Webinar: Onboarding: It’s More Than Just a Checklist

Disclaimer: This transcript is intended to provide an overview of the main topics discussed in the original version of this webinar. Because it has been auto-generated, it might contain errors (including to proper names, industry terminology, numbers, and punctuation) that result in altered meaning. To hear the webinar in full, please view the archived recording.

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Hi, everybody. I wanted to thank you all for attending today. And I just wanted to say first off that I am very grateful and excited to have a chance to talk with you today and share some of the things that I am truly passionate about. A few years ago, I left operations and started my own company that really focuses on a paradigm shift for organizations. And it’s looking at this idea of changing our language, our behavior, and our thinking around the entire life cycle of an employee. And today’s focus is going to be that paradigm shift as it relates to onboarding. And the first thing we want to look at is the fact that it is truly more than a checklist. So let’s dive in.

Clearly the objectives have been outlined in terms of appraising your current onboarding methods and outcomes. We’re going to redefine the goals of onboarding and orientation. And we are going to develop tools to redesign your onboarding program in order to fully understand the importance of this successful onboarding process and then effective engagement strategies, we truly would have to look at the cost of turnover. And I think this is a mistake that a lot of organizations make. They either don’t calculate the dollars and cents related to turnover, or they underestimate it. The United States bureau of labor statistics tells us that turnover can cost 33% of an employee’s total compensation. In addition, the society of human resource management tells us that it can actually be three to five times an employee salary. And so think about some of the positions you have in your organization. If it’s a $14 an hour position that adds up to at least $9,000 to replace one person, think about someone who has a 60 dash, $60,000 salary. Now we’re talking about at least $19,000. And I have to say, this is one of the first aha moments that my clients have. I use a turnover calculator that that takes their real financial information and shows the actual cost by position. So it’s important that you’re always considering the real cost of turnover. In addition to that dollar amount, there’s a few other things that we need to consider. The second bullet. It can take one to two years for a new hire to become completely productive.

Now you might be saying to yourself, well, Amy, my new hires are productive a couple of weeks they’re up and running on the floor and doing those types of things. What I’m talking about here is complete productivity. How many times does someone have to stop what they’re doing to look up how to do it, go find someone else to help answer a question that they don’t know the answer to find a piece of equipment or something along those lines. So the productivity isn’t the ability to do their role in general. It’s that higher level of productivity where they’re not being interrupted, trying to figure out an answer to something that they don’t know.

In addition, decreased morale. This is one of the greatest challenges with turnover. And I’m not saying that if you lose one person over the course of a year, that you’re going to have decreased morale. Although of course, if it is a pivotal member of your team, it can bring down morale for people, especially if people don’t understand the why behind them leaving. You know, if it’s not for the opportunity of a lifetime or to move to another area, it can be confusing to people. Think about though, if you have more than one opening right now, or you’re losing more than one person in a position over the course of the year, what happens now? We’ve got vacancies and with those vacancies, everyone on the team has to pick up a little bit more. Now, imagine if it takes six months to replace that person, suddenly they’ve got six months of extra work that leads to increased absenteeism because they are truly exhausted.

In addition, they’re not going to be good at productivity because they are so exhausted. And they’re starting to get frustrated with the fact that we haven’t been able to find a replacement. It is a real morale killer. When you have vacancies or this cycle of turnover that just won’t quit. And going back to those real dollar changes, there are multiple articles out there and research that supports the fact that when you have turnover, especially frequent turnover, it leads to a decrease in your profit margin and your customer experience. Let’s think about it. If you have a team that has low morale, because they’re all working harder or they’re calling out now, there’s all of this extra work. They’re not going to be as engaged in their work. And we all know that the truth is if you don’t have an engaged team, they’re not able to give their best to the customer experience, your patients are going to know it.

In fact, how many times have we actually heard someone say, oh, I’m sorry. We’re short-staffed today. I’ll get to you as soon as I can. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of our team members and that customer experience goes down. And if you’ve got all of these dollars being spent on replacing people and you’re less productive now you’ve got a decline in that profit margin. Okay. What I’d like to do next is I want to do a poll. Oh, and my goodness. It looks like some people have already submitted for the poll. This is great. What I want to know is what setting are you in? And so please, everybody take a moment to do that right now. I’ve got about 9% of people responding to the poll. So I’m looking forward to a couple more people filling that out. So tell me what your setting is.

