Help your rookies
One of the biggest challenges for a high-growth company is inserting new employees into the mix in a way in which they can get up to speed with everyone else as quickly as possible. You’re starting with a clean slate, but that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll fall right into place with your culture.
“Sometimes we want to give people information, but maybe we don’t do a very good job of explaining why that information is either important to them or is important to the company,” Elwood says. “I could tell you, ‘Hey, Mark, when you come here to work, you have to do this and this and this.’ You may have no idea in the world how you do that.
“And you may therefore not think you want to do it or you may not think it’s a good idea. But if we told you, ‘Here are two or three reasons why we do that, because it helps us do this better,’ it may make total sense to you. We don’t always help people understand why what they’re learning is important and how it benefits them and the company.”
Elwood has tried to in
crease the understanding of its employees by allowing them to work for a month before bringing them to the corporate office for a weeklong welcome and training session.
“In past years, we started them in new-hire training on their first day,” Elwood says. “So they spent their first full week on the job here at our corporate office. Over time, we heard people say, ‘Boy, that was a lot of information. That was overwhelming. It was like drinking water from a fire hose.’”
The change gives new employees a chance to learn a little bit about the company first and then get the hard-core training session to learn all of the details.
“We want to let them to have a full month or a little bit more to be in the environment and kind of start to learn about the policies and procedures,” Elwood says. “Then when they come to corporate orientation and we say, ‘OK, now we want to talk about this,’ then they can say, ‘OK, I’ve heard about that; I know a little bit about that.’ Then we can tie it all together.”
The company also uses a variety of people, each an expert in his or her given department, as trainers to teach new employees.
“If we just had one person that tried to cover all these topics, over the period of a year or two, their information could get a little stale,” Elwood says. “When the HR director does the benefits or when the safety director does some of the safety training, by having the in-house experts do the training as opposed to just one training person, you’re increasing your chances that you’re always up to date with the latest and greatest training.”
The way you treat your new employees can go a long way toward building the trust you have with your more experienced people.
“It sends a real strong message that they are important enough that we bought them an airline ticket and a hotel room and we paid for them to be here in the corporate office for one full week,” Elwood says.
