The first action, without deviation, in placing a person newly on post is to find a specific and unalterable place for them to sit and where they can store their mest and where they aren't in another person's road.
The second action is a basket (1 per person) in the comm centre.
The third action is a three basket stack for "In" "Pending" and "Out". Use pasteboard boxes until somebody buys new baskets.
The fourth action is providing the new person with a hat (no matter how brief until a new one is written up).
The fifth action is briefing by the Assn Sec.
The sixth action is check over by the HCO Sec on what new person should know as a staff member (colour flash, etc.).
The seventh action is to get his pay straight with accounts.
Further actions are obvious and most important of these is to get the new person to do some specific work.
Most of these actions are prepared before the person enters the org - the day before at the latest.
Putting a new person in order is to have a new staff member. To neglect him is to invite a disorderly future for him or her. These apply to changes in post as well as new people on post.
If a new person hasn't gripped it in a week, is still begging for help from all, he's a DevT Merchant. Unload, he won't be any better in ten weeks and the org will be a lot worse. Such a person can't be at Cause over the job and will only destroy the post (as witness the way you have to do his work as well as your own — dead post).
Don't ever fill a post because it's empty. Fill it only to get more work done. If more work isn't done you are ten times worse off having it filled with a DevT Merchant than having it empty. You have to have three staff members extra for every DevT Merchant you have on staff. Why - because the coin has "efficient" on one side and "destructive" on the other - and it never stands on edge. There are no cases on staff-ever. Cases exist only in sessions.
When a person is removed from a post the Assn Sec in a Central Org or the HCO Sec in an HCO must capture all mess, papers of the removed person, move his dispatches back into lines and the HCO Sec must recapture the hat.
Posts are not turned over from leaving A to arriving B without the Assn Sec and HCO Sec pitching in on it. It's the Assn Sec who dusts the removed person off and puts the new person on. Don't leave it up to the old person to break in the new person exclusively.
A change of post always means a review of post.
If leaving A were to be the only person to groove in arriving B the whole org would begin to slide into strange new patterns. So capture a post being vacated even if the new arrival was coached for a week or two by the departing person.
At the moment of departure the Assn Sec grabs the post, the mest, the work, the HCO Sec grabs the pending basket, the files, the hat. Everything is put in order by these two. Then the new person is formally grooved in by the Assn Sec and the HCO Sec. These present the new person with his post, his instructions, his work, his hats.
It need only take a few minutes. But it makes havoc when it's not done.
Here's where you find all the secretly closeted skeletons, the long lost despatches, the reason why Bilch never wrote again. So don't deny yourself the gen available in a post transfer and don't deny a new person the security of getting his hat from the most important people in the place.
Things work better this way.
[See also reissue of the above policy on 9 September 1964, Volume 7 - page 287.]