The Problems Surrounding Employee Onboarding

During the past decade, organizations have used onboarding programs with the hopes of seamlessly integrating a new employee, all while attempting to improve retention, engagement, and their overall employee experience.  Sadly, most companies are completely failing at implementing a successful onboarding program. According to a survey recently completed by Gallup, only 12% of employees agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.  The consequences of this are detrimental – significant turnover within the first year of employment and low engagement among employees who stay.

So what exactly has gone wrong with onboarding?  And how do companies fix it?

Socialization is a key component of an employee joining a new team, and arguably crucial to success in any role.  However, onboarding always seems to be “someone else’s job,” with leaders, managers, and team members not taking responsibility.  If no one is reaching out to help the new employee, it’s no wonder that employees never feel fully engaged and leave the company early.  When managers take an active role in onboarding, employees are 3.4 times as likely to strongly agree their onboarding experience was exceptional (Gallup).  

Another major problem with onboarding relates to too many details slipping through the cracks.  There are many circumstances that can affect the extent to which details are missed during employee onboarding, however, too many missed opportunities can cause stress on the new employee.  Not to mention, it doesn’t paint a positive picture for what their experience may be in working with this organization. Some common examples of missed details include:

• Employee’s key card doesn’t function on the first day
• A key piece of equipment did not arrive before the employee did (i.e. laptop, computer mouse, cell phone, etc.)
• New hire arrives before supervisor on the first day
• Email address isn’t set up by IT in time
• Employee uniform was not ordered before the new hire arrived
• A benefits enrollment meeting was forgotten (Exacthire.com)

Not only does the disregard of these details leave your team scrambling at the last minute, it also makes a negative first impression on your brand-new employee.  Think about what these new hires may be saying to friends and family about their first few days of work. In addition, think about how this might be amplified on social media.  Great onboarding = great PR for your business.

Gallup discusses how company culture can also play into great PR for your business, and this begins with onboarding.  A PowerPoint slide with your core values listed is not enough to truly convey what makes your organization an extraordinary place to work.  New employees want to know if they belong with you. Furthermore, they want to know what you believe, and how that makes a difference in the way work gets done.  Organizations need to provide immersive experiences that let employees feel your values, not just be able to name them.

An example of this might be focusing on safety.  If safety is essential to your culture, consider bringing in managers who can explain a story about tough calls they made in the name of safety.  Introduce and celebrate safety award winners in front of new employees. You could even create immersive role-playing scenarios where the real managers evaluate teams on their safety thinking.  The purpose of onboarding is to get new hires acquainted and inform them about the company’s values, mission, vision, and history. New employees should leave work those first few days feeling excited about their new journey and engaged in their work.

Engaged, talented people want to work with you because they see opportunities and possibilities.  Ben Wigert, Director of Research and Strategy at Gallup explains, “Onboarding can often feel like a bait-and-switch operation, where many of the opportunities promised during the job interview are shown to be illusory.  It may not be time to talk promotions, but managers should have conversations about an employee’s dreams and desires early on.” All of this can be built into the onboarding process. Employees should also be introduced to learning and development opportunities that extend training beyond formal onboarding.  Again, something that can be built into the process. Employees who strongly agree they have a clear plan for their professional development are 3.5 times more likely to strongly agree that their onboarding process was exceptional.  

Compared with employees who rate their onboarding experience at a “4” or below on a 5-point scale, employees who give their onboarding a “5” are twice as likely to strongly agree they feel fully supported and prepared in their new role.  In fact, if your employees aren’t consistently scoring your onboarding process a “5 out of 5,” the majority of people going through your program would not strongly agree they feel fully prepared and supported in their new position. “In other words, if your onboarding is not exceptional, it’s broken.  To make onboarding work, HR leaders need to design a consistent, creative and deeply engaging experience that wows new employees,” says Ryan Pendall, writer at Gallup.

Depending on the size of your organization, allowing for flexibility may also be necessary within your onboarding process.  Jessica Stephenson, Vice President of Marketing and Talent at ExactHire claims, “Failing to customize the onboarding experience can be just as detrimental as not having much of an onboarding process, too.”  It’s important to determine the core elements of your process – those activities that must be introduced to all new hires, and then flex the experience to cater to different new hire requirements that may be based on:

• Employee geographic location
• Department and/or division
• Employee role/level in organization
• Special accommodations for employee
• Assessment results (ExactHire.com)

The definition of employee onboarding encompasses so much more today than it did in the past, so it’s no surprise that numerous potential problems now exist.  Today, there are many things to track, and many people to involve. Some growing organizations are utilizing independent systems to mitigate some of the administrative burden.  Emails are manually sent to different stakeholders to remind them to complete things, such as ordering new business cards, creating schedules and timesheets, and coordinating department members’ agendas for a new hire lunch.  Excel spreadsheets are used to keep track of which employees have signed off to acknowledge the latest policy update.

This gradual approach to systems is a step in the right direction; however, it pales in comparison to the efficiency and productivity that can be achieved with web-based onboarding technology.  By having a single system to integrate all onboarding-related forms, tasks, activities and assignments can help alleviate (and even avoid) many of the problems often associated with onboarding. At the very least, it can help free up time to address more intricate aspects of the onboarding process.  “Robust employee onboarding software can handle your tasks, notifications, employee signatures and HR countersignatures, form updates, prompts for benefits enrollment, equipment provisioning, training curriculum and more. Plus, moving cumbersome paperwork into the cloud means no more illegal handwriting and incomplete fields on statutory forms,” Stephenson says. 

