NASA: Briefing new employees

An open lesson in how to exploit the online medium to provide a rich resource for employees.

The Site

NASA, the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has an Employee Orientation website with open access from a prominent link on the home page of its careers site. The focus of content is on helping new employees and those transferring from other government agencies to prepare for their first day and months at NASA. Left-hand navigation provides access to tailored information for six categories of employee (for example, Civil Service, Contractor and Presidential Appointee) along with a sub-section on Orientation for Your Family. The site’s home page also points to orientation toolkits both for employees and supervisors, while there are similarly two versions of a first-day tips list, ‘20 Steps for a successful first day’.

New employees can also find out more about their “duty station” and its orientation process via an interactive map showing all 19 locations in the main My Center section and use a MyChecklist Builder to compile a personalised orientation memo. A NASAPeople section links to the content-rich mini-site of NASA’s human resources department, the Office of Human Capital Management.

The Takeaway

NASA’s inclusion of a dedicated site on its public web presence for new employees is unusual in itself – if organisations do make this kind of provision it is generally carried on their intranet. But, noteworthy as that is of itself, it also gives an open lesson in how to exploit the online medium to provide a rich resource for employees.

There are benefits to NASA in ‘going public’: first, employees about to join the agency may not yet have access to its intranet or, like a significant proportion of existing employees, will naturally consult it (employees are one of the biggest user groups on most company websites). And the availability of varied and detailed information about the ‘nitty gritty’ practicalities of working at NASA adds an often-neglected dimension for job seekers researching the company. HR gains, too, through what is effectively a self-learning exercise to get people up to speed before their physical orientation begins. In this, the site shows an impressively effective command of web tools for interactivity and personalisation of content, as well as strong content management that should help new employees land running.

First published on 20 March, 2007