strip#33 appreciation

Employee appreciation comes in different shapes and shades.

Interns – a blessing in disguise.

On one hand, you don’t wanna show them how meaningless and soul-sucking their future career can be. Or how bad supervisors can be.

On the other, you just may not have the time and patients to properly onboard and train them. Especially if neither of you is really excited about their internship.

So what do you do? How do you show an intern a good time without much commitment:

  1. Job shadowing: If you are short on time, ask your intern to follow you around your meetings and other (mildly) thrilling activities. You can explain to them what will be happening and what just took place while walking from/to meetings, and giving them some explanations during a water cooler break in between.
  2. Prep and dispatch some reading materials. Rather than explaining all things orally, prep some relevant reads, make up a written list of tasks and questions that you’d like them to look into. Later, have a sit-down session and quiz them on what they learned, plus answer some of their questions in return.
  3. Test a roster of tasks with them to figure out what they are really good at and further use their strength to help you with your day-to-day duties.