The WOW! Buzz

It was my turn to ride out with new hires today.  In the region where I work, when we bring on a group of new hires, we take them on a tour of our three office locations and one of the senior management team always rides along.  This month it was my turn and we had a reasonably-sized class of 7 new hires representing Commercial Sales, Warehouse and Broadband Technicians.  They were a great group and very engaged; a couple of them were very appreciative of just landing a job and a couple of them were already tuned in to why WOW! is a really good company to work for. (THAT makes for great casual feedback for the others!)  Our day-and-a-half on-boarding process is designed to help new employees learn about our culture, our values, give them a 30,000-foot view of our technology, and meet a mentor (a friendly coworker) to whom they might go with questions or concerns.  Our goal is to help new employees understand how and why WOW! is a special company and why THEY must be special people too, to become members of our team.

On Day One, while we drive back to the main office from our tour, we play a game called “Two Truths and a Lie.”  Once these three facts are told by an individual, the rest of the group tries to guess which fact is the lie.  This game is an ice-breaker, designed to help us get to know one another a little bit more, but it ends up serving a much bigger purpose than that.  As each person searches his/her life history to find truthful facts that might be a little special or a little outrageous and hard to believe, and then adds a total fact fallacy, it helps each person recognize that they really are special people and have unique qualities or stories worth talking about.  Here are just a few of the facts I learned about our new hires today:

One new hire moved out of his house during his senior year in high school and has been self-supporting ever since.

One new hire played varsity baseball as a freshman in high school.

One new hire played basketball against Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson (not all at once, of course!).

One new hire qualified to enter a televised poker championship in Las Vegas, but took the buy-out option ($12,000) instead.

One new hire spent the night in a 24-hour CVS pharmacy rather than continue with the out-of-control antics of other high school students at a home-coming celebration.

We all have special stories to tell and our life experiences make us all special people.  At WOW!, we look for opportunities to celebrate the individual differences, the individual accomplishments, and the individual characteristics that make us unique.  I would venture that each new-hire who goes through this ice-breaking exercise goes home that same day feeling a little more special than when they woke up, got dressed, and prepared to report to their new job… at WOW!.