I walked through the doors of my new home; I was planning to spend 8 hours a day here. The air was crisp, the people were dressed sharply, I was home. I walked through the doors and was met with open arms and was politely asked to sign in by security. Fifteen minutes later my new boss came down and promptly showed me to my desk. She was pleasant. I sat down in my new office, excited to be promoted from the cubical world to have my first door. She turned to me and said, “your computer is right here, along with your blackberry, I have to run to a meeting, but will be back in an hour, in the meantime, settle in.” That hour passed and a few people stopped by and said “hi”. My new boss returned and walked me through the department and introduced me to a few key players. We then walked back to my office, now it was about 11:30. She told me that she had to run an errand and that she should be back after lunch, she pointed me in the direction of the cafeteria and told me, “the chicken was not very good.” After my solo lunch, I spend the remainder of the day in a meeting with HR going through the albeit important, but boring employee paperwork packet. 5:30 rolled around and I was again in my office. My boss stopped by and told me, “that she was sorry, but she was called to handle a problem at one of our other sites and she would be out of the office for the next 3 days.” She told me, “in the meantime get to know your team and call me if you have any questions.”

How do you think I felt in the situation? Valued? Appreciated? Welcomed? Ironic that I was brought in to be in charge of the team that hosted on-boarding. We had a lot of opportunity. So I was off to develop the best program that I could.

Whether you call it on-boarding, new employee training, new member orientation or day one, it all boils down to the same concepts. You have hired an individual to join your team, this person was hired because of the skills that they bring to the table, but they were hired to join YOUR TEAM.

So what are some of the key things to keep in mind as you develop or revamp your new employee programs.

1. Create a great first impression. It all starts at the beginning. Not at the start of the training on your first day, but truly at the beginning. The experience that you are creating for that person from the start says a lot about your organization. A HR manager at a Columbus, OH non-profit recently told me that she thought a great experience is all about the Office Admin. The first person you see when you come into the company. Is that person pleasant? Rude? What type of environment are you portraying? This is your company’s image and how it comes across. What’s the experience you are building? Thinking back to my example, the security guard was the first impression. While she did nothing wrong and some may argue was doing her assigned job of making sure everyone was welcomed, signed in and announced She could have made that day start off with a bang. What impression is your company giving? How are you making a bang with candidates and new employees?
2. Have a plan. Even if you have a formal classroom orientation make sure you as a leader have a plan. What do you want this person to master week 1, 2 and so on? Who should they meet? What should they get to know about that person and their job? Write it down and share it with the new employee. They will appreciate it and you will be setting early expectations for that employee. Make your plan realistic; understand that getting an employee up to speed takes time so give your new employee time to succeed.
3. Have all the IT stuff ready to go for the employee. Technology is supposed to make life simpler. Why do we often find that new employees are challenged when it comes to making the switch to your company’s technology? Have all the IT stuff ready to go for the employee. Make sure it is all there, working and you have the information on how to log in to the system. If possible when you are looking at designing your system, try and make the system easy to access. One log in, one password. Some companies can do this. Others are required to have more complexity. Nothing is more frustrating than going to work for a new company and not having a computer or access for a week. Spend the time to make these processes work for you and your new employees.
4. Build the Relationship. Plan to spend time with that employee; your personal investment in the relationship will pay off ten fold. Try and arrange a lunch on the employee’s first day. Remember it is all about building relationships. The better relationships you build the more productivity you can expect.
5. Simplify the HR process. Try and make the employees paperwork process as painless as possible. Some organizations send it to the employee before they start so they can bring it with them their first day already filled out. With some non-exempt positions and in some states you can’t do this so consult your legal team before you require paperwork being sent early. But at least explore the possibilities. Also look at your HR systems, are they easy to use. Do they add a layer of complexity that makes a simple task more complicated? Try and make your HR systems a single log in. So the employee only needs to go to one place.
6. Get Executive support. Set up a meeting for the new hires with the Executive team or members of it. During this meeting have the Executive team welcome the new hires to the company, share their success stories and high-level strategies. In my experience, many executives will enjoy this. Then have the line managers come in and translate the high level strategy to actionable tasks. Link those tasks to the learning that the new employee will receive. Remember the more invested the new hire feels the company is in them, the more likely they are to work hard and be a productive member of the team.
7. Assign someone from their team to help them along. Set the new employee up with a mentor. Make sure they have clear guidelines on what you want them to focus on with the new employee. I have seen many companies create a mentoring training session, an hour or two program that the new mentors need to go through in order to ensure the experience delivered is consistent. Make sure you give the new employee a little time to figure it all out, set them up for success. Give the employee doing the mentoring time to do it. If you are asking that person to mentor make sure that you are taking things off of their plate in order to give them time to do it effectively.
8. Make sure you have all the Basic Tools available for that new employee. Quick reference guides (or online tools) are essential for the new employee. Some things that I have seen in the past: company org charts, phone lists, department listings, building maps, and company fact sheets. This is not a comprehensive list, just ask a few new hires what they used or what world have been helpful and you are off to the races.

