What are the best practices to improve employee onboarding process?
Hello,A comprehensive and efficient employee onboarding process has a major impact on a company bottom-line. When you consider the cost of replacing an employee and the consequences of a high turnover rate, companies have every reason to improve their employee onboarding. How can they do that? Let’s look at the first day of a new hire:Getting to the office and meeting the team - 1 hourSetting up of equipment and work station- 2 hoursHaving lunch with the team - 1 hourLearning all the required software - 4 hoursWhile there are plenty of resources and solutions on how to optimize the first three steps, I want to insist on the last one. Today, the amount of software training required for most positions is a huge chunk of starting a new job, and new hires have to be able to quickly understand and use the company CRM, CMS, ERP, etc.With this challenge in mind, we at Userlane have developed a technology that allows user to understand any software instantly, without prior knowledge, using interactive step-by-step guides. What if new employees could be instantly software-proficient, avoid cumbersome software training, and companies could focus on other areas of training and onboarding? Userlane allows them to:Seamlessly onboard their employees without long and ineffective software training.Involve new hires in the learning experience. The guides are interactive and the experience synchronous, the user is completing tasks and actively doing as he progresses towards his goal.Customize and tailor guides to cater to employees needs and tasks, taking them directly wherever they want them to go (no coding is required).Focus on other areas with the time they have saved on software training: soft skills, company culture, team integration, etc…Our technology brings companies the opportunity to automate and personalize software training, directly impacting and improving their new employee onboarding process as a result. I hope I gave you interesting elements to consider!Kai
How do I improve brain plasticity?
In a word, "Frustration."It is not just games or activities that push the brain to adapt, it is a particular emotional state, that state of, "almost, almost I can do this, but not quite."Cultivate pushing yourself.Nature is a very efficient beast. It tends to take away talents you are not using, and enhance talents you require.Plasticity is, itself, an adaptation to the need to change. It's not free. It's something the brain and body have to devote resources to, in order to make it happen.Now let me give you some boosters to make it work even better. Do not think, "brain games, brain games, brain games and more brain games." when you think plasticity. These almost surely work, but they are very assuredly not going to work as fast as full scale, whole body coordination games. Try to pick up new full body coordination abilities, things that are a stretch for you, but that will require new neural adaptions to master.And understand why frustration matters. If you attempt an activity, but simply fail and go, "Ok, so I can't do that," this is not the emotion of frustration. And even though all of your activity was identical to someone else's activity who was frustrated, you did not pass along a signal to your evolutionary genetics. You didn't pass along the signal that this new skill matters. Without that signal, the genes say, "ok, not important, don't devote resources here."The beauty of physical skills over purely mental ones (dance, figure skating, piano, over chess, lumosity, etc) is that these require massive neural re-organizations, whereas pure mental ones require more minimal reorganizations. And you are asking for general plasticity, so big adaptions will generalize better than will small ones.I should add the credit where it's due here. I didn't initiate these ideas, but I use them and can attest to their usefulness for me.Here's where I got them.The biggest credit I give to Ed Strachar who introduced the concept to me in his Reading Genius course.The scientific Validation goes to Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley who wrote extensively about this in “The mind and the brain: Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force.” And the focus on full body activities goes to Win Wegner’s book, "How to increase your IQ."
I got fired after 2 months in my first software development job. I had to learn frameworks in a week and complete the project. I was not given good training, and senior developers did not have time to train me. I’m at a loss. What can I do next?
It doesn't seem like a very friendly workplace.I have worked at a few companies as a software developer, and in each instance, I've had about 2 months to ramp up, with no significant responsibilities (just small projects that require learning about the system, etc). This really has not much to do with senior vs junior. Senior developers unfamiliar with the framework and large codebase would still require about 1 month to get up to speed, and be able to really start contributing. This is true even at places like Google which has incredibly high hiring bars.If they wanted someone to be able to start contributing right away, they should have hired someone with a lot of experience with the framework already. They made a mistake in hiring you (not because you are not good enough, but because you didn't happen to already have a lot of experience with the framework).Also, don't worry about asking questions. A workplace where you cannot comfortably ask questions and have things patiently explained to you is not a healthy workplace. My very first supervisor was a Technical Director at Capcom (incredibly busy person), and he still patiently answered hundreds of my questions (whenever I was able to track him down at least).Maybe try going for a bigger company? Usually they won't give you so much responsibility from the start, because they can afford to spend some time on ramping up people.
I'm 29 and just developed a stutter. Why?
I've been teaching for the past 5 years, and have NEVER had a stutter, whether I was nervous or not. It suddenly crept up about 2 months ago, in every situation, from talking to close comfortable friends/family to in the class room. Most people don't pick up on it, because it's slight, but it is slowly becoming more frequent and noticeable. I fear that it may eventually get worse. Is there anything i can do about it or is this just the start of my mental decline?