Can I ask you’re doing this? I don’t want you to think that the way I’m gonna approach onboarding is different based on your setting. It truly isn’t a good onboarding program is universal. What we’re going to talk about is how you might need to tailor it to your organization. So it’s great news. We’ve got about 75% of attendees who have already completed the poll. So what I’m going to do is advance the slide and show you the results. So thank you all for attending. I’m excited to see that there’s such a good variety of practices and different types of settings. As Matt mentioned, I have worked in a variety of settings and I have been a director or an operations administrator in a variety of settings. I have worked in everything that’s being represented by this poll right here. So again, I want you to think of the universality of the onboarding process and the paradigm shift I’m proposing, as opposed to thinking about yeah, but in my setting. Okay. Open your mind to that. All right. The next question I want you to answer is how long has your onboarding process? So take a minute to fill in how long your onboarding process takes.

I’ll give you guys a minute to fill this in as well. All right. We’re about up to 40% response rate. So I’m going to give you guys just another minute, take a look at how long your onboarding process is. And there we go. We just hit the 70% mark. So I’m gonna shift us over so that we can see the results. Wow. Look at this. We have a pretty even split between one to two weeks, two to four weeks. Fewer people listed it as one to two months. And then the highest percent is 90 days. However, that’s only a little bit higher percentage than some of the other aspects. And then we have a couple of people that wrote in other. So you can see that people are creating onboarding processes of really different levels of intensity and length. And so now is our first opportunity for us to do some question and answer and guides.

This is the reverse of the end of the session. What I want you to do is I want you to send me a message and tell me your ideas. I want you to submit your ideas into the Q and a box. And what I want to know is your definition of onboarding. So if your onboarding is two to three weeks, what is that process? Now? I don’t want all the details or the checklist itself, but I just want you to answer the question. What is your definition of onboarding? So I want to give you guys a couple minutes to go into the Q and a button and write me some of your ideas on the definition of onboarding.

I’ll give you a minute to do this, but I’m definitely looking for some good answers here. Not getting too many answers. Can you guys go ahead and fill out? There we go. Thank you. Wonderful. Wow. We’ve got some interesting answers coming through. Okay. This is great. So I had someone respond hospital orientation. It is one day I had someone else respond. It’s obtaining all credentialing materials prior to the first day. Traditional background checks, physicals, drug tests, electronic health record trainings. Sometimes that’s why your onboarding program can be so long. So we’ve got electronic health record training company orientation. We talk about the mission, the regulations, how to admit a patient to the agency, training them to all aspects of the job, understanding the laws, regulations, and guidelines. Someone else listed that it’s two to four weeks because they’re doing direct hands-on training with software and programs used.

And then someone else said, I believe it is beyond the initial week of paperwork. And it’s how to use the EMR, where to find basic tools. This is great guys. I appreciate all of the input and all the different ideas here. You know, familiarize hires with our policies and procedures, orient them into our daily work in home health. And gosh, I hear you guys in home health, there is so much regulation and rules that it takes a very long time. Yep. Someone said that at the two month mark, they also perform some documentation and feedback after the two month mark. So they’re giving some time for them to get up and running and then doing the double check. Well, great. I appreciate all of the thoughts on that. So we talked through somewhat your ideas about traditional onboarding and you guys have certainly hit on all of the aspects that I included in traditional onboarding.

So if this is traditional onboarding and I saw real consistency in what a lot of you guys were saying, what’s wrong with that. We’re going to talk about traditional onboarding versus best practices. So after we’ve hired for technical skills, we spend time during the onboarding to retrain them in quote, unquote, the way we do technical skills. And then notice down in the right-hand corner, we’re testing them. Someone even said, we’re double checking on their documentation. So we’re going to make sure that they can do the technical skills. We’ve hired them on, oh my there’s those policies and procedures binders. And yes, I know we’re all electronic these days, but let’s face it. There are still paper policies and procedures floating around. So we talk about that. We have them sign a code of conduct and we show them where the bathroom is in that lower left hand corner.