Creating a great program is an essential piece for employee training. We provided you with some high level tips. If you would like to discuss your situation, a professional from Your Training Team will be happy to speak with you. Don’t hesitate to call or write. Just click contact us on the link to the right or send us an email: info@yourtrainingteam.com

The infographic below, compiled by the creators of social goal management tool WorkSimple, offers a deeper look into what today’s employees look for in a boss.

Did any one else find it scary that on last nights episode of undercover boss, the behavior of Jessie was tolerated and rewarded.  What message is that giving our young people and your professionals entering the workplace?

For those of you that didn’t see the show or preview.  Jessie is a 19yr old girl who was asked to train the Chief Development Officer on how to make sandwiches.  Instead, she berated him for being old, unintelligent and the like.  The whole scene made me cringe.  And what made it worse was that when she came to corporate and learned who he was she was rewarded instead of disciplined.  I mean come on folks.  Lets not reward behavior that should not be tolerated.

I think this episode has pushed me over the Undercover Boss chasm.  Tivo >>>> Delete Season Pass.

If you want to see for yourself …. click here

This was an interesting article in Fortune magazine. Is your organization getting back to the basics of management?

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By Julian Birkinshaw, contributor

When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I’ve certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it’s also because we adults aren’t exactly singing the praises of the management profession either.

For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12% of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity — an all-time low. With a 37% low/very low rating, the executives came in behind lawyers, union leaders, real estate agents, building contractors, and bankers.

What should we do about this? Some observers would like us to get rid of the word manager altogether, favoring terms like leader, coach and entrepreneur. But I believe a more useful approach is to reinvent management — to go back to first principles, and recapture the spirit of what management is all about.

We need to help executives figure out the best way to manage, and we need to help employees to get the managers they deserve.

Management versus leadership

Let’s start with a definition: Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. There is a lot of stuff missing from this definition: no mention of planning, organization, staffing, controlling, or budgeting; no mention of companies or corporations; and absolutely nothing about hierarchy or bureaucracy. And that is precisely the point — management is a social endeavor, which simply involves getting people to come together to achieve goals that they could not achieve on their own. A soccer coach is a manager, as is an orchestra conductor and a Cub Scout leader.

But over the last century, the term management has metamorphosed into something narrower, and more pejorative, than Webster’s dictionary might suggest. Managers are often seen as low-level bureaucrats who are internally focused, absorbed in operational details and controlling and coordinating the work of their subordinates.

Why has this change in perception taken place? One reason is that our way of thinking and talking about management is based on the century-old form of management practiced in large industrial firms. This approach to management was all about improving efficiency, standardization and quality control, and it was built on principles of hierarchy, bureaucracy and extrinsic rewards.

The trouble is, these objectives are not what drives success in most sectors today — we are much more likely to be concerned about innovation, agility and engagement. And yet we are still, for the most part, using these industrial-era concepts to shape the way we get work done.

To make room for leadership, gurus felt compelled to diminish the role of management. John Kotter saw managers as being the ones who plan, budget, organize, and control, while leaders set direction, manage change, and motivate people.

