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Great Onboarding Can Lead To 50% Higher Retention
Finding skilled, talented candidates to come work at your practice can be hard enough. How do you convince your best employees to stick around for a year or three once you’ve trained them?
One of the best things an employer can do for a new employee is to jump-start their “getting acquainted period”—their first 90 days of employment—by using a structured onboarding process. As HR experts, we’ve learned that this helps speed up the training, assessment, and engagement of your new hires. The first part of onboarding is to cover what you’re required to do by law. After that, your onboarding activities focus on getting your employee settled and grounded, making sure they have the best possible chance to learn, and assessing their capabilities and fit for your team and office culture.
These tasks are not easy to do, so it’s important that you start simple. As with most areas of HR, the possibilities of what you could include in your onboarding process are endless. Develop your own list as you go, and do as much or as little as you are comfortable with. Our own processes, which I’ll share with you, are culled from working with some of the best dental managers out there. Any improvements you choose to incorporate will help you assimilate new hires into your team faster, better, and with a greater chance of sticking around long-term.
What’s the Point of a Formal Onboarding Program?
Onboarding gets a lot of attention among us HR nerds these days, and for good reason! The first few days of employment are a critical time when employees decide to be engaged or disengaged. Up to 20% of employee turnover typically happens in the first 45 days, but companies with a structured onboarding process experience 50% greater new hire retention. Better yet, improving your onboarding usually carries few to no costs other than a bit of time.
One reason onboarding works so well is that it sets good patterns in place immediately. It’s a way of saying, “We’re happy you’re here, we’ve invested in making this work, and we are committed to giving you the training you need to be good at what you do here.” A well-organized program and clear communication from the start sends a message about the level of professionalism and engagement we, as employers, expect new employees to reciprocate.
What Onboarding Activities Are Important?
To protect your practice and positively impact new hire retention, you’ll need to consider all of the following:
- What should happen before the first day of employment? This includes the offer letter, the background and certification check, and much more.
- What paperwork do you need the new employee to read or complete? I-9s, W-4s, direct deposit, your policies, and other necessary items should all be ready, whether printed or in HR management software like CEDR’s HR Vault.
- What physical/practical issues need to be addressed? Your new hire will need building access, an office tour, their schedule, computer passwords, and so forth.
- How will you draw your new hire into your office culture? This might start with providing a mentor, making sure they don’t eat lunch alone on their first day, discussing how your practice is managed, and other activities.
Despite all the logistics, onboarding isn’t just about making sure you dot your employer i’s and cross your t’s. It also helps you keep track of progress and identify issues early. If your new hire is showing up on time, asking questions, asking for help, and demonstrating emotional intelligence skills (e.g., empathy, self-awareness, etc.) those are great signs! In our own HR guidance, we call the first 90 days a “getting acquainted period” for both the employer and employee. This is a time of special focus on how well things are working out. Not only does onboarding set the stage for good employees to excel—it helps you identify non-starters early.
In best-case scenarios, onboarding confirms your new hire’s choice to work with your practice, and it provides them with resources and support to learn and perform the job you hired them to do to the very best of their abilities. Now you’re tossing the ball to them, so they can show you what a great employee they are. How Do You Keep Onboarding Organized?
Many managers complain that they are lucky if they have time to organize anything for an employee’s first day. That’s understandable, but having a system helps. Making small, gradual improvements to your process will add up before you know it.
You can get a categorized Onboarding Checklist in this month’s CEDR Insider newsletter, at www.cedrsolutions.com/cedrinsider/0818. (It’s linked near the end of the article called “Making Workplaces Better: The Way You Onboard an Employee Matters”) Scroll up and down the page for more onboarding articles, and be sure to subscribe if you’d like to receive future issues.
Paul Edwards is the CEO and Co-Founder of CEDR HR Solutions (www.cedrsolutions.com), which provides individually customized employee handbooks and HR solutions to dental offices of all sizes across the United States. He has over 20 years’ experience as a manager and owner, and specializes in helping dental offices solve employee issues. Paul is a featured writer for The Profitable Dentist, Dentaltown, and AADOM, and speaks at employment education seminars, conferences, and CE courses across the country. He can be reached at [email protected].
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