We introduce them to the new team and I’ve been experiencing this all of my career. At one point I was working as a traveling physical therapist. And so I would go to different locations. I typically stayed longer than normal. So my orientations might have been structured a different way, but regardless of where I went, and even when I started in a new health system as a full-time team member, it was often the drive by introduction, either you’re in the break room and say, there’s Bob there, Sue that’s John. He’s going to be your preceptor. And it’s a very surface level introduction. Now, like I talked about earlier and some people even, they are observing. So we’re sitting there watching them, do things, see how they go with it. We might even meet with them on a regular basis and some of those types of things. So if that’s traditional onboarding, what are some of the outcomes that we can expect?

Congratulations, they are technically competent and they are safe to perform their responsibilities. This is so important for someone in the healthcare field to be safe in their patient care or whatever their responsibilities are. They’re technically competent. However, look at this, I talk about turnover within six months to a year, and you may be saying to yourself, Amy, I know that’s not true. Our average tenure is 2.9 years or 6.7 years. Some of you may be really fortunate where you have long-term employees and that’s fantastic, but is that the case in every position? In addition to that, I want you to think about more than just what we traditionally think of as turnover. I’m not only talking about turning over, meaning someone either turns in their resignation or is terminated often at six months or a year, people have already turned over in their mind. They simply haven’t turned in their resignation because they’re still looking for the right job. So again, there’s this undercurrent of mental turnover where they’ve decided I am not committed to this role. In fact, I’m limited engagement. Once the excitement of having a new job wears off, and this becomes just a job and I’m always on the lookout for something different and something new.

So there are a lot of strengths in traditional onboarding, technical competence, safety, but there’s a lot missing. So if we want to shift our thinking to best practice goals of onboarding, what are they? And it’s truly three simple things, connection, purpose, and commitment. We want them to buy into what makes your organization special. What makes your culture unique and different? What makes you better than the facility down the street? Because guys, there are thousands of hotels or hospitals out there, and there are hundreds of private practices. So what is going to keep them working with you? You want to start this connection, purpose and commitment on day one, because you know what, when that dollar more an hour offer comes to them, when they get that interview and they say, we’ll pay you a dollar more an hour, the person doesn’t even consider it because you know what? They are so committed to what makes this team special. And so I want you to take a minute off the top of your head. I want you to write this down. What makes you special? What makes your culture so attractive and engaging? Go on, write it down.

What makes you a better place to work? Then the facility down the street and your answer actually is the framework you need for your onboarding program. So when we talk about redesigning your program, whatever you’ve written, there is actually the framework. It’s the starting point of your new onboarding program. You know, and I had some people write in a little bit more about how they do their traditional onboarding. I saw some really neat answers, patient engagement and empathy. We want to connect them to the whole team, our passion for treating pelvic health patients. Look at that. They’re talking about the passion of the organization. So I think people are really seeing what the differences are. A couple people wrote in their answer. What makes them special is that they are part of a team. Oh my goodness. There is not a facility down the street.

Fair enough. I’ve seen that before, when I’ve done some conversations with people, someone said to me, well, we’re the only health system within 150 miles. So people don’t leave us, of course, but when they’re there, don’t you want them to be as engaged as possible. Look at someone else. We are the forefront of evidence-based practice. These are the things that set you apart. Oh, here’s one. I love Elizabeth Pearl. I shouldn’t have called her out directly, but she and I used to work together. And how needed this, her answer. It’s fun. Our office is employee, family and communicated support. We value and seek employee input. How fantastic is that? That is the goal. Guys. You want the orange boarding process to illustrate and create this sense within your team member of what makes you special. Okay. Now some of you might have accidentally placed the blame on quote unquote, this new generation for the, the turnover rates being than they used to.

