7 Essential Steps to Effective Healthcare Onboarding.

Onboarding is the key to a successful employee lifecycle. We share our top tips to getting healthcare onboarding right.

Onboarding is a critical step that an employee takes. It’s the process in which they become fully familiar with your organisation and understand their role and expectations.

If healthcare onboarding isn’t done right, it can have huge ramifications both for the employee and for your patients.

In fact, more than 93% of employers believe that onboarding plays a critical role in an employee’s decision to stay or leave the company.

In this blog, we’ll run through:

• What healthcare onboarding is and why it’s so important
• The challenges when it comes to good onboarding in healthcare
• Our top tips for better healthcare onboarding

Let’s get started.

🚀 Pro Tip

Onboarding is an important part of your employee lifecycle so it’s vital you get it right. We share our best practices with customers all the time, so we thought we’d bottle that up to share with you too…

Download-free guide to onboarding

What is healthcare onboarding?

Onboarding is the first step in the employee lifecycle and it can cover a wide range of activities depending on your definition.

Related: Read 20+ shocking onboarding statistics

Like other industries, healthcare onboarding helps new starters get familiar with their role and the organisational policies that they need to adhere to in order to be compliant and successful.

Of course, healthcare onboarding is specific to the healthcare industry in that it requires an employee to become familiar with the many regulations that guide healthcare professionals.

Related: Benefits of onboarding processes

In order to get off to a flying start, your new hires need to be able to:

Understand the culture

Culture is the shared values that define your organisation and its purpose. Sharing these values during onboarding is essential as it allows new starters learn what’s important.

Develop connections

As you can imagine, when starting a new role, it’s important to help integrate your new employee.

Whether that’s meeting their immediate team, or other colleagues, onboarding is the perfect time to help new employees connect with their co-workers.

Feel competent in their role

One of the main goals of onboarding, particularly in healthcare, is to allow employees to feel confident in their role and their ability.

The better the onboarding experience, the sooner employees will feel comfortable working on their own.

New hires are expected to have an onboarding timeline of two weeks.

However, most experts said it can take 3 months until a new hire is fully onboarded and working independently.

Being compliant

Compliance is particularly important for the healthcare sector. Following rules and regulations and becoming familiar with any new processes is essential for clinical staff to ensure patient safety.

💡 Pro Tip

Read our complete guide to compliance to understand how you can get higher rates of compliance with some simple changes.

Challenges with healthcare onboarding

Just like with any other learning and development initiative, there are challenges with onboarding.

Addressing these challenges is key in order to provide the most effective onboarding experience for your new starters.

The biggest challenges with healthcare onboarding are:

• Managing multiple new starters
• Giving relevant, personalised content
• Working with time-strapped staff
• Lack of digital skills

Let’s look at each in more detail.

Managing multiple new starters

There can be a lot of admin work required when you’re dealing with a lot of new hires at once, particularly if you don’t have an intuitive LXP set up.

With an LMS like Think, you can pull HR details like their department and job title through from other tools.

And, even better, your LMS will automatically add users to the right audiences based on their demographics meaning they’ll be sent the right content and dashboards.

Without a tool like this, you’re left with a lot of busywork and manual data handling. Not only is this time-consuming but it leaves room for error which could negatively impact your user’s experience.

Giving relevant, personalised content

Clinical staff work across all different remits and as such, they all need very different content when it comes to onboarding and compliance. Your medical team will need to follow a certain set of procedures compared to your administrative team, for example.

Creating this content is time-consuming and it can be tricky to ensure that the right people are served the right content, at the right time.

Working with time-strapped staff

Even from their first day, clinical staff are going to quickly feel the demands of their work.

While their onboarding should ease them into work, in healthcare this isn’t always the case especially when you’re already in a staff shortage and dealing with large workloads.

As such, making onboarding a priority is a major challenge for L&D professionals in healthcare.

Lack of digital skills

Not everyone is technically savvy when it comes to computers, particularly if they’re using a new software. When you start in a new role, chances are you’re going to encounter a brand new tech stack.

In this case, there’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to understanding the new tool and using it in the most efficient way.

The same is true for your LMS.

As such, it becomes a barrier to learning for new starters in your team, which can impact their onboarding process.

Healthcare onboarding best practices

We know that staff members need to be properly trained in order to work competently and efficiently. Patient safety is of the utmost importance for clinical staff.

Creating a good onboarding process can help you ensure your employees are set up for success as soon as they’ve completed it.

So, here are some of our best practices for the most effective healthcare onboarding programme:

• Start pre-hire
• Integrate existing tools
• Give onboarding a clear focus
• Get automated
• Consider mentoring
• Push your content
• Gather feedback

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Start pre-hire

Your onboarding process should start as soon as your new employer accepts your job offer.

At this point, you can start onboarding them through relevant content. By drip-feeding content through a longer process as opposed to bombarding them from their first day, you can ensure they get through all the content they’re required to.

✏️ Note

With Think, you can set up new hires with their personal email address and then move them across to their new work email once they’re set up.

Integrate existing tools

One of the biggest tasks for HR and L&D teams is adding new hires to all the relevant tools.

With the right tech stack, you can automate part of that process.

You need to find an LMS that integrates with your HR tool and your active directory to ensure that all right information is carried across.

Doing this will save lots of time, plus room for error.

⚡️ Pro Tip

Think has an ESR import tool where you can pull through historic data on new clinical staff hires so that their compliance and training data is automatically pulled into your LMS.

Give onboarding a clear focus

It can be easy to overload new hires with tasks and documents to read over.

One easy way to add focus to your process is to create an onboarding checklist.

This list can live in your LMS within your onboarding dashboard and allows users to tick off tasks as they do them, so they can keep track of where they’re up to. It also gives you a good visual of what tasks they have left and if you need to give extra support or not.

Get automated

When new users join and you add them to your LMS, you then have the job of manually adding them to the relevant teams, dashboards and learning content.

But, with Think, you can automate this process. By using audiences, you can preset who should get what content and dashboards based on their demographics like job title and location.

Using this data allows you to get really targeted with what you share to people, but without all of the manual work.

Consider mentoring

Clinical mentoring is a fantastic way to onboard new hires. Not only does it give them a point of contact to ask for help, but it also speeds up the learning process.

Research shows that on-the-job training is the best way to expedite learning. So, if you have experienced staff members happy to take new hires under their wing, then make the most of it.

The benefits of mentoring are ten-fold, but its impact on onboarding are great too.  In fact, employees who are involved in mentoring programs have a 50% higher retention rate than those not involved.

Push your content

When it comes to onboarding, you can’t always rely on your staff to take initiative. Sometimes you need to nudge them.

This is where a tool like ThinkNudge comes into play. It’s an email and text notification tool that allows you to send reminders for training to your users.

You could also edit your homepage and dashboards to ensure that key content sits front and centre. Understanding how your LMS design works best is key to ensuring a good learner experience.

Gather feedback

With an L&D initiative, it’s not a case of set it live and leave it.

You should always be reviewing your work and improving it. The best way to do that is through feedback.

Feedback tools allow you to share surveys with your LMS users.

You can then use this to edit your content and learning ahead for better engagement and retention.

Get started with a healthcare onboarding platform

Building a successful onboarding programme for clinical staff isn’t easy. However, it’s so important that it’s worth investing in to ensure you’ve got it right.

A tool that can support healthcare onboarding can help you get more out of your process.

Integrating a tool like Think Learning lets you manage all of your learning and training in one place.

Not only can you host your learning and compliance content, but you can manage onboarding, performance and talent too. It’s one central hub for all of your people data.

Book a demo to learn more about Think and its tools and features.