Employee Orientation
When “Joe” arrived on the island, we immediately put him through our standard new-employee orientation program. We assumed that, as a newly-minted “Open Water Scuber Instructer,” “Joe” and his fellow Very Famous Brand instructor school graduates possessed basic guiding skills. All we had to do was to teach them our policies and procedures.
To do this, we had every new employees spend four days on the boats. For the first three days, each new employee was to simply watch and help as needed. On the fourth day, we would give the new employee a small group of divers to guide.
Our dive operation had two dozen different dive sites we visited on a regular basis. Which sites we would go to on any particular day was a factor of conditions and where our passengers might have been to previously. Thus, it could take several months before some of our employees got to see even most of the sites in our repertoire. This, however, was not a problem.
- In the pilot house of both our dive vessels were detailed maps of every site we went to.
- Our site briefings gave everyone a pretty good idea of the layout of each site and what to expect.
- Seldom were any of our instructors expected to take the group they were guiding any more than 150 feet from the boat.
- On top of this, visibility in Hawai’i is generally excellent. Thus, it was easy for new staff members to keep the groups they were guiding in sight of other staff members and their divers.
Therefore, the fact a new staff member might be asked to guide divers at a site he or she had never been to before was not a problem. That was, it wasn’t until “Joe” arrived.
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