Guys, I have to tell you that even with this new generation, what they’re looking for is purpose and passion. They want to be able to serve the community and balance their personal life. Now an onboarding program in and of itself, can’t create balance between personal and professional life. But what it can do is help them understand the true expectations of your organization. And I know that we often say, well, I’m in healthcare. And so the purpose is automatically built in Amy. I have heard this so many times, well, everybody goes into healthcare because they want to help people. So we don’t have to worry about purpose. We all have the same common purpose. Well, how many people would say they went into healthcare because they wanted to do documentation because they wanted to do that management and tracking of metrics. And they wanted to write have patients in the outpatient settings, convincing them to write a Google review or getting them to go out and be a referral source.

That’s not why we went into the healthcare profession. And so we need to make sure that we really are hitting on purpose because so much of what happens today in healthcare isn’t immediately and tangibly related to helping the patient in front of them. And that’s what we need to look at. Okay. So let’s transition a little bit. How do we actually change? I want to show you this slide. It is a slide. That’s going to give an overview. And then in the next slide, I’m actually going to break down the best practice portion. But traditionally we start with what, here’s your job? Here’s the technical skills. We want to change it to starting with why, why does their role exist? And I’ll explain all of the steps to the why in the next slide we want to look at traditionally, we talk about how, when and where, how much time are we spending on mission, vision, and values, which is part of best practice onboarding.

Traditionally, we introduced them to the team. I’ve already talked about that. The best practice is actually connection to the team. Traditionally, we monitor their performance. You remember the guy sitting there with his binoculars on the chair and the past sales stamp at the bottom. We want to look at the best practice being that you monitor your performance. Traditionally, they have a preceptor best practices. They have a coach. And of course, even in best practice, yes, we do have the, how, what, when and where of the role. All right. So I want you to start thinking about how you are going to redesign your program. So let’s break down each component of the best practice. So you can start to redesign your program, why this is the first and most important thing that you want to connect people to right away. And I don’t mean the why for that person who had one day of hospital orientation.

There may be the president standing up in front of a room of 50 people. And that person might explain the why of the hospital or talk about the mission and vision. But that’s talking at people. We want to look at transforming why into the connection and the individual commitment. So I actually want you to start showing people the value of their specific role within the ecosystem of the organization, regardless of it being a housekeeper, a physician, a therapist, I want you to think about having them understand the, why, the why behind this role, you need to be able to connect each key accountability for the role to elements of the mission, vision, and values. And what do I mean by that? Now I am not asking you to combine or take the job description, the laundry list of the, what, how, and when, and connect it to the Y or the mission and vision. What I’m asking you to do is take the key accountabilities. What are the big bucket items that they’re responsible for? Whether it be patient experience, quality, safety, whatever the case may be. I want you to be able to take those key accountabilities and tie them to the role.

Do you even know your mission, vision, and values? And I hope you’re laughing and saying, of course I do. But when I present this to groups or when I’m working with a client, the first thing I always ask is what’s your mission, vision, and values. More than one time I had had people have to Google search it, to make sure that they actually had the answer. So you need to know your mission, vision, and values. And if you have to Google search it guys, before you even start working on onboarding, you have to start with this. That is problem. Number one, I want you to go back to the drawing board and start over. Suddenly if you have a mission and vision that someone can attach their role to, they’re going to be much more excited about working on it. And they’re going to be much more excited about working for the organization.

I was fortunate to work for an organization whose mission I believed in 100%. And the great thing was when I was the operations administrator, during our orientation process, we would have the new team member talk about how their role affected, impacted, and ensured the mission, vision, and upheld the values. Meaning if I am a front registration person, how do I ensure healthy communities for all? Number one, I welcome everyone, regardless of circumstances. Number two, I want to support the idea that we’re glad they are here, that they are taking control of their health. Those are things that connect to lifelong wellness as a front office person. I want to create such an inviting environment for my patients, that they can’t wait to come back and see me, which means they’re more likely to come for their annual visit or more likely to show up for their next appointment.

That’s what I mean by tying key accountability to the mission statement. Remember we talked about the drive by introduction. You know, the, Hey, this is Bob. This is Sue guys, connection to your team. This is where it can be really fun. And I want you to think about your whole team, not just the new member. I want you to think about how can I connect the team? What better opportunity than to pull everybody together and say, Hey, this is our new team member. And we want to make sure the whole team is aligned around the mission, vision values. Maybe you want to play a game. My personal favorite is fun fact, bingo, which is where you, as the leader take information from each person, a fun fact that nobody else might know. And then you make a bingo card. And during a staff meeting or a, or a welcome lunch for the new team member, you have everybody fill it out until someone gets bingo by finding out five interesting things about their coworkers. They didn’t know that’s the type of stuff I’m talking about with connection.

