Advise on a temporary member of staff?
We’ve taken on a student from a FÃS course for 4 weeks starting this Monday morning. I will be responsible for his workload and I’m looking forward to the challenge.
I often work with other individuals or businesses but I’ve never been directly responsible for a persons workload before.
I’m putting a plan together for the first few days, starting with some work importing data into a database we are compiling for a customer. This is time consuming work and I’m happy to have someone work on it for me.
I would like to give our new member of staff some challenging and interesting work related to their course, though I would be concerned about giving too much access to everything too soon. More than likely I will provide a to-do list the day before each day.
Any advise on working with a temporary member of staff?
hmm, make sure the work you have set is interesting and relevant to the course. O course this is not always possibly but try. Also get feedback and see what the student thinks of the task you are setting him at the end of each week so you can gauge what you can set him to do the following week.
oh DONT MAKE HIM MAKE THE TEA!
I had an intern last summer for four months and that was a good amount of time for her to take on some real projects. 4 weeks is shorter so you may want to just pick one specific project for that time or just a very general bit of work - that database job sounds good as it’s basic, but the student can see how it fits into the big picture of the project.
You do need to be concerned about access and should limit the intern’s knowledge to what is needed to know and perhaps change passwords, etc. after the training is completed. The person may be trustworthy, but it’s just good standard practice. As Stephen said, review at the end of the week and see how he’s doing as far as the project and reliability is concerned.
This is good training for you to learn how to delagate and give up some work that you are used to doing yourself all the time! I am a real control freak and my intern taught me a lot!!
Gordon, my advice would be to also try to give the intern some access to how the company operates as a business from start to finish. If possible and appropriate you could get them to sit in on meetings, meet clients, attend demos, etc. This will help them a greater understaning of the business and also give them some variety in their daily work.
Hi Aedan,
Thanks for the tips. A couple of people have recommended this, bring him along to meetings with customers to listen in, at the very least it will be something he could add to his CV.
Gordon.
Also, give him a title for when he’s meeting customers. It’ll really motivate him and enstill pride in him for when he’s been introduced to customers as ‘our new database manager for a couple of weeks’.
Also, good practise is to change passwords before he comes and after he’s gone. It’s nothing personal. And I wouldn’t recommend you tell him everything from day one… slowly introduce it to him and keep the tasks interesting and challenging, and where he does well, give him credit…
@Nev Great idea for a title. Though I have trouble giving myself a title. Might upgrade myself to ‘Wannabe Entrepreneur’ and give him the title of ‘Software Developer’.
I’ll change any passwords too for good practice.
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