There’s a fine line between helping a new IT hire and doing all the work

I work as a help desk manager in a government office, and part of my job is training newly hired employees. It can also be a lesson in patience.

Since we coordinate resources with other offices and follow workflows set down from upper managers, we have a fair amount of paperwork to fill out and to track. For instance, we don’t actually install the operating systems on the PCs we use. When we get a new employee or a corrupt operating system, we need to submit a form to another contractor to schedule a technician to come out to our office, load the operating system, name the PC, and join it to the domain.

The forms are easy and quick to complete, but if they are not filled out correctly, it can delay the installation; thus, the help desk staff has learned to pay close attention when doing the paperwork. As part of the workflow, staff members send me a copy so that I can track the submission and the installation, and confirm that it is done in a timely fashion.

We had recently hired a new employee, “Bill,” and the training had been a frustrating experience. His technical skills were up to speed, but his attention to detail left a lot to be desired. He was constantly incorrectly filling out the paperwork, including the contractor forms.

One day, we were preparing two PCs for a new program we were testing, so we needed to fill out two forms — one for each PC. This time, I sent a sample form directly to his email so that he’d have it for easy reference and told him in person to look for the sample.

The ending of the form is a free text box. For some reason, this information isn’t elsewhere, so I always add, “If you have any questions, please contact …” and include my name and phone number to make the process go as smoothly as possible. We’ve made this a standard procedure, since including our personal contact information has helped speed up installations several times, and it doesn’t take long to add.

As an example to Bill on how to write the free text box, I wrote the sample as: “If you have any questions please contact (whoever submits this form and their phone number).”

The copies of the form came in, and sure enough, it was full of errors. Bill had also submitted parts of the form exactly like the sample, including the free text box, which stated, “If you have any questions please contact (whoever submits this form and their phone number).”

I called Bill in to my office to go over the form with him. As we went through it, he didn’t say much. When we got the text box portion, I asked, “You do realize you needed to put your name in the portion in parenthesis: ‘(whomever submits this form and their phone number)’?”

Bill replied, “Oh yeah, I forgot to read the forms before I sent them.”

I reminded him, “There were two separate forms, you forgot to read both of them?”

Maybe I should have instead reminded him that the form I’d emailed to him was a sample, and that I wasn’t actually doing his work for him?

I guess that trying to make tasks easier for some people doesn’t actually teach them anything.

This story “There’s a fine line between helping a new IT hire, and doing all the work,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com.