Well, I not saying that in redesigning your program, you take away the need to monitor the new team members performance, but I asked you to monitor your own as well. I want you to listen as much as you speak, and I want you to ask for their input on how to improve orientation. What better person to tell you what works and doesn’t work in, in orientation than the person truly going through it in the moment. I’m not asking you to take a ton of time on this. I want you to have a brief conversation or send them a sheet of paper or a little survey in emails each week. Write down these questions who was the most helpful to you and who deserves recognition for that help. What’s your biggest goal for next week?

What is the most important thing you learned this week during orientation? And of course you wanted to monitor the performance of the coach. What are they doing? Well, what can they actually improve on by asking questions like this? You’re creating a connection and commitment as their leader, even if you’re not their coach. One of my favorite things as a leader. And again, I know you’re going to say this takes too much time. At one point I had 55 people who directly reported to me as the director of rehab and home care. They were spread across three counties up to an hour and a half away from the office. My commitment as the director of rehab was that anytime we hired a new person, I took them out to lunch at their one month anniversary. Now I’ll tell you some people were scared. They’re like why do I have to meet with you?

And I’m like, I just want to take you out for lunch and see how things are going. I had times where I learned about their personal life. I shared a little bit about mine. Sometimes they had lots to say about the orientation process, but again, what level of connection then to say, I’m coming out. I want to sit with you. I want to understand who you are and what you need. And the last one, and gosh, if I could have you change one thing tomorrow, no, I can’t say that. I’d want you to change all five of these, but a really strong element is this idea of changing from preceptors to coaches. The definition of a preceptor is simply teacher instructor. Guys, you have already hired based on the resume and technical skills. We don’t need to look at a teacher or instructor as the most important aspects of this onboarding program.

No, we need to talk about a workplace coach. And there’s a company in Australia, integral.org dot AAU, and they have the best definition of a workplace coach. I’m going to read the definition and then I’ll help you write the abbreviated version. A workplace coach. The idea is a process of equipping the person with tools, knowledge, and opportunities. They need to fully develop themselves to be effective in their commitment to themselves, the company and their work. Listen to some of those words. It is an opportunity to fully develop themselves no longer are we trying to impose teaching and instruction. We are providing them opportunities. As new team members, we are providing them opportunities to fully develop themselves, to be effective in the role. Every single person, no matter the job wants to be good at what they do. And a coach is what’s going to help them get there.

Think about it. Coaches don’t teach you how to do everything. They’re going to ask questions. They’re going to give you opportunities to fail and learn from your mistakes. They’re going to teach people to think for themselves guys, how many times do you get questions that you’re thinking? I thought we did this in orientation. I want you to be able to have independent thinkers who can effectively do their job. Now it is incredibly important. Regardless of your setting, as you move from this concept of preceptor to poach, I need you to be really careful guys, because you can’t simply change the name and think it’s going to work. I work with a lot of my clients on developing these coaching training sessions. Coaching is a skill it’s not inherent. And so, instead of saying, congratulations, we changed the title from preceptor to coach. You have to give that team member the skills they need to coach.

Alrighty. So we’re going to shift gears just a little bit. As we start to move into the final stretch, I hope you’ve taken away some ideas on how to start that redesigning process. Here’s the next thing I want you to think about though, in order to have a redesigned and effective onboarding program, you have to go back to the hiring process. I did a conference presentation recently and I had the best question from a audience member. They said, what do you do when you interview one person and someone else shows up and I said, you go back and you learn how to actually interview because the problem isn’t that they didn’t show up in the interview. You just didn’t know how to detect them. Cause what do we do? The first question is, did you hire the right person in the first place? Traditional hiring focuses on competency? Gosh, there is a whole lot more than competency. One study from hunter and hunter said that the accuracy of hiring based on resume and interview alone is about 14%. Now I know you’re all saying, well, I have a much better success rate than that. Sure you do. But when we look at competence, we are missing all of the other elements that are outside of that technical skill aspect, creativity, flexibility. What about resilience? Think of how important that is when you’re doing the hiring.

