During Orientation, I must present descriptions of approximately 20 departments in our organization. It's a bit of an information-dump and could possibly put participants to sleep. At the moment, the information is presented department-by-department, slide-by-slide, and I know it needs something creative (i.e., different way to present the details) to make it more interesting. I'm thinking of an exercise of some sort, but am drawing a blank. Thoughts? Ideas? Thank you.

Hi AASW,
One thing that worked for me in the past in a similar situation was the following:

- Prepare dept. slides with details of what each does as before.
- Add in a picture of one person in that dept, a bit of their background, hobbies etc.
- After I gave a general,short, presentation on what each dept. did - I divided the "orientees" in to small groups.
- The task for each group over the next 30 minutes was to get to each of the people in the pictures and find out a special "code word" from them.
- Each of the picture people are briefed beforehand with a different codeword. They are also told not to give out the codewords unless the teams have answered some basic questions about their dept.
- We have a "winning team" - the team with the most codewords at the end of 30 minutes!

Finally, we have a debrief on any questions that the "orientees" may have about the various dept.

It was generally fun, and people participated willingly - plus - people got to know others and their way around.

Hope this helps, Mike Collins.

Hi AASW,
Honestly no matter what you do, when using PowerPoint it will be boring. I have been through numerous PPT presentations, trainings, etc and often look around the room to see nothing but blank faces and boredom. I am personally sick of PPT and think they are over used. I beg people not to use them. Alternatives? Creative and interactive eLearning with audio, video, and check your understanding tests. New hire orientation is the first thing that new employees see when they enter your organization, don't bore them to death with powerpoints. If you can, have them take some of the basic company awareness online and then have practice to proficiency exercises in the classroom with group activities. But if it doesn't make sense to do eLearning (since I don't know the size or detail of your organization) a short term solution would be to incorporate an ad campaign to mix with the training? Maybe a video of your CEO doing a welcome speech? Make it fun, make them feel welcome, and make them feel like they didn't make a bad decision.
Hope this helps
rcarter@entelisys.com

We have a similar class with a book that describes our business and the roles of various departments. Usually the class is does as a lecture with opportunity for Q&A. There are no slides.

As an experiment, last week I made the class into a kind of scavenger hunt and it was very well received. I divided the class up into teams and gave each a questionnaire with questions taken from the book, along with additional questions about the company history, structure, products, etc. The groups had one hour to answer these using any resource available to them - their book, Internet/Intranet, additional training books I had onhand, and people on the floor. Then we took the answers up together and related them to the book. The students enjoyed meeting people in different departments and, of course, they appreciated the opporunity to do something active, rather than sitting in a classroom listening to me talk.

Pick up the books "Shake, Rattle and Roll" as well as "Preventing Death by Lecture" (both by Sharon Bowman).