What Do You Do for New User Orientation?

An anonymous reader asks: "What do you do for new user orientation? I started at a company as part of a very small help desk / MIS department. Part of my job is to give orientation to all new computer users for the entire company (no more than 10 new users a week). Right now I have to sit with each user, go over logging in, passwords, email, outlook, Microsoft Office, and so on. This takes between 30-45 minutes. What do other IT departments do? I was thinking of a Flash presentation or website, and maybe even a short orientation movie. What ideas have you tried and how well did they work?"

Comments

Large turnover

[LiquidCoooled]

Maybe you are swaming them with stuff they don't need.
Large numbers of new users every week can mean immense expansion or they are really put of by your new user orientation meetings.

If its turnover, perhaps it would be easier to skip the email/office stuff until they need it.

Orientation?

[MyLongNickName]

It involves duct tape, Vaseline, five rolls of toilet paper and the trunk of a mini-cooper.

But we don't call it "orientation", we call it "hazing".

Here's what I do

[Centurix]

I sit them in front of a computer, don't tell them anything and I poke them with a stick if they do something wrong.

Not the Flash presentation!

[PalmerEldritch42]

Unless you want to spend a lot of money putting together a professional and engaging presentation, don't bother with that route. I am not a manager, but I have been to enough new employee orientations that I feel I have a good understanding of what works (at least for me). Sitting a new employee down in a room and making them watch some presentation, be it on DVD or online is pretty much a waste of time. The thing that a new employee needs is face time. Sit with them and show them what they will be doing. Sit them with their co-workers and let them show him what, exactly, the job entails. Orientation is about gettin gto know your peers, learning about the company you will be working for, and finding out what the job is that you have been hired for. There is always the obligatory legal issues (dress code, no bad language in the workplace, no molestation of the opposite sex, and whatnot). But the important thing is to get a feel for the new environment and find out what you are being hired to do in a more specific way than the interview process would have lead you to believe.

Set up a wiki

[Max Romantschuk]

A wiki is probably the most flexible way to set up something like this. It can serve both as an introduction (think pages linked one after another) and as a general documentation tool.

And unlike a flash presentation it's searchable and less of a pain in the rear end to update.

PS. Wikis can be read only for regular users too...

Get a co-worker to just start screaming and crying

[antifoidulus]

about how he "lost his lifes work and will probably get fired because he didn't listen to the IT guy."