Top Ten Ways to Turn Off a New Employee

You want your new employee to experience his new job as a major turn on. Why is it that organizations so often act in ways that create the opposite result? These are the top ten ways to guarantee your new employee will start off on the wrong foot – possibly forever.
Make sure a work area has not been created or assigned. (Let him sit in a hall or share a cube.)

Schedule the new employee to start work while her supervisor is on vacation.

Leave the new employee standing in the company reception area for a half hour while reception staff try to figure out what to do with him.

Leave the new employee at her work station, to manage on her own, while coworkers pair up and head out to lunch.

Provide an hour in a noisy lobby for the new employee to read and sign-off on a 100 page Employee Handbook.

Show the new employee his office and don’t introduce him to coworkers or assign him a mentor.

Assign the new employee to a staff person who has a major, career-impacting deadline, in three days.

Assign the new employee to (you fill in the blanks) your most unhappy, negative, company-bashing staff member.

Assign the employee “busy work” that has nothing to do with her core job description, because you are having a busy week.

Start the new employee with a one or two day new employee orientation during which Human Resources personnel make presentation after presentation after presentation after presentation …