Wednesday, October 06, 2021
Welcome to Your New Gig, Here Are All the Things
Technicians for Change: For freelance workers, entering a new workspace can be both thrilling and confusing. Each place has its own quirks and unique working processes and styles. To help acclimate new workers, here is a list of items to consider for employers to offer and for workers to ask for when starting at a new place. Different combinations of this information may be more useful depending on what is required of the worker – this is intended to be an overview primarily targeted for freelance designers and crew heads, but you may find these suggestions helpful for whichever job you take on.
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7 comments:
If I could add to this list, I'd recommend the name of a very cheap bar, where the best Thai food is, and the general vibe of the community. The amount of stress I've accumulated to get used to a certain area because I wasn't local will put like, 10 grey hairs on your head. It can be fun to go to a new job and learning the institutional knowledge of different companies, it just takes a while. Usually about a month and then you'll finally get used to all of the keys you have and which stairwell will lead you to a corner to cry in to yourself. It's also really fun because then, you'll start to transform into a local and the next thing you know, you're riding the bus like a pro and don't need to pull up maps every time you drive somewhere. But for now, just breathe, read your debrief on the company, and don't cry too much.
I think the things listed out in this article are so important for people coming to new jobs. I think a lot of these things are things that the new person will be thinking about might not feel comfortable asking for yet, as well as things that the people who hired them aren’t thinking about because it is all so natural for them, so these things can be things that get lost in the transition of the new hire that make the person even more confused. Having this list is a great resource for things the new person can remember to ask, as well as a great list of things the employer should have so they can remember to tell the new people. Because nothing on this list seems like things that “they should already know, or they should figure out themselves.” I also love Monica’s additional list above about adding the bar and restaurants because that is also such a good way to get to know new people is to take them to these places and show them around.
I found this article to be an extremely useful tool for those starting a new job or those who frequently change work locations. In the theatre industry, this is especially important because many professions are based on a “gig to gig” basis where you are put on a project in a space you probably don’t know with a group of people you haven’t worked with yet. Coming from a high school setting, this article outlined everything I have had to learn or figure out for myself now being an undergraduate student. It can sometimes be difficult for people to ask such simple questions about the venue or the organization of positions to people who have probably worked there a long time. Therefore, I agree with this article in that this list should guide not only the new member of the team, but also the people who have been working in that space together so they understand how such little pieces of information go a long way in making someone new feel welcome but also knowledgeable about how the space works.
I think this article is very valuable, and honestly surprisingly applicable to a lot of industries outside of entertainment. Specifically, the aspects of the place of business such as general safety guidelines, overview of workplace dynamics, and the elements of the business model that are often overlooked. I think this is a nice thoughtful way to welcome an employee and in an industry like theater where safety and guidelines are so important, it is fundamental that we be explicit in our expectations of conduct and behavior. Mistakes in these categories can lead to huge safety hazards, and present danger. In my experience, this information would have been so useful as a young theatrical professional. It can feel like there is a stigma attached to being new to a position, but as a freelance professional this is unavoidable and it is the responsibility of the hiring company to accommodate avoiding this feeling.
After starting a new job this past summer with a non-theatrical firm, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about onboarding processes, and specifically how they apply to theatre. My job this summer’s onboarding included a number of company program trainings, meetings, and procedure training sessions for an entire week. I know the job was totally different from theatre, but it was way more comprehensive than anything I have heard of for a job in entertainment. The one professional job I had in theatre for summer stock, the onboarding was mainly company-wide, so when it came to my specific department, we were thrown in head first and had to figure things out. This list was actually really helpful to see the kinds of things theatrical people should consider for their workplace to make employment transitions as easy as possible. I plan on using this if I am ever a department head, because it genuinely is very useful.
Before working in company management, I wasn't privy to many of the things that were on this list. However, I had the privilege of working in company management at a theatre who had a lot of rotating actors come in during the season as well as non-local seasonal staff. I also had the chance to revamp this companies Company Management department overall. This involved creating a lot of paperwork that involved sharing this information with the incoming companies. I think that this is great to have on the blog because it's great for students to have before going into the workforce. These type of questions and institutional knowledge aren't taught in classes. Also as a grad student who came into CMU during the pandemic, it was obvious that CMU doesn't exactly pass this information on if there are no productions. I am currently working on a show and am 2 weeks from tech and have never been on the stage that we're performing in or the booth that I'll be calling from. I have no idea how any of the things work.
This sort of thing is really important in our industry when so much of the team changes show to show. I might add some more things to the section with local resources. Knowing where the best local food is is great, but knowing about hospitals, post offices, grocery stores, museums, and other things that people frequently need is helpful and could save a few headaches or ease a transition into a new city. Otherwise, though, this seems like a pretty good starting point. Frequently an introduction to a new company is pretty informal and it’s just everything the person who is giving you the tour can think of at the particular moment, but we’ve been talking a lot about checklists and formalizing simple processes in seminar, and this seems like an important one. Compile all these resources into a script or a packet for your new hires, and it could streamline and improve that experience a lot.
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