If i give my employees clear titles and expectations, how am I supposed to pile new things on them later and dismiss their concerns with a wave of the hand and the explanation that it's part of their job?

Tired of companies thinking we should be greatful to have a job...most companies are loving the "bad economy" It presents an excuse to offer low pay and not take care of their employees.

jayhawk88: Great, "onboarding". So this is going to be the new HR buzzword for the next few years? I should expect to have mandatory training sessions where I get to hear about all the ways my employer is willing to spend money to keep me as an employee? Everything except higher pay of course, because ha ha that would just be silly.

Only if your company is run by boneheads. We generally don't pay for training, we hire people we think we can train and then give them reasonable goals that they're expected to grow into in their first years. I'm currently mentoring someone who took on a Jr. System Admin position out of college. He's not expected to be able to do all the tasks of someone with experience at the pay of a newbie, he's expected to grow into his role so he's ready to replace retiring or leaving employees elsewhere in the company.

I would say, however, I feel like I lucked out getting into this situation. It does not seem to be the norm... the typical approach seems to be to send people through the murky mind of some HR dweeb before hammering them with buzzwords and then dropping them on the job with no direction, no goals, and the expectation they're just going to magically figure out their role in the company with no guidance what-so-ever.

Hence the article.

/ HR: because not everybody was gifted with the intellect necessary to learn a useful skill

I guess we're doing something right. We lose less than 2 percent of new employees a year, 5 percent over 2 years.

And, fortunately, it's usually amicable, as they discover they aren't cut out for what they're doing (probably a failure in the hiring process, but whatever).

Now if we could just start making some more money. Perhaps we should pay our employees less so we can meet the industry averages? :D

Ha! Compared to the money the military throws away every year by driving trained personnel out? My training a a Nuc costs the government over a million bucks back in the '70s and they had no problem with forcing me out. My submarine had the lowest retention rate for junior officers (zero over five years) and senior enlisted for the entire Pacific Fleet. I suspect the cost is 3-4 times as much now.

Pay has been stagnant for over a decade.

NOT paying your new workers a decent living wage means they will be using your ass as a springboard to those who want a year or two of experience.

Gee, imagine that.... If people aren't adequately compensated and treated well, they don't stick around.

/I love it when the 'business conservatives' mantra comes around to bite them all in the arse - and they don't seem to get 'why'.

IrateShadow: If i give my employees clear titles and expectations, how am I supposed to pile new things on them later and dismiss their concerns with a wave of the hand and the explanation that it's part of their job?

When I finally had enough and gave my notice at the deathstar, I had the responsibilities of four people that had been reporting to four different managers. So of course I had those four managers all trying to get their projects done over the other managers.

Seriously, the place churned (and probably still does) through employees and low level managers at an incredible rate. They had an dizzying array of rules, requirements, and quotas that were wholly incompatible with each other. If you followed the rules, you could not meet quota. If you didn't meet quota, you were fired. If you didn't follow all the rules, you would be punished, and eventually fired. And upper management wondered why moral was so low and turn over was so high.

Drakuun: Gee, imagine that.... If people aren't adequately compensated and treated well, they don't stick around.

/I love it when the 'business conservatives' mantra comes around to bite them all in the arse - and they don't seem to get 'why'.

The biggest issue in my opinion is publicly traded corporations that are far too short sighted. What matters to them is performance on a quarter to quarter basis. So you get situations like Circuit City, Home Depot, and Best Buy, where experienced employees were replaced with cheaper high school kids to cut down on costs. Sure it helped the bottom lines for a few quarters, but then sales tanked. But then again a CEO can make a sizable fortune by sacrificing long term performance to make profits look better in the short run.

In my opinion, the days when you could buy a single stock, and hold onto that stock for years are gone.

Splinshints: jayhawk88: Great, "onboarding". So this is going to be the new HR buzzword for the next few years? I should expect to have mandatory training sessions where I get to hear about all the ways my employer is willing to spend money to keep me as an employee? Everything except higher pay of course, because ha ha that would just be silly.