And so in order to move beyond traditional hiring, I want you to move beyond competence and I want you to assess the whole person. One of the things that I find most effective is when I’m working with a team and we start to look at what makes the best employee. Now, granted, no matter what profile we make, there is no perfect person out there, but I’ll give you an example. I was working with a client up in Massachusetts the other day, and they were adding a second clinic to their outpatient program. And so they wanted to hire a clinic manager and they said, we know what we’re looking for, but we don’t know how to figure out if they’ve got what we’re looking for. So we created a profile and then using evidence-based validated assessment tools, we are able to compare the applicant to the benchmark.

And again, nobody matches perfectly. He had me run the assessment on three people and you know what, not a single one of them was perfect. And I said, Kevin, if you took this profile, it would not be perfect. But what we look for is where are the gaps? So on the left, I start with the disc assessment. This really looks at how you make decisions, how you respond to change. Then we’ve got soft skills and guys soft skills are so frequently overlooked. And remember in that last slide, when we talked about resilience, flexibility, all of those pieces, that’s what I’m talking about with soft skills. And so every single person has soft skills. Those are the soft skills they have match the soft skills required for the role. That’s what you’re looking for. And then how neat is this? Once you’ve actually used that as part of the hiring process.

Now I have my development plan because I already know they have gaps. And what I’m looking for is where are the gaps? How big are the gaps? Are the gaps easy to overcome or are they going to take more time than it’s worth? And so now they’ve joined the team. I have their onboarding program cause I need to get them ramped up on the soft skills that they need as well as the technical skills. This is one of my favorites. I like to look at what motivates the person. Because if I understand, if they’re motivated by going with their guts and being instinctive versus being someone who likes to learn and, and research academics probably is best suited for someone who loves to learn for the sake of learning as a per post to a person, who’s going to go with their gut on decisions.

So by understanding what motivates them, I can, if what rewards are provided by the job match those motivations. This is another assessment tool that I use. And it’s related to acumen. I can look at how much role awareness they have, how self-directed they are, how they apply systems thinking and systems judgment. One caveat to all of these assessments. It is imperative that when you are looking at assessments and choosing them for your organization, you must make sure they are EEOC compliant. So that’s the equal employment opportunity commission. So many organizations are using assessment tools that are not validated and are not given the stamp of approval by the EEOC. If you’re using tools that are EEOC compliant, if a patient, if a person doesn’t get hired and they attempt to Sue you for using the assessments, they will not win based on the assessments because they have been validated to show that they don’t have adverse impact.

Alright, we’ve got two more slides to go. And then I’m looking forward to some of your questions. As we come into the home stretch, there’s a couple more shifts in your thinking. I want you to make. So traditionally we say to people, congratulations, you’ve completed onboarding. Think back to when I asked you the poll question, how long is your onboarding process? One to two weeks, two to four weeks. And then we give them a cake or we give them a certificate or we give them a pat on the shoulder and say, you’re done. You’re oriented. You’re onboarding. Best practice is to consider that onboarding is never complete. Wait, what? It’s not completed. If onboarding is about connection, purpose, and commitment, then we want that process to be ongoing. We just need to reframe the thoughts around onboarding as part of our engagement strategy. Okay? Traditionally, people quit because of their boss.

There are so many research articles out there showing different percents of time where the employee quits because of their boss. I’ve seen it as high as 80. I haven’t really seen it lower than 40%. And so if traditionally, we know that people are going to quit because of their boss. Best practice is to be constantly developing your leaders. Guys, you must be looking at your development program. I worked for phenomenal health system. They had 20,000 employees. They had 1000 managers and above and yet they had six leadership development classes a year that is not going to stick. You need your senior leaders to know how to coach and support the next level of leadership down. You need to be providing ongoing support and programming for them. Okay? And the last thing is traditionally people quit because there’s no growth opportunity. And this is regardless of role.

