In this blog, my mentor and teacher, Mr. Razib has been writing about the success of the Indian outsourcing industry. Today, I am going to add a new item on that menu, “Employee Induction outsourcing”.
What is it? After hiring an employee, the company needs to train the person about his/her functions in the company. This training portion is outsourced to different Indian firms. The client company bears their trainees’ airfare, food, transportation, accommodation costs and phone expense. Despite all these expenses, the companies can save 30%-50% of the total costs.
This is great news for the Indian training centers. However, as I was going through the article few questions came into my mind. First, can small companies with 9/10 employees, afford this type of outsourcing? Second, if any American or British or European company sent their new employees to India for training; would the Indian instructors be able to properly represent and pass the company values, norms and cultures to the new employees? This is a very important issue. While studying HRM I found out that, in western countries the new employees are often trained or put under the charge of a more experienced employee (mentor), who is very well acquainted with the company, its cultures, values, work ethics, and norms. Now, can an instructor from India, who never worked in the company, really supplant that well experienced employee? Last but not the least, will language and cultural differences create serious problems?
Before getting started, the Indian training centers should address these issues? Don’t you agree with me readers?
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I think you go straight to the critical question. We must remember that all education and training at work, especially for brand new employees, is about much more than the actual content of the training.
It is, as you write, about culture, values, networking inside the organization, setting expectations, finding your way and a whole host of other intangible factors.
I don't think there is any real way to adress this issue, when outsource the training of new employees.
The solution may be to focus strictly on the content of the training, and then letting the company have some sort of social event for new employees to handle all the other needs.
Though I am reminded of one fairly large company, in which every month's new employees were invited in a group for afternoon tea at the CEO's house. That's a great way to disseminate values and culture.
Posted by: Alexander Kjerulf | July 6, 2006 12:34 PM | Permalink to Comment