It’s no secret that employee turnover is the main issue facing home health and home care organizations. What can you do to greet and keep those new employees you’ve just convinced will be with you? Ensure you’re following the best practices for onboarding to extend a warm welcome to new team members.
First, make certain to actively engage and educate your new team members throughout onboarding so that they can begin their work. Information and entertainment are not incompatible, but you do know that.
They welcome newly-joined team members in a manner that allows them to feel part of a community of compassion and respect so that they can also give back to their customers.
Optimizing Onboarding
These best practices can be beneficial when you welcome new employees to the fold:
- Assess Initial Skills to Identify Gaps
- The agency must consistently disseminate its policies throughout the company
- Customize the process of onboarding to ensure that you get reliable performance
- Connect with team members on the move
- Inform patients about the clinical procedures and information in the course of treatment
Assess Initial Skills to Identify Gaps
The high turnover rate puts pressure on home healthcare and health agencies to bring new employees up to speed quickly and efficiently.
When you must fill multiple roles in a short time and efficiently, you need to get the new employees in the client’s homes as fast as you can while making sure they’re prepared to provide high-quality care. By analyzing each new hire’s abilities and knowledge, as well as their weaknesses, you will be able to identify areas of weakness to ensure you focus on them during the onboarding.
Don’t be hesitate to give them a helping hand, applaud their strengths in public, and identify at least one thing to praise for everyone who joins the team.
Disseminate Agency Policies
In the beginning, the new employees must know what they are expected to do in their positions. When they are onboarding, you’ll have to make sure they know your agency’s policies and have the information, understand, and agree to the expectations. Your agency can be protected from responsibility and protect your customers from misinformed advice by making it easier to distribute online guidelines and policies and an electronic sign-off feature.
If new rules are introduced in the near future, which is likely to happen, it is easy to make sure that your mobile service teams are able to review and accept any new rules on the move.
Also, remember to craft openings and introductions to your guidelines with wit and some enthralling stories of how policies from the agency have resulted in real-world successes.
Tailor Onboarding to Ensure Reliability
Beyond knowing the expectations of the role, team members may require some extra support. Prepare to provide details on how you can achieve those goals.
The first step is to create specific learning plans for each role and then use the online platform to automate and induct new employees into online training courses to help their onboarding. When you evaluate the individuals and discover areas of need or knowledge, you can customize the training program to meet those requirements and speed up gaining competency. Making personalized learning plans and assigning courses through the internet or a learning administration system (LMS) will make it easier to manage the process.
A reliable LMS will allow for automatic tracking of course completions. When it is time to submit a report about compliance, you are able to draw the data from the system and create automated reports that you can release every few weeks.
Remember to reach out via your note or a phone message to let them know how grateful you are for them on your team.
Communicate With Widespread Teams
If workers are mobile and work in various areas, such as home health and caregivers and nurses in home care usually do, you must do your best as a manager to create a harmonious team environment. Inform your employees of how you communicate with them as your manager and how they can communicate questions, ideas, and achievements with you and the rest of the team.
Email for your company may be your preferred method. Also, using the announcements feature of the LMS and mobile-based learning applications may be an alternative. Consider using the most popular business messaging app Hucu.ai a HIPPA compliant.
Remember that Millennials, the largest generational group in the workplace today, are more likely to use instant messages or mobile apps over email.
Whatever you decide to do, make an idea of how to communicate with members and the whole team, often starting to allow communication to flow and encourage interactions. If you are proactive, you will ensure your team is always within reach. It means staying in touch with the team.
Remember to use questions for ice-breakers, such as trivia quizzes or other activities encouraging sharing to create joy and delight.
Provide Resources for Ongoing Learning
By utilizing an online platform to offer courses and refresher programs on a regular basis, it is possible to give professional growth to the hands of each employee. With access to your employees who are on the move and on the go, you can reduce the risk, liability, and fines that result from carelessness.
Suppose you make courses available to all team members through the internet or mobile application. In that case, you can increase employee loyalty by helping them discover ways to improve their skills and practice. This is a great benefit, as a Glassdoor survey revealed that 19% of the employees surveyed in 2015 were adamant about training programs for employees more than a pay increase.
As a learner and manager yourself, you’ll find it beneficial to have access to the managerial tools when specific issues arise when you have a new employee.
Suppose your company creates an environment of continuous learning that begins with onboarding. In that case, you will ensure that your entire staff offers quality, reliable care and that your company is an industry leader, getting high-quality referrals from institutions and glowing community reviews.
Remember to foster the desire to improve by publically praising team members willing to push their education beyond the initial onboarding process and comply with compliance requirements.
Standardize Onboarding Best Practices
Once you’ve got the basics of these actions, you can come up with your specific agency plan to establish best practices in onboarding new hires. If you are able to evaluate your employees from the beginning, you’ll be more likely to keep the most talented individuals on your home health care or health care team.
