This is old news, but I haven’t been able to shake it. I love the idea. Zappos pays employees to quit. A thousand dollars (plus your earned income) to walk away if you don’t think you’re going to like the job after the two week training period.
This got me thinking about what most companies do with new hires in the first two weeks. Sometimes it takes that long just to get your work station set up. Managers are often ‘too busy’ to properly prepare and it shows in the actions of the new hire. Often they’re left to sit with a pile of documents to ‘learn the industry’ or to take their time to ‘understand what we do.’ There is a whole lot of nothing happening.
Here’s an idea:
Give the new employee a week of introspection time. Seriously. They’re sitting around doing nothing anyway.
Supply them with a list of questions that will ultimately help you get the most out of them. Some of the questions may be repetitive from the interview, but they already have the job so they should be able to answer more freely now.
Stress that they have the entire week to do nothing but this. They can do it from the beach, from home, from a mountain top or from their desk. Doesn’t matter, wherever they have the chance to dig deep to come up with the answers.
After the week you set aside several hours to talk through their responses. You listen. You learn their goals, learn what they need from you and learn when you should expect the most out of them. Compare this to what works best for you and what the team needs. (This means you also need to take the time to figure these things out as well.)
Talk through the job again. Highlight both what needs to get done vs. the areas where they should be expected to run wild because it’s something they enjoy doing.
You can even have a session with the entire team so that everyone on the team gets to know the new hire better, hear their goals and figure out who has complimentary skills on the team so that the new hire can be paired with someone who can run in the areas where the new hire gets bogged down.
Often hearing the goals and interests of others will diffuse any turf-protecting or passive-aggressive competitions. You’d be surprised how often somebody really doesn’t want their boss’s job.
Certainly a touchy-feely approach, but I see a lot of benefits to it with almost zero downside. If nothing else, you now have time to get their work station set up.
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