Only if your company is run by boneheads. We generally don't pay for training, we hire people we think we can train and then give them reasonable goals that they're expected to grow into in their first years. I'm currently mentoring someone who took on a Jr. System Admin position out of college. He's not expected to be able to do all the tasks of someone with experience at the pay of a newbie, he's expected to grow into his role so he's ready to replace retiring or leaving employees elsewhere in the company.

I would say, however, I feel like I lucked out getting into this situation. It does not seem to be the norm... the typical approach seems to be to send people through the murky mind of some HR dweeb before hammering them with buzzwords and then dropping them on the job with no direction, no goals, and the expectation they're just going to magically figure out their role in the company with no guidance what-so-ever.

Hence the article.

/ HR: because not everybody was gifted with the intellect necessary to learn a useful skill


Your job could be done by a bulletin board!

My wife is running into this with the company she is with right now. There was little to no training involved and her pay is based on client contact hours. She only gets paid if the client shows which is about half the time. Some times she drives to meet them and they still don't show, she doesn't get reimbursed gas. The company is expanding to a larger area and expecting their people to drive farther distances. Hence, everyone except a few upper level people are looking for new jobs or have quit already. All the people running the company see are, "wow we're expanding our business, look at all the new clients." Meanwhile, the employees rarely last a year and they lose tons of money in paying people to find new employees to and do new hires all the time. Any idiot can see this place is going into the ground, but somehow the higher ups don't see it or don't care. It's sad really (for my wife not for the company).

/she has a Masters degree and can't find a decent job. A hard worker with lots of education and not a lot of job prospects is a bad place to be.

Splinshints: We generally don't pay for training, we hire people we think we can train and then give them reasonable goals that they're expected to grow into in their first years. I'm currently mentoring someone who took on a Jr. System Admin position out of college. He's not expected to be able to do all the tasks of someone with experience at the pay of a newbie, he's expected to grow into his role so he's ready to replace retiring or leaving employees elsewhere in the company.

I would say, however, I feel like I lucked out getting into this situation. It does not seem to be the norm... the typical approach seems to be to send people through the murky mind of some HR dweeb before hammering them with buzzwords and then dropping them on the job with no direction, no goals, and the expectation they're just going to magically figure out their role in the company with no guidance what-so-ever.

From your description, your company sounds very typical, much like the companies in the article. You think that not having external classes means you're not paying for training, but you're actually paying more, because you force your existing employees to STOP what they're doing and teach the new person, reducing productivity in everyone. This process goes on for several months, and in the end, everyone has extra work piled up that they can't possibly get to, and the new person has huge holes (and misinformation) in their training.

Mentoring is something you get tricked into because it sounds worthwhile, when all it really is is free training to the company, in addition to your regular job. And if you do have the time to mentor someone, maybe your job isn't that important to the company.

BigBooper: In my opinion, the days when you could buy a single stock, and hold onto that stock for years are gone

They were over in the Clinton Administration; simply holding and having faith in continued strong leadership and decision-making from any organization has become a pipe dream.

beantowndog: When I started onboarding the article I wasn't expecting much in the way of onboarding. I was pleasantly onboarded however. The important thing is onboarding.

I envy your fortune in helping to establish this new paradigm.

Let me put in a word for reasonable working conditions.

You want to stick 20 software developers in a big open room, so the boss can keep an eye on them? And with a conference table on one side, so there is almost always a meeting going on. Expect productivity to be low and annoyance to be high.

You want to stuff two people per cubicle? You want to give us these shiatty little armless chairs that were the cheapest thing at the office supply store that are uncomfortable to sit on all day? Laptops, with no external monitors or keyboards?

You want me to come in and work on the weekends, but won't pay maintenance to turn the HVAC on?

