Have you ever wondered why some new employees “work out” better than others? You hire them full of hope that they will be the sparkling success you need them to be for whatever position they are to fill. In the interview, they seemed so right and their credentials and experience all checked out. And you expect that they will fit right in and be able to do the job in no time.
Disappointment sets in
Somehow, though, it may not have played out that way. After a few weeks you start to feel like perhaps you made a mistake or were fooled in the interview. Or worse even, the employee quits suddenly without notice.
Does any of this reflect back on you as the boss? Short answer: Yes, it does. Like many, many other employers, you may have made the assumption that the new hire knows what to do based on their previous experience and you wait and hope that they can adapt to their new conditions and environment and figure things out on their own.
Negative results
Leaving the new person alone from the start can open the door to many drawbacks:
- They may bring bad habits with them from previous employment.
- They may feel they need to change everything right away without enough data to judge by.
- They will probably waste a lot of time trying to figure out on their own what needs to be done and how things are done in your practice.
- Lack of sufficient training and direction may cause them to develop inefficient work habits and/or inappropriate responses to situations.
- Chaos can easily be created by a new person who is not aware of the habits and routines of your practice. Things get hard to find. Important actions are not done or forgotten.
After a while, you as the manager may start to doubt the employee’s ability to work out on the job the way you wanted. The 90 day rule starts to circle in your mind [you have 90 days from commencement of employment to dismiss a new hire with no reason and no severance pay]. Sometimes you will just give up your dreams of the ideal candidate and just let things ride as they are.
An ounce of prevention
How could this situation have worked out differently? This is a case of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If you do this right, it will save you a LOT of money and time in the future.
One of the main ways is to ensure the success of a new staff member is for you as the boss to spend enough time training them properly in order to make them operational and happy on the job.
Your management tools
To assist you with this, it is extremely important to have very full job descriptions and detailed protocols for your practice. An up-to-date policy manual is also very valuable. If there is a fully trained manager between you and the new person, they may do most of the training, of course. If there isn’t, then you can’t skip doing it yourself, no matter how time consuming. If you didn’t like the way the previous post-holder did the job, you mustn’t let that person train your new one.
Having to go through the hiring process all over again would be much more time consuming than training this one correctly in the first place. You WANT this person to be that sparkling success you envisioned, so you must MAKE it happen.
For more info or help with your practice and how to be the ideal boss, contact us!
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