Staff Deduction

Shawn with a great post on staff inductions here. The issue as I see it is that staff inductions often get left to HR and/or the training department. And they want to put on a one-shot classroom event (with some canned eLearning courses) and then wash their hands of it as quickly as possible. I remember asking someone putting together a 3-day induction course: "What happens after the 3 days?". The answer was along the lines of: "They go off & do their jobs". Feel the love! Induction should be seen as a process rather than an event (much as Shawn lays out here). The other point to make is that clever organisations treat the induction process as a chance to learn from new employees as well as the other way round both with experienced hires ("Hey what's the big wide world like out there") and inexperienced ones ("Lend us your fresh eyes before they become stale)>

One interesting tech tip (courtesy of Glenn Maramara) is to offer collaborative bookmarking software (along the lines of del.icio.us) to new joiners. That way, you & they can see the parts of the intranet they use - allowing you some insight into what they need & can find, what they look for & fail to and also some sense of their relative information finding abilities. Obviously not appropriate for all organisations but an interesting idea.

The flipside of people joining your organisation is people leaving. Many organisations manage this process very badly. It is important to note that the care-factor burden subtly shifts here. On joining, the newbie has more to gain if the process goes well and more to lose if it goes badly. This is not the case on leaving. Obviously a sudden resignation is hard to deal with but if you know a staff member is retiring, do you have a reverse version of Shawn's year, month, week list or will you try to cram it in on the last day (just as you ran around on Christmas Eve trying to get that Bruce Lee box set your mum had always wanted)?


(Picture: CNN)