Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Nothing hurts a growing business than being understaffed for key positions. Every year, corporations around the world spend billions of dollars on finding new employees to take the business to the next level. However, even if you find the perfect person tomorrow, she will not be working at full speed for weeks if you are lucky. This is exactly the opposite of why you hired the person in the first place; you need them contributing yesterday! So what is a fast growing business to do?

The Scott Porad, CTO of Pet Holdings Inc, had a great post about this subject yesterday. Specifically:

At Cheezburger, our new developers write and commit code to our production software on Day One. Yes, you heard that right…we throw a newbie into the fire before they even have time to know what hit them.
 
I would strongly encourage you to aim for this goal with your new employees on Day One.  The result will be happier, more empowered employees with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity.
 

For those that do not know the term, just substitute “checking in code” for “some small but significant contribution to the business”. I LOVE this attitude.

The beauty of this is two fold. First, it’s a wonderful forcing function. As Mr. Porad mentioned, what is not listed here is buy a new machine, get the machine set up with the proper dev environment, buy a desk, get the user account and email setup, and on and on. All that provisioning takes time and is a complete waste of your new hire. By having the requirement that they must contribute on the first day, the entire team must dedicate themselves to having a repeatable (and fast!) process for on-ramping. Second, it lets people win instantly. My friend likes to say, there are two keys to happy employees: give them the opportunity to learn, and let them demonstrate proficiency in their subject area. By giving new employees the opportunity to do this on the first day, you accomplish both at once.  Talk about instant gratification!

Mr. Porad briefly mentions some of the other disciplines in which you can execute this philosophy, and, again, I totally agree. I think this bias for action is even more essential when you go outside purely technical areas areas. For example:

  • Sales – Give the new salesperson a brand new account, and get them into their offices immediately. You do not need to put them out on an island (feel free to send the existing account rep with them), but the sooner they hear your customers and what they want, the faster they will see chances to make sales everywhere.
  • Marketing – Do not even let these guys in the building before they have gone out and talked to your potential customers. Having a fresh look at what your customers really want is worth its weight in gold.
  • Product development – An outsiders view of the product, without any baggage that came from actually implementing it, can be incredibly insightful. You do not want to present this broadly, but having her create a short spec, and reviewing that spec with an existing member of the team can be incredibly enlightening for both parties.
  • Executives (of any stripe) – The goal of any great executive is to manage a top performing team and, without fail, a top performing team excels at communication. Get this hire to have a tight team meeting on their first day, where she can facilitate nothing more than listening to issues, ideas, complaints, and walk away with a brand new list of people to follow up with.

So much of getting employees going is changing their attitude from “them” to “us”. You can make great strides in this effort by getting them a win that they can mentally point to and say “that’s mine”. The jobs do not have to be big, but by focusing them on accomplishing something, you can skip weeks of wasteful bouncing around while they find their way. While it may feel artificial at first, the process will feel more natural and more significant each time you do it. Eventually, you will have a team that derives as much benefit from the process of educating the new hire as they do from the additional head count. It will not be easy, but it is worth it; as the owner of any fast growing business will tell you, the sooner that your new employees can start contributing, the more nimble your business will be.

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