A broken onboarding process not only loses exceptional talent, it loses your organization money.  According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), employee turnover can be as high as 50% in the first four months for hourly workers, and 50% in the first 18 months for senior outside hires.  The cost of recruiting, hiring, and training are exceptionally high. Conservative estimates indicate that it will cost a company one-half to two times an employee’s annual salary to find and onboard a replacement.  The average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is estimated at $49,500, but costs can range from $38,000 to $61,000 depending on hospital and location. And some reports estimate that replacing a physician is at least $200,000, but can reach as high as $1 million per exiting doctor (Businessdailypay.com).  In a competitive talent marketplace, a broken onboarding process causes you a lot of wasted time and wasted money. It’s time to make employee onboarding a priority in your organization.

Contact us to discuss how to improve your onboarding experience.  We are here to help!

Facts Healthcare HR Need to Know

• By the year 2025, roughly 75% of the global workforce will be Millennials.
• Nearly 70% of employees are not actively engaged in their work.
• Quantum Workplace surveyed 75,000 employees across the U.S. and discovered that within the healthcare industry, you’ll find some of the most disengaged employees in the nation. Specifically, after profiling 17 industries, healthcare ended up in last place for employee engagement.
• A disengaged employee costs a company approximately $2,246.
• The total economic impact of employee disengagement in the US is between $450 billion and $550 billion per year. 
• There are 20 million employees (making up approximately 18% of the American workforce) who are actively disengaged.
• Technology can solve the healthcare industry’s employee engagement crisis.
• An immediately actionable technology solution for healthcare employers is to deploy an integrated engagement platform, which allows for the large proportion of remote and frontline healthcare employees—as well as traveling staff—to remain solidly engaged in the organization.
• The more highly engaged hospital nurses experienced superior patient outcomes (i.e., decreased mortality rates), with the less engaged nurses seeing an increase in patient mortality rates. The researchers determined that the engagement level of nurses was the number-one factor where patient mortality was concerned, beating out even variables like the number of nurses per patient day.
• Engaged employees feel better about their work and their organization; those who are highly engaged (regardless of industry) are nearly 40 percent more likely to have above average productivity.
• Employee engagement is directly tied to corporate profits. Dale Carnegie research showed companies whose workers are engaged outperform those with a poorly engaged workforce by 202%.
• Of the workforce, 29% of employees are engaged, 45% of employees are not engaged, and 26% of employees are actively disengaged. In other words, 71% of the workforce is not engaged.

The Ripple Effect of Disengaged Employees

Managers love having engaged employees around.  They exude positive energy, are passionate, creative, and energetic.  One can rest easy knowing the job will not only be done, but be done well by an employee who’s engaged.  But company culture is made up of all employees- the engaged and the disengaged. The elephant in the room, and the topic most companies fail to address and improve on is the issue of disengaged employees and the negative effect it has on the entire organization. 

A recent Gallup State of the American Workplace Report indicated a disturbing trend: nearly 70% of employees were not actively engaged in their work.  Quantum Workplace surveyed 75,000 employees across the U.S. and discovered that within the healthcare industry, you’ll find some of the most disengaged employees in the nation.  Specifically, after profiling 17 industries, healthcare ended up in last place for engagement.  What does this mean in terms of money?  According to an ADP study, approximately $2,246 per disengaged employee.  The total economic impact is an alarming $450 billion to $550 billion in the U.S., per year (Paycom).

It is obvious that disengaged employees have a direct and negative impact on your business’ bottom line.  There are a number of reasons disengagement is costly:

• Bad customer service and poor patient outcomes, which are detrimental to employers in a Value-Based-Payment (VBP) reimbursement model
• Increased turnover rates and high vacancy numbers, which result in huge financial costs for healthcare organizations
• Poor access to quality healthcare for the local community, which negatively impacts local economic growth

Disengagement is bad enough, but did you know there are 20 million employees (making up approximately 18% of the American workforce) that are actively disengaged?  Actively disengaged employees are those that are not just unhappy at work – they act out on that unhappiness and undermine the productivity of otherwise engaged employees (tolmanandwiker.com).  

Actively disengaged employees cause disruption and dissatisfaction within the company.  Even actively engaged employees can experience decreased morale if the overall team’s level of engagement falters.  Just a few actively disengaged employees can have an immense negative effect on the entire workplace.

The healthcare industry has reached epidemic levels of disengagement, resulting in organizations struggling with issues such as absenteeism, poor attrition rates, loss of productivity, and business disruption. Unless the situation improves, the negative side effects of disengagement could have far more serious consequences for the healthcare industry, given that successful patient care outcomes are dependent on the engagement level of employees.

You may be wondering if there is any silver lining in all of this.  Luckily, there is. The beautiful and essential answer to this colossal disengagement issue is technology.  According to Health IT Outcomes, technology can solve the healthcare industry’s employee engagement crisis.  Technology can help improve the employee experience, all while reviving employee engagement.  An immediately actionable technology solution for healthcare employers is to deploy an integrated engagement platform, which allows for the large proportion of remote and frontline healthcare employees—as well as traveling staff—to remain solidly engaged in the organization (healthitoutcomes.com).

For healthcare organizations, medical staffing is only as successful as their ability to engage and retain the best healthcare professionals. To achieve this end, organizations must be consistently vigilant of their employees’ needs and develop talent carefully to keep employees engaged and committed to their job.  By deploying a digital workforce experience platform, companies can engage their workforce with experiences that truly matter to them. The result is the opposite effect of what disengaged employees cause:

• Improved customer service and patient outcomes
• Decreased turnover rates and vacancy numbers
• Improved access to quality healthcare

Addressing disengagement protects your company culture and ensures that your engaged employees stay engaged, creating satisfied customers and enhancing your bottom line (Infosurv Research).  Employee engagement is a goal that should receive the attention – and intention – of all managers and leaders. Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Does your organization have the strategy needed to thrive?