On-boarding and Health and Wellbeing in the NHS.

Using Think Learning’s unique workflow tool to support on-boarding and health and wellbeing.

Your onboarding experience and first few weeks in a new company have a huge impact on your perception of the organisation, your new colleagues and managers. The technology a company invests in for its workforce, the culture of the business, how welcomed and supported you feel at the start will set a tone for the business and your new job.

On-boarding new employees effectively plays a crucial role in employee retention, turnover and performance and technology can improve the experience for employee and employer alike. It can create a more efficient on-boarding process through automation, and it can increase engagement and productivity in new employees.

In the NHS, and healthcare generally, reducing the time to hire and associated on-boarding activities through streamlined processes significantly reduces agency staff and locum costs. And once employees are using Totara they will be self-managing their personal and professional development. This will benefit managers and L&D teams through improving education reporting and reduced administration but long term, self-service access to personal and professional skills development and effective appraisals will improve retention, retain talent and reduce recruitment costs.

“Think’s onboarding solution is the first in our sector
that links pre-hire and post-hire learning processes,
and their workflow tool is significantly the most cost
effective we’ve seen.”

Training is essential for new starters yet on-boarding and engagement is much more than a list of 10 statutory training courses they have to wade through.

To welcome people to your business in the most efficient way we create user-friendly, simple screens specifically for pre-hire content and new starter forms. Audiences (based on your HR data) gives access to these features ensuring people see the right information and forms based on their specific need. The information and dashboards they see can contain blocks, activities, course lists and HTML content. Here’s a typical example of the content elements – each of these tiles is clickable to view your bespoke content, and with links and tiles we can create an unlimited number of pages of pre-hire and on-boarding content.

We can also lock down other parts of your Totara site so, for example, pre-hire users can’t search or browse for the content that’s not directly relevant to them.

Pre-hire training can be tracked

We can use Totara’s powerful audience and certification tools to target mandatory training to pre-hires; they can log in to Totara before their start date and complete e-learning, because the individuals on Totara retain the same account as they move from pre-hire to employment, their record of training stays with them automatically.

Health and Wellbeing

From September 2020, every member of the NHS should have a health and wellbeing conversation and develop a personalised plan (detailed by NHS England) and new starters need Health and Wellbeing as part of their induction. The NHS People Plan, also calls for staff to be supported and get any help they need.

In Totara, you can record health and wellbeing conversations as a stand-alone workflow during induction, in an appraisal process, or during quarterly 1 to 1’s. Automatic reminders let managers and their staff know when the next conversation needs to take place and board reports can be produced to review progress Trust-wide.

As part of the conversation, line managers can record key details around the individual’s health and wellbeing, and any flexible working requirements, as well as equality, diversity and inclusion. HR, senior managers or OD teams can be part of the conversation with dynamic routing of notifications and forms.

On-boarding forms and workflow management

We’ve built a uniquely powerful workflow management enhancement in Totara, which is only available to our clients. Workflow can be used to automate forms that would otherwise be on paper, email or alternative expensive on-boarding solutions. Staff who are at the pre-hire stage will see a list of forms that they need to complete, and their progress can be tracked via reports available to your recruitment or L&D teams. Data from forms can be exported from Totara or automatically emailed to your HR/payroll teams. This helps NHS organisations work towards the vision of a paperless future and improved back-office efficiency.

Clients are currently using Think’s Workflow Tool to automate processes including:

• Health and Wellbeing induction
• Study Leave and CPD Budget Tracking
• Right to work information/declaration
• Health assessment questionnaire
• New joiner general questionnaire and personal details
• Uniform ordering

The new starter process is key

The precise approach to be utilised for pre-hire LMS access will be determined by your current ‘new starter’ process (particularly in relation to the setup of organisation system user accounts). If we integrate Totara with your Active Directory, this may have a bearing on pre-hire access as will the timing of data being entered into your HR system. We also have the option of integrating with Trac recruitment system for improved data flow.

Whichever process you follow, we’ll draw on our knowledge and experience from the past several years working exclusively with Totara and our client base to find an on-boarding solution that works for you and your organisation.

To find out more get in contact us for an informal conversation here.