Induction training: the first week, and what actually has to be taught

Induction training is what a new person is taught in their first days: the organisation, the safety and compliance essentials, and the specifics of doing their job here. It sits alongside the administrative side of joining — accounts, equipment, paperwork — which is a checklist rather than training and is covered in employee onboarding checklist.

The distinction matters because the two get merged and then the training half loses. A first day spent on policy documents and account setup feels productive and teaches almost nothing about the work. The questions a new person actually has — how does a job get quoted here, who decides this, what happens when a customer complains — are answered over the following three months by interrupting colleagues.

What belongs in the first week

• Anything with legal or safety consequences, first and properly: safe working, data handling, whatever the role and jurisdiction require.
• How the work actually flows, end to end, once — where a job starts, who touches it, where it ends. Almost nobody is shown this and everybody needs it.
• The three or four systems they will use daily, taught by doing a real task, not by touring the menus.
• Who to ask about what, by name. A new person's biggest hidden cost is not knowing whom to interrupt.
• The unwritten rules that are actually rules: how quickly people reply, what gets escalated, what never goes in an email.
• One real piece of work in the first week, small and low-risk. Nothing teaches like doing, and nothing demoralises like a week of watching.

Spread induction over weeks rather than concentrating it in one day. A single day of everything produces retention of almost nothing — the material has no context to attach to yet. The same content across the first month, with real work in between, is remembered because each piece answers a question the person has now actually encountered.

Making it repeatable

1. Write down the induction plan once, per role. The second hire in a role should not require somebody to reconstruct it from memory.
2. Assign a named buddy separate from the manager. The questions people are embarrassed to ask a manager are the ones that slow them down most.
3. Have the new person write down what confused them, and use it to fix the plan. They are the only people who can see what is missing, and they can only see it once.
4. Record what was covered and when, particularly for anything with a compliance requirement — the register side of this is training matrix.
5. Check in at week one, month one and month three. The month-three conversation reliably surfaces things nobody thought to explain.

The document nobody writes

The single highest-return induction artefact for a small business is a short page describing how work actually flows through the business — not the org chart, the work. Who it comes from, what happens to it, who decides what, where it ends. It takes an afternoon to write, it is the thing every new person reconstructs slowly and expensively, and it is equally useful to the people who have been there five years, which is how you find out that two of them believed different things.

Most of what a new joiner needs is unwritten. A working agreement states the response expectations, the meeting norms and how decisions get made, so the norms are read rather than inferred from other people's reactions.

Where it lives

Ettex Docs holds the induction plan and the how-work-flows page where they can be edited as reality changes, with the procedures behind them in standard operating procedure. The record of what was covered belongs in Ettex Records, and the administrative checklist in employee onboarding checklist.

To be clear: no learning management system, no e-learning modules, no automated onboarding sequences. Induction at small scale is a written plan, a named buddy and somebody checking in — and the reason it usually fails is none of those three, not the absence of software.