standardizing the department's procedural documentation.
By creating the procedural repository on the staff intranet, time spent actively training new hires went from 2 months to 2 weeks, saving the department approximately $1,590 per employee. This time reduction did not sacrifice quality or new hire comfort, as new staff were still shadowed by longer-term staff, but we were able to reduce the amount of time staff spent lecturing new hires. This was made possible by standardizing documentation and using online course tools to convey information.
The standardized documentation was made accessible on a departmental intranet called "the dashboard."
Circulation and UX Manager at Rochester Hills Public Library
May-December 2021
I was able to hire multiple new part-time employees, but the long, involved training periods were causing more stress on our understaffed department.
Existing training procedures weren't adequately preparing staff or giving them required knowledge, like comprehensive understanding of library policies.
Department documentation was either nonexistent, unstandardized, or out-of-date.
Some procedural documentation were laminated signs hanging on bulletin boards, other were handwritten notes taped to computer monitors, and some were just in the memory of long-term staff members.
After collecting all of this documentation, I was able to identify inconsistencies and create an authoritative source of truth.
I gathered feedback on the existing training process from both long-time staff members who had experience doing the training and new staff members who had just recently gone through the process. I also spoke with other department heads about their training processes for new hires.
Most of the current training process was having longer-term staff provide information in a lecture format in conjunction with shadowing at service points.
All updated and standardized procedural documentation and policies were put into an internal intranet (called "the dashboard") that allowed staff members to search by keyword or navigate to by task.
For example, if a staff member was discussing removing or reducing a fine on a patron's account but did knot know how much they were authorized to remove, they could go to the dashboard and select "Fines" from the "Procedures" dropdown in the navigation menu or search "fine."
New hires were onboarded using the new training process and I scheduled multiple check-ins throughout to specifically discuss their training experience to compare it to readiness benchmarks of the previous training program.