Congratulations! You’ve selected your new hire and today is day one of what you hope will be a long, mutually rewarding relationship. What’s your onboarding plan?
First impressions are powerful and lasting. The prospects for achieving success with a new hire will depend to a great extent on what you have planned for this new hire’s first day at the office. Putting your best foot forward matters, considering these statistics:
- Healthcare is tied with banking and finance in having the second highest turnover rate of 15% in 2016, behind hospitality (20%), according to Compensation Force, a workforce blog produced by Altura Consulting Group in Wayzata, Minnesota
- 40% of employees who have quit a job voluntarily did so within six months of starting the position, according to ClearCompany, the inventor of a software/service talent management system. The cost of replacing an entry-level employee is 30-50% of their annual salary, according to ClearCompany.
Do the math, it’s eye-opening.
What is your onboarding plan?
This the question is often met by a surprised, deer-in-the-headlights look.
“What do you mean, onboarding strategy? We hired an experienced dental assistant, she knows what to do, right?”
The reality is this dental assistant does know what to do in her previous practice. She doesn’t have any experience in how to best support your philosophy of care and protocols. She doesn’t know your perspective on the practice culture or the nuances of everyday life in your practice. Without this knowledge, there is a steep, stressful learning curve ahead of all of you.
“Hmm, I guess I don’t have an onboarding strategy.” This doctor does have a strategy; unfortunately, it’s not a good one. There’s a long-standing tradition in dentistry of introducing new hires through a process known as the “sink or swim.” For the uninitiated, this consists of basically throwing the new hire into the deep end of the pool and hoping they learn how to save themselves. Some will thrive, some will struggle; others will simply choose to get out of the pool and go home. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Want to learn what new employees really want and a better way to onboard? Click here to read my most recent article published in the Winter 2018 edition of Dental Practice Success.
I am amazed by those statistics. My team and I work in the realm of compliance and staff turnover takes it toll here as well. Properly onboarding new staff is critical or the entire practice suffers–patients and team.
Couldn’t agree more, Linda. Turnover is expensive any way you look at it. We need to create a greater focus on integrating new team members more deliberately. The entire team will benefit from better hiring and onboarding strategies. This is an opportunity for those of us in training and development to better serve our clients.