I think there’s this belief that only certain jobs require advanced training or professional development. No matter what role you’re in there still might be an opportunity for you to teach someone or have them develop a new skill. A housekeeper might want the opportunity to start doing more than the traditional role of housekeeping. Maybe they want to add a component of supporting the rest of the team in a different way. Maybe they want to become a coach. There is always room for professional development and advancement. And know when I talk about growth opportunities, I am not talking about promotions. Yes, people often want a promotion, but the reality is they also want the recognition for the hard work they’re doing. So what better way to recognize someone and say, we want to bring your skill level up, even higher. If your hierarchy is flat, that’s okay.

There’s still places to grow people. And that’s what I’m talking about. There is my final thought. What I’m asking you to do is have a true paradigm shift. And my personal paradigm shift came when I started to change my language, I moved from new hires, direct reports to the people I support and my team members. If I say a new hire that has one con connotation. If I say new team member that has a very different one, look at the way this paradigm shift happens. And eventually there’s going to be a we’re going to be having a white paper come out that expands on this final thought that I’m giving you. It will look at the paradigm shift for each aspect. What I’m asking you to do is move from recruitment to attraction. Stop thinking of it. As onboarding, focus as inspiration, commitment, purpose, connection, it’s now your opportunity to align the new team member and retain versus engaged in the white paper. I explained the word retention is a terrible word. The definition is literally the continued possession use or control of something. How many team members want to be in continuous possession? All right. I want to make sure we have enough time for questions. So here is my contact information and what I’d like you to do is now you actually get to go back and ask questions in the Q and a section. I’m going to give you a couple of minutes to do this. And then I’ll start asking, answering the questions that you have.

I’ve got one already. So I’ll go ahead and start with this. While you guys are filling in the rest of your questions. Someone asked me what competencies assessment I use during the interview process. I think one of the things that I look at in terms of competency is technical skills. You can’t actually have them demonstrate the technical skills of drawing blood or doing the technical aspects of the role. When I look at assessment tools as part of a hiring process, I’m looking at their disc score or their disc assessment, what are their behavioral tendencies? I look at soft skill assessments. I look at what their motivating factors are. Those are the things that I’m going to use when I’m looking at assessment as part of a hiring process.

If that didn’t quite answer your question, let me know, and I can try to reframe it. I have another question here. What can you suggest to increase this onboarding idea to higher levels of leadership? My team members constantly say that they never see upper management leaders in our team and they believe, and maybe come in disengaged because of it. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Katie, for asking this question. Truly. When I look at onboarding, you have to create a specific program for leadership onboarding. And what I’m talking about here is looking at what are the key skills of a leader? I do a lot of work with leadership training and leadership development, and we always look at what are the core skills of leadership. One of the most important skills of leadership is coaching and developing others. And so making sure that your onboarding program actually incorporates technical and I’m air quoting here, you can’t see it.

I just realized technical competence in coaching and developing others. That is the technical skill of a leader. A technical skill of a leader is their ability to communicate successfully with team members. My goodness. And if they’re saying, if your team is saying they never see upper level management, one of the onboarding processes is creating a procedure and a frequency and a set rhythm of staff interactions. Okay. What do you, what are your thoughts on actively giving raises on a regular basis? Laurie, I’m actually going to set that question aside for a second, because I want to focus on the onboarding pieces. I had a question about how do you assess soft skills? There are two elements of soft skills that you can actually assess for meaning. Someone can take an online assessment for soft skills and for emotional intelligence. And so when you look at assessing soft skills, I actually have my my candidates take an assessment tool that I use from that I distribute to my clients.

And it has a list of the 25, most common, soft skills needed in a role. And then what happens is once they take the assessment, they answer the questions. It’s a way to look at what that person soft skill hierarchy actually is. And once I’ve got that soft cell soft skill hierarchy, I can actually compare that hierarchy to the benchmark that I’ve created. Speaking of that, someone asked, how do you create an ideal profile? When I do that, I work with the client directly. We look at people already in the role and say, what are the attributes that make you successful in this role? I asked that same question to the person, to whom that role reports to, and that group collectively comes up with the benchmark. We take a group assessment as if we were the job. And then we use that as the ideal profile there certainly the second piece that I want to really look at how long do you think an onboarding process should go?

