Welcome Aboard Our New Orientation Format

About a month ago I wrote about how our department was striving to create a new, exciting and more interactive orientation.

Well today we launched our S.S. Southlake, General Orientation. Yes indeed we have designed our first day of orientation to be that similar to welcoming guests aboard a cruise ship. We greeted each new staff with a flower lei and a "cruise" itinerary for the day. The room was decorated with as many cruise motif decorations we could find. Local party stories have moved full swing into Halloween decorations, but we seemed to do okay. We had a large life preserver at the front door that says "Welcome Aboard", there were tiki torches at the front door, other life preservers in the room were decorated with sayings regarding our strategic focus. We changed our presentation from our corporate logo to a lovely picture of a cruise ship.

Now elements of our actual content have yet to get updated. This portion of change will come when we move some of the documentation of new staff to another day. We want to add hospital scavenger hunts. These will be designed to lead staff around to key areas of the organization and pin point items of interest. Including our most popular intranet site....the Cafeteria Menu!

We haven't quite decided yet on a few games to place into the content. Once we have created a little more time within the day we plan to change the breaks into "Stretch Breaks with the Cruise Director". Also I may possibly add in some "Improv" entertainment into another of the breaks.


We did so much of this, I hate to admit, last minute last week that we didn't mention the cruise idea to anyone in the organization. Mostly we wanted to keep it a secret. Our presenters were great and are embracing the entire new concept with open arms. Our IT manager came in and used all sorts of "sea worthy" sayings in relation to password protection including..."it was our responsibility to make sure the ship didn't sink from improper computer use." For those of you who have read me before....yes this was a Dannyism.


So far the new staff seem to be welcoming the idea of the theme and playing along with the day of fun and learning. The majority of our staff are women (it is a hospital) so they laugh along, the men in the room tend to chuckle and you can see them wondering how long they have to wear the lei before they can take it off. The feedback throughout the day has been fabulous and we are already thinking of ways to make it even better.

LMS finally here

Yeah good news yesterday. My organization finally got the last contract signed for our new LMS. It's about time. We knew years ago we needed to go this way (early 2003). But, a change of directors, budget cuts, etc. etc. etc. held it off until now. A friend here comes up with some great expressions that I want to keep capturing...his metaphor for this one was "It took as long to get the LMS as it does to get a new baby elephant" (Dannyism 1). I'm not even sure who it was we "tricked" into agreeing to this one, but you'll won't here me complain.

Or will you.....

I guess for the time being I'll be the one running the show on the LMS side. We also got a content management package and intranet package with the deal. So I begin to be excited that we will have one solid system to track all the various bits of education and certifications that fly around here. One place to track our reimbursements. One place to sign up for courses. One place to manage our people and their talents. But...all this brings more work and as many of you I have spoken too also realize, when more work is given to you it doesn't mean something else is being taken away so you can deal and cope. So my fear also begins, but I "won't start kicking the cat until I know for sure" (Dannyism 2 - I don't even know for sure if I understand that one.)