Tim and other Learners,
On a very practical answer side, here is some experience I hope may give
you ideas. I took a Human Resources position, about 7 years ago, in a
company shortly after it had been created from four companies-three of
whom were competitors. There was tremendous culture differences among
these companies, lots of fear, and little money to spend. However, some
of the early things I were:
*get senior management out to all the locations with very little agenda
other than a "bagel break" at each at which they would talk to all
employees about what was going on and recognize any achievements we could
(personal, professional, sales, whatever)
*set up and run a three day meeting for all management in which the
President talked about the vision, the various senior execs each talked
about some aspect of the business (competition, technology impact, etc),
and every manager talked about what their function did and what their
needs/concerns/issues were. I did a lot of training spread through the
three days with lots of exercises and activities designed to build
people's knowledge of each other and willingness to share -plus a lot of
human resource management training so we all were treating employees the
same way.
*each manager was required to spend time talking with his/her staff
about the meeting, sharing all the handouts. I went to every meeting that
a manager asked me to attend and helped them do some of the hr issues plus
did some career info sessions.
That was in the first three months (along with a lot of other things like
setting up an HR function :) ) We then continued with a lot of the "bagel
breaks", did all sorts of HR training at each location, put a lot of
information out via e-mail, used taskforces for much of the restructuring
and other business process issues.
hope this helps,
patria frame
Strategies for Human Resources StratHR4PF@aol.com
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