As a new employee to Jive, I've been hungry to come up to speed as quickly as possible.  When I started, I was expecting my inbox to fill up quickly, and to spend long nights keeping up with the typical flow of emails.  I also expected to have to hunt folks down with the email chain of "FW: FW: RE: (etc!)" to get answers to my questions.

But things are different at Jive. I don't get many emails. No one does. And although I've only been here a month, I feel completely ramped up on the company, our products, and how work gets done.  As you can guess, our popular social productivity product, Clearspace, is the reason why.

We use Clearspace extensively inside Jive. It's very powerful, a huge time-saver, and an extremely efficient way for everyone to stay current with what's going on. We have discussions, debate ideas, post documentation, track progress, share knowledge and easily find current and historical information through Clearspace. This isn't just lip service. I am just one example, and onboarding is only one small productivity benefit I see in Clearspace that will continue to empower our company moving forward.

In the past, I've seen various metrics indicating it takes roughly 3-6 months to bring employees to full productivity. It's such a big deal, that there are entire industries and experts in the field who are constantly creating new software, processes, tools and best practices to reduce the "onboarding" time.

It's really impressive to experience a rapidly faster personal uptime. I can only imagine the cost benefit to other companies. Not to mention, I'm very happy to be on board.