Many, many large corporations and most businesses struggle to get good staff on the job and keep them there. A huge investment in recruitment costs is often frittered away by the sheer fact that a person newly appointed to a position can take up to six months or more to become effective in that role.
An even greater amount of time and money goes into work that has to re-done. The job did not get done properly the first time because of someone’s unfamiliarity with the task. The expectation was incorrectly set that the person could jump into the role and run with the ball. This is usually far from the truth.
What is missing?
If you have a valid strategy so that people know where you intend to go, and the structure of the business is relatively firm, and if you have the systems in place to produce the products of the business, then there is really only one critical framework or system that is missing: the one that you use to put a person on the job and bed them in.
When you repair an electric motor, you bed-in the new brushes so that they make good contact with the motor armature, and therefore eliminate sparking and extensive damage.
The same thing needs to be done when someone takes on a new role. Like the good old idea of an apprenticeship, new people need to gain practice on key tasks to perform well. This bedding-in is such a neglected role that the waste in businesses is astounding. How many times have you been told “Oh, sorry, but that person is new” when confronted with poor service or a failure to deliver, etc.?
But how?
You need the structure and systems as mentioned earlier, and as a part of those systems, you need a Personnel function that contains all the role descriptions, the “how-tos” of every single job function in the business.
A staff member needs at least the following:
1. A role description for their specific job. (Sausage mincer)
2. A role description for their general job. (Joe’s Butcher Shop staff member)
3. A role description for their Management job. (How to be the boss of my and other areas.)
With those elements, a staff member can understand what is expected of them generally (how do I answer the phone), specifically (how do I make prime mince meat) and managerially (what do I need to learn to get promoted).
To bed-in this sausage maker, you would take small pieces of 1-3 above and simply tell them what is expected in each - sort of an instant training.
Meat goes in here, mince comes out there … keep your fingers away from that! You show them, then they show you back, then you tell them how long it should take. That covers the instant training, and is usually where most businesses leave off. The staff member is then left to figure out what the next steps should be to train themselves.
Haphazard to say the least. You must prepare the rest of the learning steps for each role in the business, so that staff have a way to train up to become better on the job and also more valuable to the business.
What about initiative? I hear some of you cry. Let me say this: those that have and can use initiative go even faster when you lay out the path for them to run into.
Once you have these role descriptions, you lay them out piece by piece and get the staff member moving. Check progress at least daily until they have proven they can produce their products unassisted.
Too much! I hear you scream. No. Too much is when you have to come back and fix things because you didn’t do it right the first time. Too much is losing a key client because of not bedding-in someone properly and something important gets missed.
Do you get the point?
Done right, bedding someone into a job allows them to produce good products in a very short time. The good production leads to pride and increased moral. The bedding-in helps protect other members of staff from having to bail-out the new guy.
Everyone wins. Altogether a sensible investment. | 
