Whether you’re a doctor, dentist, optometrist, or other practice owner, your financial wellbeing is directly tied to your onboarding processes—both in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.
Low employee engagement, high practice turnover, and HR disorganization are often symptoms of the same underlying problem.
Effective employee onboarding ensures new team members know how to do their job and are provided with the essential new hire documents. Onboarding also leads to better retention rates, higher team efficiency, and reduced hiring costs year after year. For this reason, solid employee onboarding boldly increases your bottom line and allows you to breathe a sigh of relief.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the reasons why your employee onboarding process directly affects the health of your practice and determines its long-term sustainability. If you are struggling with low engagement, high practice turnover, or disorganization in HR practices, this information can help.
What Is Employee Onboarding?
The single most valuable business asset you have is your people. However, it is easy to let this fact slip through the cracks when things get busy, giving more focus to urgent tasks. A proactive strategy and the right HR tools will allow you to prioritize your onboarding process without a lot of manual work.
The key is to get off on the right foot with new hires. Treating freshly onboarded employees well and training them effectively doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. It all starts with installing proper onboarding procedures and getting good results with them. Onboarding includes every step to get a new hire situated from start to finish:
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- Job offers via an offer letter
- Interviewing
- Benefits paperwork
- Salary negotiations
- New hire paperwork
- Employee handbooks
- Team introductions
- Health and Safety training
- Job training
Employers—especially those in high-turnover industries—are likely to see a direct correlation between their onboarding procedures and their bottom line. 2020 data showed that healthcare turnover rates were at an all-time high. A good onboarding program will help you save time, money, and stress while improving your new employee’s experience.
Did you know? Our HR software makes it easy for your office to increase its bottom line. Stay compliant, onboard new employees quickly and easily, track performance, and gracefully let go of employees who are not a good fit.
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How Can A Strong Onboarding Process Directly Affect the Bottomline?
Strong onboarding practices are a win-win for both employers and new hires. A process that reduces stress, automates paperwork, simplifies the learning curve, and clearly communicates expectations sets both parties up for success in the future. Data strongly supports the idea that your onboarding procedures dictate the health of your entire practice. They increase your bottom line by:
- Saving you hundreds or thousands on recruiting and hiring costs from high turnover
- Getting employees up to speed quicker, allowing them to add value to the practice sooner than later
- Attracting the right people who are committed to your practice & doing the job correctly
- Ensuring you comply with the law and reducing the chances of a costly lawsuit or other legal issue
What a Good Employee Onboarding Process Looks Like
Communicative, encouraging engagement, productivity, and continued education.
A new hire who is overwhelmed or confused won’t feel confident in their role. They may struggle to pay attention or worry that they chose the wrong position. All of this can be avoided with an onboarding strategy that eliminates gray areas and miscommunications. Instead of feeling stressed, you can help new hires feel motivated.
Employee onboarding isn’t just about getting new hires up to speed. It’s also an opportunity for professionals from different departments and offices to come together and form positive habits. For example, when your practice hires nurses or receptionists, you can use onboarding to familiarize them with your imaging software or payment system—key tools that they’ll need down the line.
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Low stress, reducing the chance an employee will quit within the first year.
You don’t want an overwhelmed new hire to run out of the office screaming. That’s why practice owners must create customized employee onboarding programs that take into account individual skills, personality traits, and motivations. Different roles also call for different training requirements so onboarding may vary slightly
Automating new employee onboarding with technology is crucial for creating engagement, especially in today’s mobile-first world. With employees on smartphones and laptops, it’s easy to access training materials, benefits paperwork, and employee handbooks from anywhere, anytime.
Highly structured, encouraging employees to stick around longer.
Every practice should have a goal of reducing turnover and increasing employee loyalty, but it’s also easier said than done. It is estimated that 75% of the reasons employees quit are preventable, and unstructured hiring processes are one of those reasons. At HR for Health, we understand the pressure practice owners and their teams are under: Get it all done and do it perfectly.
Did you know? Our new hire checklist is designed to ease the burden of remembering everything during the hiring process. It helps practices organize and streamline onboarding, so nothing gets left out.
Longer and more thorough than the average training process.
All too often, a new hire is left to their own devices after just a few days on the job. They are not given enough direction or instruction in what they need to do or how they need to do it. Research shows this isn’t how the most successful companies operate, so your practice probably shouldn’t operate that way either.
If an employee doesn’t understand why they’re doing something, they may not care as much about doing it well. If they don’t believe in the organization, your team can’t work effectively —unless you find employees who are passionate and inspired by your vision. A strong onboarding process allows you to identify and retain those people.
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7 Tips for Successful Onboarding
How HR for Health Can Help
With high turnover rates in healthcare, there’s no better time to makeover your onboarding process. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. HR for Health is an all-in-one HR software solution dedicated to helping veterinary, optometry, and other healthcare practices run more efficiently.
Our powerful and flexible human resources platform integrates with essential business software solutions, organizing payroll and tracking time, benefits management, recruiting, hiring, career development, and more.
From multi-location businesses to solo practices and everything in between, HR for Health makes it easy for practices of all sizes to manage their team members without sacrificing time or efficiency. Make employee onboarding a priority, and see how it increases your bottom line and stabilizes your practice. Contact HR for Health today to learn more.