I've seen a ton of places that will pay six figure salaries, but wont' spend $1K per employee giving them a work environment that would make them much more productive.

Splinshints:
Only if your company is run by boneheads. We generally don't pay for training, we hire people we think we can train and then give them reasonable goals that they're expected to grow into in their first years. I'm currently mentoring someone who took on a Jr. System Admin position out of college. He's not expected to be able to do all the tasks of someone with experience at the pay of a newbie, he's expected to grow into his role so he's ready to replace retiring or leaving employees elsewhere in the company.

You work in IT and don't believe that there's a need for additional training to keep relevant?

Obviously some skills are OJT or self-taught, but there needs to be a support system in place as well. I'd hate to see a place where the developers, IA, etc. folk are totally on their own as far as developing new skills go. Even with mentoring, some things you have to send folks out to train for.

Big trick there is making sure it for something that's actually needed, and not sending them off on a corporate-sponsored party for a week or two every year.

/lack of growth, lack of training/mentoring required for position, and wage are the three biggies I see... and in that order

midigod: Mentoring is something you get tricked into because it sounds worthwhile, when all it really is is free training to the company, in addition to your regular job. And if you do have the time to mentor someone, maybe your job isn't that important to the company.

This is a really big scam in my field right now, laboratory cancer research. OK, so there's no possibility of me getting a tenure track position? Or a staff scientist position? Or getting a contract extension in my current position? And my other postdoc options at the NIH are limited because of salary requirements that the NIH is responsible for inventing and implementing?

Well, thank heavens you're gracious enough to give me the opportunity to "mentor" the pre- and postbacs that you're bringing in for half my cost. Hey, this isn't because twenty somethings won't biatch about shiatty benefits and salaries and will believe everything you tell them about their future prospects, is it? Well, I guess that makes up for my ten years of experience.

FTFA: "HR professionals in the study said the top three reasons employees leave within a year of being hired are their relationship with their manager, their job performance and career advancement opportunities."

Step 1: You can hire someone who has a basic skill level that you think you can train to do the job OR you can hire someone who has done that specific job or one that is close enough to allow for very little drop off.

Step 2: You can train your employee how to meet and exceed your clear expectations OR you can stick them with another employee and tell them to train the new guy OR you can throw them into the mix as soon as they know where their desk is with little to no intro.

Step 3: You can provide a clear career path with measurable, agreed upon milestones so that at every moment, every employee knows what needs to be accomplished to qualify for a promotion or new position OR you can make every position a vague mishmash of responsibilties that allow you to subjectively decide who is "ready" for a promotion based on personal criteria OR you can never really promote or give raises to anyone unless they threaten to leave and even when most people threaten leaving, just let them go.

Unfortunately, very few companies that I have heard of take the path that actually requires work upfront, but leads to more productive employees later.

//Also, your interpretation of how the system is set up may be skewed by how you are treated by it. Of course if there were clear, measurable standards against which you could measure yourself, there would no longer be confusion.

ModernPrimitive01: My wife is running into this with the company she is with right now. There was little to no training involved and her pay is based on client contact hours. She only gets paid if the client shows which is about half the time. Some times she drives to meet them and they still don't show, she doesn't get reimbursed gas. The company is expanding to a larger area and expecting their people to drive farther distances. Hence, everyone except a few upper level people are looking for new jobs or have quit already. All the people running the company see are, "wow we're expanding our business, look at all the new clients." Meanwhile, the employees rarely last a year and they lose tons of money in paying people to find new employees to and do new hires all the time. Any idiot can see this place is going into the ground, but somehow the higher ups don't see it or don't care. It's sad really (for my wife not for the company).

/she has a Masters degree and can't find a decent job. A hard worker with lots of education and not a lot of job prospects is a bad place to be.

Strangely...that sounds an awfull
lot like the job description of Julia Roberts character in "Pretty Women".

