The Role of Onboarding in Retaining Healthcare Talent

Turnover, turnover, turnover: in the healthcare industry, it’s an ongoing refrain.

After all, the current hospital turnover rate stands at a worrisome 20.7%. That’s why 96% of healthcare employers cite improving retention as a key goal. If your hospital is one of them, it’s time to rethink some related HR factors, starting with your onboarding process.

Why? Because while multiple factors impact a healthcare professional’s decision to stay or go, many are rooted in—or connected to—their onboarding experience. For this reason, it’s important to understand the relationship between onboarding and retention—and to adopt some strategies that elevate both of them.

Drilling Down: The Link Between Onboarding and Retention

The link between the onboarding experience and healthcare retention makes sense intuitively, but it’s also confirmed by HR research. Consider these findings:

• According to a study published by Glassdoor, a strong onboarding program boosts new hire retention by a staggering 82%. What are the hallmarks of such programs? They: 
  • Actively help new hires assimilate into the workforce
  • Create socialization opportunities with peers, and 
  • Leverage technology to help get new hires up to speed faster  
• Most new hires decide if they’ll stay with an employer in their first six months on the job, according to Becker Hospital Review findings. Those early days and weeks are critical; you can’t afford a perfunctory onboarding process.
• According to Gallup research, only 12% of employees think their employer does a great job onboarding new hires. The key: to forge a beneficial emotional connection between worker and employer.  
• Hospitals that invest in onboarding improvements find it pays off. For example, when UC Davis Health launched a relationship-focused onboarding/professional development campaign for nurses, it yielded a stunning 92% retention rate, far exceeding the national average of 22.5%.

Finally, when SHRM surveyed former new hires who left an employer within the first six months, they learned: 

• 33% reported receiving little or no onboarding
• 15% said a poor onboarding experience contributed to their resignation
• 23% said that receiving better job guidelines might have helped them stay 
• 21% believed that they weren’t trained properly 
• 17% wished for better rapport with coworkers
• 9% wanted more guidance from managers and coworkers

Clearly, a great onboarding experience makes a difference. Now, how do you provide one?

7 Ways to Improve the Onboarding Experience

Unfortunately, many employers limit their onboarding process to routine tasks like completing forms and learning HR policies. While necessary, they don’t help employees build that all-important sense of belonging. To do that, consider these strategies.

• Start the onboarding process the minute a candidate accepts your offer. Share your onboarding plan and timeline, so they know what happens next. This will help them feel valued, included and confident in their decision.     
• Provide new hires with lots of carefully curated information about your organization and area, consolidated in an easy-to-access location—say, an internal webpage or within your HR platform. This can accelerate assimilation. Need ideas? See UrbanBound’s Company and Location pages for relocating employees. 
• Give new hires an FAQ of less-official-info that everyone wants to know before their first day: the lowdown on the dress code, a guide to insider jargon (is it the ER? ED? The Pit?), parking tips, etc.   
• Arm them with hyperlocal information about your immediate area, provided by employees. At UrbanBound, we offer these as Co-Worker Insights to relocating employees. It’s invaluable for giving newbies the lay of the land.
• Provide new hires with a mentor or buddy. One study found that employees who were mentored were 49% more likely to stay with an employer than those who were not. 
• Hold off on the paperwork—make their first day fun and exciting. Host a small welcome party. Introduce them to as many staffers as possible. Give them the full tour. Make sure they’re taken to lunch. 
• Show that you care. Yes, compensation and benefits matter. But when it comes to retention, relationships matter more—so shower your new hires with some TLC from Day One.