4 Healthcare Onboarding Best Practices You Should Follow

Have you ever hired a talented, eager employee to work for your practice, but they left after only a month? The candidate seemed excited during the job interview and was beyond thrilled to receive an offer. Despite a generous compensation package and positive work culture, you can’t seem to retain new hires. The problem could lie within your onboarding process.

Like other industries, healthcare onboarding is the process of welcoming a new employee, arming the new hire with the necessary tools and resources, and introducing them to company policies. Onboarding, when done right, creates engaged and dedicated staff members that are ready to make long-term contributions to your practice. Employee satisfaction is not just about salary. Giving your employees the information and support they need to succeed gives them a reason to stick around.

Why is Healthcare Onboarding Important?

The healthcare industry currently faces several staffing issues such as the nursing shortage, an aging healthcare workforce, burnout, high staff turnover, and exhaustion due to the pandemic. In addition, in today’s highly-competitive workforce environment, employees can afford to choose where they work and for how long. As a result, the quality of patient care declines. A good onboarding process helps healthcare organizations attract, engage, and retain employees.

Employees in healthcare need to complete paperwork and certifications before officially starting a new role. A complete onboarding roadmap guides new hires on required compliance training such as HIPAA and cybersecurity rules. It ensures that new employees are fully aware of these rules and how they impact their work. A strong healthcare onboarding process helps establish the employee’s full responsibility regarding sensitive information and ensures that all legally required documentation is collected and filed.

4 Healthcare Onboarding Best Practices

HFirst impressions last. Glassdoor reports that companies with a strong onboarding process

improve retention by 82% and employee productivity by over 70%. On the other hand, companies with weak onboarding programs are more likely to lose new employees in the first year. Whether you’re restructuring your onboarding process or creating it for the first time, here are four healthcare onboarding best practices to consider.

1. Create a Healthcare Onboarding Checklist

An onboarding checklist helps employers stay organized during a new hire’s first several days and avoids any important details getting lost along the way. When welcoming new employees, there’s a lot of things to go over to ensure everyone knows what to expect. Creating a checklist helps you keep track of every required paperwork and compliance training. Lists provide new hires with all the tools and resources they need to start their new role. A thorough checklist puts your new employees in the best possible position to succeed by helping them adapt to their new role and environment.

If your new hires still have trouble adjusting to their new environment despite your onboarding efforts, you might need to evaluate your checklist and make adjustments to your process to address any issues.

2. Assign a Mentor

One of the most daunting things about being a new employee is walking into an unfamiliar environment filled with unfamiliar people. Designating a mentor for your new hire builds an instant relationship, gives them access to the person’s existing network, and sets the path for establishing new working relationships. New employees might feel detached without a mentor, especially since everyone else in the workplace has existing relationships.

Interactions with a mentor give new hires an idea of how they are expected to behave, communicate, and collaborate. Structure the mentor’s onboarding tasks on what they should introduce on the first day, week, or month. Assigning a mentor helps ease the transition when the new employee knows they have somebody they can approach.

3. Encourage Professional Relationships

When hiring an employee, make it a point to announce the addition to the concerned team. New hires might find integration challenging if their department isn’t expecting a new team member.

Feeling connected to your coworkers is a critical aspect of the workplace. It builds trust and creates a sense of belonging, both of which are essential elements of retaining employees. Set that tone as early as possible in the onboarding process. Introduce your new hires to the whole floor and set aside a time for icebreaker games where the new employee can get to know the current employees and vice versa. If time is limited, send an email to your employees with the new hire’s background and interests and encourage them to introduce themselves.

4. Do Not Rush the Onboarding Process

Make onboarding more than just a one-day basic orientation about the company’s policies. Create a complete onboarding experience where new employees can get acclimated to their role and new environment smoothly, even if it takes several months. As much as you want them to be productive on day one, they might get overwhelmed and confused, leaving a poor impression on your company. In a study by Ivanti, 92% of respondents say a productive onboarding process positively affects their overall satisfaction with a company. Take the appropriate time to properly onboard your employees, and they will have an easier time integrating with your practice.

Assess your new hire’s progress periodically across the various stages of your onboarding process. Check how they are adapting and provide feedback on any issues. Additionally, ask your new employees for input regarding your onboarding process. Make the necessary changes and revise your onboarding process accordingly. You can easily create actionable next steps for smoother onboarding when you clearly understand what’s working and what’s not.

How Can You Achieve Successful Onboarding?

A successful onboarding process in healthcare and beyond involves educating new hires about company culture and policies and informing them what is expected of them in their new role. Structuring a robust onboarding process takes several trials and errors to get it right. It requires time and resources that can take you away from what you do best — patient care. Outsourcing your onboarding process to a company specializing in healthcare is an efficient strategy to achieve successful employee retention without compromising your time and resources.

Nexus HR offers a comprehensive recruitment process, from finding the right candidate to onboarding a new hire. We help you meet various compliance training requirements such as HIPAA and other workplace policies. Partnering with Nexus HR makes managing your practice and employees more straightforward and less stressful.