BigBooper: IrateShadow: If i give my employees clear titles and expectations, how am I supposed to pile new things on them later and dismiss their concerns with a wave of the hand and the explanation that it's part of their job?

When I finally had enough and gave my notice at the deathstar, I had the responsibilities of four people that had been reporting to four different managers. So of course I had those four managers all trying to get their projects done over the other managers.

Seriously, the place churned (and probably still does) through employees and low level managers at an incredible rate. They had an dizzying array of rules, requirements, and quotas that were wholly incompatible with each other. If you followed the rules, you could not meet quota. If you didn't meet quota, you were fired. If you didn't follow all the rules, you would be punished, and eventually fired. And upper management wondered why moral was so low and turn over was so high.

Sounds like my last place, where I was junior sys admin at a collection agency with offices across Canada. Starting pay for the collectors was peanuts, the training sucked, and upper management (basically the COO, who ruled everything) cheaped out hard on technology. As I did the user accounts, I knew first hand the turnover rate and, I shiat you not, it was almost 175%. Of course, upper management was oblivious to the cost of that turnover, and I'm a prime example. I left for my current place who was offering 40% more in pay, plus I would be able to walk to work. I was asked what it would take to stay, and replied 50% (to my boss, the CIO who was a decent guy). He heard back from his boss that they would offer me 10%.

They had to hire 2 people to replace me. Instead of 50% more, you're paying more than 100% more. Well done.

Nexzus: They had to hire 2 people to replace me. Instead of 50% more, you're paying more than 100% more. Well done.

I got into the situation I was in because they had a hiring freeze in-force. So as people left, management couldn't replace them. So they passed on those responsibilities to someone else. One of my many jobs was escalated customer service, you know, taking care of issues when they got so bad that lawyers and/or state utility boards were involved. I averaged an hour an issue, and that's only because I got VERY good at cutting through the companies massive amounts of red tape. I also received ten to twenty new issues a day. I was not allowed to work overtime, so of course I had to triage. I only had time to work on issues that were major farkups; the rest were left to fester until they were elevated to that level.

If the company had hired, trained, and retained skilled people, most of the issues I dealt with could have been avoided. And if they had kept enough people handling issues before they became major losses, the company would have probably saved millions of dollars a year in legal settlements.

My favorite story: The company turned off the lines of a company that did automated monitoring of oil and natural gas pipelines over a minor contract issue. In other words, we stopped them from being able to detect leaks, pressure issues, etc. Can you imagine the liability if there had been an accident?

Smeggy Smurf: Training on new software means nothing if they buy the 32 bit version and expect you to do BIM modeling on 4 year old off the shelf Dell computers.

On the flip side, if the company wants to offer a new service to it's clients and doesn't know how the technology behind the new service works (which often happens) that training becomes rather important. Not wanting to invest in it is rather short-sighted.

Company I'm contracted with has decided on a new tactic. They're telling their people that these (they have a list that's updated quarterly) are the vital skills that the company needs. It's up to the employees to get them. Some of these items require a formal certification. Company response -the employee has to pay for them. Costs of the test? Employee has to pay for them. Costs of materials and exam? Employee has to pay for them. CPEs? Employee has to pay for them. Etc.

What does the employee get for shouldering the cost? Nada, but the carrot that their initiative might be recognized by a future "opportunity" within the company. Additional pay or recognition? Ha!

It's interesting to see these things from the contractor's perspective, but really the companies in general don't give a damn about anything but a quarterly earnings statement and some exec's bonus.

What scares the hell out of me is that I see it strongest within the defense industry.

I just finished "on-boarding" at a place I was hired at. It must be a great job for those who have to teach training. Had a training instructor who I think is either playing a game to see how far he can go as to when he'll get caught. In the first three weeks of training he banged three women in class and messed around with at least two or more. He must have been tired of trying to keep everyone of them separate. He transferred out the following week. Then the next day drama began when each of the girls found out about each other. Putting out apps for a new job right now.