Week Discussion 7 Health Management Professionals

Select 5 of the 10 questions to respond to and complete the case. Respond to at least 2 other classmates’ posts on at least 2 different days.

1. Describe how you might try to avoid “informational overload” during a new employee’s first few days.
2. Much of the material in the chapter conveys the need to imbue the new employee with a sense of the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Why is this important?
3. Why do we need to offer a relatively formal orientation complete with checklists of items to cover?
4. Why do we need to bother with individual orientation for a new employee who is a trained specialist hired to perform exactly the same tasks performed at a previous job?
5. Why is it claimed that we should be more interested in developing employee potential than in obtaining immediate output?
6. What do you see as the primary advantages of a strong new-employee orientation? Why?
7. Explain why the chapter states that new-employee orientation begins before the new employees arrive.
8. What are the primary advantages of a mentoring relationship as part of a new employee’s orientation?
9. What is wrong, if anything, with the apparently time-honored practice of letting new employees learn by trial and error and by watching others?
10. Why not simply have the department supervisors provide all of a new employee’s orientation rather than having a separate organization-wide orientation as well as a departmental orientation?

CASE: NO DEPARTMENTAL ORIENTATION?

Assume you have just been hired from outside of the organization to serve as a first-line supervisor in one of the clinical support areas (such as laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, etc.). Staffing in the department has been lean, with a couple of staff positions having been open for some weeks. But as luck would have it, you were able to fill both open positions during your first two weeks on the job.

Being new to supervision and new to this organizational environment, the Friday before the two new employees were scheduled to start work you asked a more experienced supervisor, “Is there anything special I’m supposed to do with these new employees when human resources turns them over to me on Monday?”

The response was simply, “Nothing other than your standard departmental orientation.”

You asked each of your employees in turn about their departmental orientation. Their answers were consistent: There was no departmental orientation; they were simply shown their workstations and told where the cafeteria and restrooms were located. Other than that, nothing.

Instructions:

In written form, describe what you intend to do:

concerning the two new employees who start work on Monday;

concerning other new employees who join your department in the future