When you start a role with a new organization, you typically observe and learn from your immediate colleagues so you can quickly gain an appreciation of how things need to be done. During this process, you are flooded with a broad range of different ideas and processes, including the business culture.
Your mind is continually questioning and exploring potentially better ways to perform your new role. However, most new employees do not raise these new ideas owing to their short time period in the business.
After a few months, the new employee has settled in to their role and is happily following the old and well used and established processes that they were taught by their manager or work colleagues.
But what happened to all the ideas that they observed in the early stages of their employment? These valuable challenging “thoughts and questions” are key to driving change in the organization so it continues to develop and improve!
One solution is to capture all these ideas in the “Diary of Thoughts and Questions”.
This diary would be completed by the new employee at the end of each work day for the first few weeks of their employment. At the end of this time, the diary contents would then be discussed with their manager, and their boss, to explore how the potential improvements could be implemented. For the process to work effectively, all readers of the diary would need to have an open mind and be prepared to consider all “thoughts and questions” whether they be positive or negative.
Thoughts that might just be useful in the future 
Houda
/ July 8, 2013We have a similar process at where I work. It’s called Breakfast with the CEO where new employees are invited by the CEO to discuss their impressions, good and bad over breakfast. The CEO gathers all of these and would follow up on the ones he considers feasible. But I think the idea of the diary is much better as it would allow to compile all comments, and may be see how they change with time and/or around certain circumstances…could be a precious resource for the company! And on a separate note, how can you churn out so many ideas?? 😉
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Steven Cramer
/ July 8, 2013Thanks for the great feedback. Regarding the ideas……they just continually churn around in my mind! The key is finding the time to write them all down!
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Houda
/ July 8, 2013Well they are great, just keep on writing 🙂
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renxkyoko
/ July 8, 2013We had that too in HS. It was our ” Reflections” diary. where we had to write down our thoughts at th end of the day.
Cheers!
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Steven Cramer
/ July 8, 2013I like it, thanks for sharing!
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Sandra
/ July 8, 2013This is awesome… imagine how good this would be for student teachers?!! Especially the ones on observation rounds. I think they have to do a relflection of some sort as an assignment for their unis, but if the school actually required them to share that with their mentor teacher as well as the principal it would be amazing!! Great idea Steve!
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Steven Cramer
/ July 8, 2013Thanks Sandra….appreciate the feedback.
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Maggie Goldie
/ July 14, 2013Thanks for tip – timely advice given that I will be starting day 3 of the new role on Monday!
MaggieG
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Steven Cramer
/ July 14, 2013All the best in the new role!
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