When I think about how long it should go, there’s two things I think about number one, it needs to be individualized to that. Person’s needs. Number two, as I said, onboarding should never end it simply translates into your engagement strategies. So the idea is that you begin with an onboarding connection, purpose, commitment, become your engagement strategies. So it never ends. Now, of course, there’s a legitimate and to be training frequency and someone just asked that what’s the difference between onboarding training and new staff mentorship, in your opinion, onboard training is the tactical practical. How, what, when and where of a job it’s things like this is how we complete this documentation. This is where the supplies are completed. The difference is that new staff mentorship, or as I define it as coaching is the ability to help that new person learn to think independently while still living in the framework of our organization’s mission, vision and values.

There were a few other questions in here. And gosh, I have to say someone had not necessarily a question, but why do we celebrate people when they leave? Why not throw a party to welcome the new team member? I, 100% agree with that. And I got to tell you, we do that at my organization, or when I worked as a director of urgent care at a health system, we stopped throwing parties when someone left and at one month we had a party to welcome the new team member. And that’s what I’m talking about for connection. So thank you so much for sharing that great point. Another question is, are you interviewing to these key accountabilities? Don’t you want to know that they can see themselves contributing to the mission, vision, and values prior to hire absolutely. Karen and that is a great point. I have a whole series of interview questions that I use that are based on this onboarding paradigm shift.
I do look at when you see your role, how does it relate to our mission? I asked them to give me a story about that or see if they can start to gain the connection. My interview questions have completely changed. Again. I talked about traditional hiring. I don’t even use those quote unquote behavioral interviewing questions. They still don’t get to the heart of it. You do want to talk to them about the mission and the vision. How do they see themselves living up to that mission? How do they see their work contributing to where this organization is going? Those are some of the key things.

I have another question here, and I think we’re still doing well on time. What is the best way to help our help new team member preceptors become new team member coaches. I strongly recommend that you help them first understand this paradigm shift you’re making about onboarding, let your preceptors give input on what they think. Because before you bring someone in as a preceptor, you need to make sure that they are connected and committed to the organization. Not just the person who’s been here, the longest or the person who onboards everyone. What I want you to do is select the team members who demonstrate the greatest level of commitment and connection and purpose to your organization. That’s step number one, step number two. I want you to take those coaches and I want you to have them start thinking about what is the difference between an and a coach.

And the first thing is questioning as opposed to telling it’s asking thought provoking questions. There’s some great books out there on coaching. And I could certainly send you a list of those if you want to contact me. And certainly if people have questions, you have all of my contact information. But there is, there are some great books out there that talk about the difference between coaching and management and coaching and leadership. And you can derive a lot of it out of it. The other thing I like to do is I like to restructure I’m betting in your organization. You have preceptor training. What you need to do is revamp preceptor, training into coaches, training. I Nan think about it. What if you could turn your entire team into a coach versus a preceptor? Okay, here’s another great question. What can I do if a CNA doesn’t have a vertical ladder, there’s no level of promotion for a CNA in the company. I’ve decided that there is no career ladder anymore, except in very few instances, I call it the career rock wall. And when I look at how you build someone up, there’s no vertical line anymore. And so the career rock wall is what other things are of interest to the CNA. Maybe they become the person who does some data collection for you, or maybe they become the coach for the new CNAs. That’s advancement without a title change without a promotion.

Just going to see someone asked if I can repeat the definition of a workplace coach. And I absolutely can. It is so Kim, I hope you’re ready to write this down. A workplace coach, the process of equipping the person with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities. They need to fully develop themselves to be effective in their commitments to themselves, the company and the work. It’s a process of equipping the person with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities. They need to fully develop themselves to be effective in their commitment to themselves, the company and their work. And I think from a time standpoint, we are almost out of time. So I want to make sure that we don’t run over. I also want you to know that you can reach out to me anytime and we can walk through whatever additional questions you have. And so I want to, again, just take a moment to say thank you to each of you for attending today. And if there’s anything you need, let me know. All I ask is that you open your eyes to a paradigm shift, stop onboarding, start inspiring, start aligning, build that connection, that purpose, that commitment from day one. Thank you guys very much.