It goes without saying: when you welcome a new nurse or physician onto your hospital team, your goal is to get them up-to-speed as quickly and fully as possible.
Clearly, your onboarding program plays a huge role here. Beyond orientation, immersing new hires in your procedures, best practices, compliance requirements, etc., is necessary to quality patient care.
But for new employees, adapting to a new work environment takes more than learning its processes and systems—and that’s especially true for those relocating from afar.
For them, the challenge isn’t merely learning their way around your hospital, but your entire city. It’s about moving their family and household goods. Finding a new place to live. Possibly buying and/or selling a house. It’s a lot of work, with a lot of emotion attached.
And until they’re largely settled, new hires may struggle to fully focus on work. The problem is: in a healthcare environment, how can you settle for anything less?
The answer is simple: you can’t. That’s why providing new hires with relocation services—not just a relocation allowance—makes so much sense, helping them achieve full productivity faster.
3 Ways Relocation Benefits Speed Assimilation
In our experience, hospitals are much more likely to offer prospective hires a flat relocation allowance versus multi-dimensional relocation benefits. What are relocation benefits? With a good relocation company, these include:
- Access to online tools for planning and booking a move
- Financial processes that streamline vendor payments and reimbursements
- A network of pre-screened vendors, including movers and realtors
- Access to curated, hyper-local information about the area, housing, schools, etc.
- The services of dedicated relocation specialists, available on demand
These tools and services have the power to simplify your incoming doctors and nurses’ relocation, freeing them to focus almost immediately on their work. For example, your new hires will…
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1. Stop Worrying about Moving Expenses
Give your new hire a flat relocation allowance, and they’ll need to devote their time to tracking expenses and submitting receipts - not to mention stress about exceeding their budget. But there’s a way to make this easier - give them a software program that tallies their expenses automatically in real-time.
Give them payments that are transferred directly from the employee’s relocation fund to an in-network vendor’s account, eliminating reimbursement altogether. And when reimbursements are required, receipts can easily be uploaded and processed online. Less red tape = more quality work time.
2. Stop Agonizing Over Vendor Selection
Choosing a reputable mover is no small feat - and neither is requesting and comparing quotations. It takes up a lot of valuable head space. One of the best ways hospitals can help? Give new hires access to a pre-screened network of quality movers and allow employees to request quotations electronically - then compare and book their choice online.
The same applies to selecting top realtors, allowing new hires to get right down to the business of buying and/or selling a house or finding a great rental. The sooner housing issues are settled, the better everyone sleeps - and that translates to more productive workdays.
3. Acclimate More Quickly to Your Area
Getting comfortable in a new city is a process. While most people perform their own online research before they come out to interview, the internet is a vast, uncharted place - and there’s no guarantee what they will find.
Smart hospitals can help their new employees acclimate faster by providing useful, validated information up front, by using a great relocation company. Housing info, neighborhoods, schools, attractions - it’s all right there, so employees start learning their way around, even before they arrive.
The Goal: Free Those Big Brains up to Focus on Patients!
Relocation involves a million details, even for smart, highly-organized healthcare professionals. But why require them to waste valuable brainpower on such small details during their first critical weeks on the job—when they can focus on patient care instead?
Offering relocation services to employees is a surefire way to help your new hires get in-the-swing faster, which translates to better patient care.
