Wednesday 13 November 2013

100days, over 5months

I have completed more than 5 months in my (new) job at HWU and feel that I've survived it and enjoyed it in equal measures.
The 100days part is that I had an email from Organisational Development (a subset of HR?) last week asking if a member of staff could come and talk to me about my first 100 days at the university.
I agreed (with slight trepidation) and was pleasantly surprised. A very nice OD/HR person came along to my office to chat about what I thought would be useful to include in a Toolkit for Staff for the first 100 days of their employment at the University. They are asking a number of people within the university for input and then anonymising and collating the results.
There were quite a few questions and topics that we discussed but some of the suggestions that I made were:
A physical tour of the University campus and an introduction to a person in each academic school and professional department.
An explanation of the University structure (people /depts). If you've worked in a university before then you've got a rough idea of how it fits together and the difference between 'Schools' and 'Services' but if you haven't it would be confusing. How would you know what Registry is for example?
An opportunity to network / liaise with other staff members at the same level or grade as you but in different departments - academic and professional.
A checklist of the nitty gritty - you need to do this to get a contract and this to get paid and this to log on to the computer and this to access particular information either online or on campus.
One other aspect that I mentioned was that I'm quite pro-active and happy to seek people and places out. I had my own strategies for finding information and setting up meetings. But you do need to keep on asking and not worry about asking numerous times. There's a responsibility on both sides - the new person has to keep asking and the established person has to keep answering.
It will be interesting to see the final Toolkit when it is produced.


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