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The Common Problem: Companies Are Bad At Training Around What ACTUALLY Matters To Them
This article has been getting some attention on Medium:
I had a few people send it to me. It’s not bad. Some of it is very entitled, i.e. this young woman who quits a job is supposedly complaining about a number of international business trips. I know biz travel can get exhausting and tedious, for sure, but I haven’t known many young people to complain about those opportunities. Anyway.
Near the beginning, this boss is asking the young buck who is quitting some questions, and she says this:
“Everyone dropped me emails on how to do what. Some colleagues are so overwhelmed with work that they reply to my Teams messages with a hyperlink to the company’s Sharepoint for onboarding information.”
This is a common problem at most organizations, where onboarding is typically rushed and low-context.
However, it belies a bigger problem. One of the major flaws of onboarding at many places is that people never tell you what is actually important. They just throw 1,200 processes at you and hope you’ll retain that information. That’s very hard, even for those with good memories and attention spans. Most end up messing up a process or two in the first six weeks — and then the issue becomes “How hair-trigger is your boss?”
I digress. Here’s what I really mean.
At a for-profit company, usually what “matters” is tied to money in the form of:
