On On-Boarding New Hires

Every company has a system to help new hires integrate into the company and team. Our current on-boarding process involves the new hire sitting down for one-on-ones with every new teammate. It teaches the new hire what everyone does, and how that work pertains what the new hire will be doing. It’s a community effort to get the new hire up to speed and ready for their job, but there’s a problem with this system:
We haven’t done their job before.

For some positions there’s a counterpart that does the same job that can show them the ropes. For other jobs, like office administrator and our part-time positions, there is no continuity from one person to the next. The old person has moved on before the new person has been hired. We end up like the blind monks describing an elephant. We all know a part of the old job, but not everything. There’s just no institutional memory.

So we end up telling the new hire about their jobs in an aspirational way. “We would love if you did this in this way” and “you’ll be taking over this part of the project eventually.”

And even if the old person left a detailed list of what they do throughout a week and a month no list is complete, and there’s always some institutional knowledge that gets lost. It could be as inconsequential as having to turn the printer off and back on again after going from A-size paper to US-size paper; or it could be a contact at a major convention or expo that made sure we got a nice booth space. One is annoying, but the other can cost you sales.

And there’s no way to keep this from happening. People leave jobs on a regular basis; the way jobs work now is that millennials almost have to change jobs to get a decent raise.

So how do you deal with the inevitable?

There’s cross-training; if more than one person can do every job, that institutional knowledge has less chance of being lost. But that’s time consuming, cumbersome, and the people that are cross-trained for a job they feel is below them (or, more eloquently, is not something related to their job title) resent being saddled with the extra work.

There’s detailed job descriptions; if every little thing is written down on the same list with the heading “JOB DUTIES” there’s no ambiguity in what they’re supposed to do. But the descriptions sometimes need to be incredibly detailed so they make sense to everyone, and you’re not stuck with something vague like “Fill out form ZJ-476 and send to fed every year.”

And then there’s what we do – a mix of the two; have detailed job descriptions of their regular duties, and cross train employees for technical know-how. New employees have set, written guidelines to follow, cross-training is diffused across several employees so they don’t feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick, and duties are covered while a new person is hired.

But it doesn’t solve the institutional memory problem, but nothing really does.

We’ve learned instead to be flexible. We each take and encourage a holistic view of the projects we work on. When someone is added to a project, they’re with the project until it’s done. After they’re small or large part is done they are still included via our project management flow so they can see how their work turns out.

That institutional knowledge that the only the former employee had? This is where it’s both most evident, and where it can be mitigated. Working as a team throughout the project lets everyone follow along as it moves from one person to another, and a good team working environment gives team members the confidence to jump in and let the lead know they missed a step.

Hopefully that step then gets documented somewhere and won’t be missed again, but we all know how busy we get.