U Shore Do Talk Fun-E

Every industry and organization have their own terms and even their own language that are completely inscrutable to anyone from outside. It can take years for newbies to learn the lingo. Meanwhile, a lot of knowledge is flying over their heads at the speed of sound simply because they don't grok.

Solution: Create a company dictionary of industry and organization-specific terms, including their usage and which departments they tend to be associated with. Post this dictionary in your new hire folio, on your company intranet, your FaceBook page, your wiki, your cloud - anywhere that newbies are likely to look.

A major component of new hire on-boarding is figuring out who to go to for what. How about an internal contact directory that shows not only name, phone number and title, but also what each person actually does, so that you don't have to ask everyone else in the building.

You see? It's the seemingly minor and easily corrected things that waste a large percentage of your man-hours and productivity.

Here's another one: Once you've created these two animals, turn them loose and let employees update them. Heck, if it's a wiki, you might even just start with the title and let them take everything from there. After all, they know everything that should go on both far better than you do. Plus it frees you up to actually get some work done between all those meetings.

Hmmm.. empowerment, buy-in, plus less work for you. What the hell are you sitting there for? Go make this happen right now!