Warren Bennis viewed managers as those who promote efficiency, follow the rules, and accept the status quo, while leaders focus on challenging the rules and promoting effectiveness. By splitting the work of executives in this way, Kotter, Bennis and others squeezed out the essence of what managers do and left them with the boring work that “leaders” don’t want.

Leadership is a process of social influence: it is concerned with the traits, styles, and behaviors of individuals that causes others to follow them. Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals.

We all need to be leaders and managers. We need to be able to influence others through our ideas, words, and actions. We also need to be able to get work done through others on a day-to-day basis.

What is the future of management?

In the face of all these challenges, can management be reinvented to make it more effective as an agent of economic progress and more responsive to the needs of employees?

Some say it can’t. Henry Mintzberg argues in his most recent book, Managing, that the nature of managerial work has not changed noticeably in the 40 years he has been studying it. Management is fundamentally about how individuals work together, and the basic laws of social interaction are not susceptible to dramatic change.

Indeed, it’s interesting to note that most of the major innovations in management — the industrialization of R&D, mass production, decentralization, brand management, discounted cash flow — occurred before 1930. If we extend this logic, we could conclude that the evolution of management has more or less run its course; that, to use Francis Fukayama’s famous expression, we’ve reached “the end of history” with regard to management progress.

But we haven’t.

Of course there is some validity in arguing that the basic laws of human behavior are not going to change. But management practices are largely dependent on context, and as the nature of business organizations evolves, so too will management.

Another school of thought says we are on the cusp of inventing an entirely new model of management, largely because of the information technology revolution.

The only trouble with this argument is that we have been here before. All the arguments around decentralization and empowerment have been debated for a very long time. Every generation of management writers, including such luminaries as Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Sumantra Ghoshal, has argued for its own version of revolutionary change in the years ahead. And they cannot all be right.

Is there a third way here? I believe there is.

We don’t need to throw up our hands and say management has gone as far as it can, because that would accept the failures of management as something we must simply live with. And we don’t need to create a whole new model of management — we have plenty of ideas from theory and practice to guide us.

We need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what management is really about to make better choices. By going back to a basic definition of management — the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals — we can frame our discussion of the activities and principles of management much more explicitly. And armed with this new understanding, we can help managers make better choices within the universe of known possibilities, rather than suggest they invent something that has never been thought of before.

Here is an example. Why should we assume that all important decisions need to be made by the people at the top of the organizational hierarchy?

Traditionally, this was the case, but is it possible that important decisions might be made in less hierarchical or non-hierarchical ways?

Yes it is. In fact, entire books have been written on the “wisdom of crowds” and “crowdsourcing” techniques for aggregating the views of large numbers of people to make better decisions. So it would be wrong to assume that all decisions made in the future will be made exclusively by those at the top, and it would be equally wrong to assume that crowdsourcing will replace traditional decision making structures.

The prosaic truth is that it depends — the right model depends on a host of contingencies, including the nature of the decision being made, the company’s size and background, the interests and capabilities of the employees, and so on.

Your management model is simply the choices you make about how you work — the way you set objectives, motivate your employees, coordinate activities, and make decisions.

Most companies have an implicit approach to defining their management model, by simply working with what they have inherited, or what they have seen in other companies. My view is that you should take a more critical look at those choices. This involves four steps:

1. Understanding: You need to be explicit about the management principles you are using to run your company. These principles are invisible, and often understood only at a subconscious level, but they drive the day-to-day processes and practices through which management work gets done.

2. Evaluating: You need to assess whether your company’s management principles are suited to the business environment in which you are working. There are risks associated with whatever principles you employ, so you need to understand the pros and cons of each one so that you can choose wisely.

3. Envisioning: You need to seek out new ways of working, by looking at examples from different industries and from new contexts.

4. Experimenting: You need to be prepared to try out these new practices in a low-risk way to see how they work.

Alas, there is no recipe book for reinventing management. While these steps suggest a process for evaluating and rethinking your management principles, there is only so much you can learn from the mistakes made by troubled companies or from the latest Dilbert cartoon. The right choices depend entirely on the specific circumstances and opportunities that your company faces, and on your willingness to experiment with unproven practices.