So you’ve just hired one or more new employees. Consider how the process worked in the past. Most of the first few days were spent following someone around, reading complex documents that didn’t always answer questions, and performing minor work tasks. After about three months, the employee grew into the swing of things and was close in productivity levels to the typical employee, and after about six months or so, he or she became a fully integrated member of the team.
What if you could speed that process up? Well, the fact is you can do this right now, and the knowledge management features of an enterprise social network can help you. Here’s how:
- Subscription to subjects/video tutorials. No longer does the new employee have to constantly track down someone to answer his or her questions, and neither does he or she have to guess the way through hundreds of pages of unfamiliar documents. Instead, you simply show them how to subscribe to the most pertinent topics to their job and demonstrate how to search for tutorials you’ve already created. Little time is wasted searching for answers, employees learn at an exponentially faster rate, and they become fully integrated team members much faster than ever before.
- Instant communication. While subjects and video tutorials can answer many common questions, there will be unique situations and insights only certain office personnel can offer. In these cases, the new guy can send an instant chat or video chat request to that person, or simply ask the question publicly. In either case, the difficulty he or she is having will be resolved that much faster, thanks to the knowledge management capabilities of your private social network.
- External communities. Any social network worth its salt allows you to set up a special community where you, the customer, and all team members affiliated with the customer’s project can communicate regarding the project’s status. Instead of phones, email, and each team member taking actions the other can’t see, new hires have an incredible level of transparency available. They’ll learn more about the process because they can follow nearly every change that happens – in real-time.
- Screen sharing. When the new hire has a question and learns better with demonstration, he or she can share a screen with another coworker. Instead of the back-and-forth of multiple emails, the new hire instantly learns the assigned task.
There’s no doubt these features will greatly speed up the onboarding of any new hire. How much time and money do you think these benefits of knowledge management could save your organization?
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