SOA 2021 Annual Meeting: Making It Work(flow): New Employees in an Era of Change

Making It Work(flow): New Employees in an Era of Change. Brenna Edwards, Harry Ransom Center-University of Texas at Austin; Karolina Lewandowska, Commander, Navy Installations Command; Kathryn Slover and Stephanie Luke, University of Texas at Arlington.

Onboarding and training under normal circumstances can be difficult, but those difficulties have been intensified amid a global pandemic. Before the pandemic, archives and libraries often relied on shadowing and mentorship for training, but in a new world of working from home and social distancing, that wasn’t possible. Although proper documentation and workflows have always been important, the pandemic has brought light to just how critical they are to the onboarding process. This panel of recent hires across different institutions will discuss their transitions into their positions and their challenges assessing their new organization’s practices, as well as discuss lessons learned and suggest solutions to some of these issues, which can benefit both new employees and their supervisors on a broader scale.