Ramping Up New Resources
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog, did anyone miss me? The main problem was workload, as you could have guessed, but I was also taking steps to prevent this from happening again. How? Well, we’ve hired new resources which are going through our ramp up program. When hiring anyone, you can’t expect them to be 100% productive or billable as soon as they walk in the door. So how do you get them to that state quickly and effectively without impacting quality and customer service? We’ve designed a 4 phase ramp up program that is really something that can be reproduced in many other organizations and business types. It boils down to
1) Company introduction to methodology and base knowledge
2) In the shoes of the Trainer
3) Shadowing the Expert
4) Taking the Lead
Every new hire in every company has to become familiar with the methodology and operations model of the company. This may be a reading exercise, a training program, a review of marketing collateral and example client deliverables, or any type of deliverable that describes your company and services. Reading alone, however, is a hard thing to comprehend unless you have something to apply it to. Here is when I look for internal projects that require information updates. This could be how your information is organized for access by others, documenting best practices or writing up process workflows, or even leveraging the knowledge your new hire has from prior experience to recommend changes. Your organization gets the benefit of completing some internal activities while your new resources get the benefit of applying their learning and being productive.
Phase 2 is being in the shoes of the trainer. In this phase, your resource is focused on building training materials, ideally for clients. When you are put in the role of the trainer your view changes from learning for yourself to learning to teach others. Comprehension is much higher at this stage since you need to be confident to answer questions and will ensure you know the material well. New resources take time to build this material so you have to balance customer billable effort with internal investment due to the continual education of your new resources. Productivity will increase over time which will remove the need to split effort between billable and non-billable.
After gaining knowledge of the company and handling training activities, now resources are ready for shadowing engagements. Here they can see your expert resources in action to learn how best to handle engagements, customer interactions, and how their knowledge is leveraged overall throughout the project. In a shadowing role, have the new resource be the note taker, action keeper, and assist with deliverables. This will demonstrate their comprehension level of the engagement as well as display their knowledge from the prior phases of your ramp up timeframe. Resources may stay in this phase longer than other phases as they become adjusted to how projects are run and what roles and responsibilities exist.
The final phase is having your new resource take the lead on a project. This still does not necessarily mean they are handling the engagement on their own. An expert resource assumes a mentorship role to your new resource by reviewing deliverables and following up with the lead resource throughout the engagement to ensure things are going smoothly. Although early engagements may require a more active role from a mentor, as time goes on your resource will become an expert in their own right.
Get productive work into your new hires hands as soon as possible, whether it’s internal or client billable, and they’ll be able to demonstrate their capabilities and comprehension immediately. Having a ramp up plan will ensure you have a consistent education program in place and know what your timeline investment will be as your company continues to grow….I’m just saying.
