New-Employee Orientation in Healthcare: Start with the Heart
- Paul Grossman • Orientation Guru
- Dec 1, 2016
- 4 min read
I've personally attended about two dozen new-employee/new-hire orientation programs in the healthcare industry. Not because I continually jumped from job to job — just the opposite: part of my job (where I was for the full 10 years prior to starting this company) was to help improve clients' new-employee orientation (NEO) experiences. The process included me attending each client's orientation program "undercover," as if I were a new employee joining their healthcare system... sort of a mystery shopper.
The longest healthcare orientation program I attended was five full days. Those five days did not include any special technical or job-specific training (that would come later, in week two!). It did include an agenda that began with a manager reception line for all new employees as they arrived, featured a baseball game somewhere in the middle of the week, and even included an animated video based on the bestselling business book "Who Moved My Cheese?" It was entertaining, engaging, informative and long. Very long.
One of the shortest healthcare orientation programs was just two hours, but it was unforgettable: After a nice continental breakfast, about 20 minutes into the content, I heard an unmistakable sound coming from over my right shoulder. Just a couple of seats behind me was a brand new employee snoring. Loudly. Shaking-the-acoustical-tiles-in-the-ceiling loud.
The other new employees around him were trying to wake him, gently, to no avail. Soon the thunderous snoring and the giggles from those nearby became louder than the mic'd executive giving her welcome in the front of the room. Only at that point did someone from the organization do anything about the new hire (they sent him home after asking if he felt OK).
All of the new-employee orientation experiences I had were different, but almost every one did have one thing in common: their focus was not first and foremost on winning the "heart" of the new employee. That's where you have to begin. That's one of the guiding principles of successful new-employee experiences... and really, for all of healthcare. It's a simple-but-elegant principle that I'll cover in detail in future blog posts, but for right now, here it is: Begin every interaction on the human/emotional level ("heart") before taking care of anything business or clinical. It's a fundamental concept that I learned from my original training and consulting mentors back at Kaset International. In addition to having a powerful, positive impact on patient satisfaction, it also increases employee engagement and drives productivity.
Inevitably, NEOs usually gloss over the human level — the "heart" — and prioritize the "business" level, beginning what should be a very positive experience with mundane paperwork, sign-in procedures or worse: nothing at all. Except for the five-day extravaganza mentioned above, I would always find a couple of early-bird new employees sitting in an empty room, knowing nobody else, waiting for something, anything, to happen, heads buried in their mobile phones. Maybe there was a fleeting handshake greeting from an HR executive, or a distracted "good morning" from a presenter trying to get the laptop, projector, screen, etc. ready to go.
Industrywide, with few exceptions, new employees sitting in their orientation are considered a captive (captured?) audience, and the opportunity is seen as too good to pass up to cram as much "business" information down them as possible.
Tasks, policies, procedures, compliance... all of it gets jammed into the eight hours or so when your organization has its best, only opportunity to make a positive first impression on the newest employees and create an experience that wins their "heart" for years to come. By not starting with the "heart," the message sent may be inadvertent, but it's clear: "We're a task-and-process organization first... people come second." Is that the message you want to send? Is that what it says in your mission statement?
Even the materials given to new employees usually reflect similar thinking: divided tabs of policies, log-in procedures, infection-control reporting forms, parking lot diagrams, and the anonymous phone number to report compliance issues. Where's the "heart"?!? A cursory nod to mission, vision and values, early in the day, with no context, simply isn't enough.
There is no question that all of the "nuts and bolts" of joining a new healthcare organization are important, but they shouldn't be prioritized over the "human" aspects of the overall experience. With a limited amount of time allotted for new-employee orientation, you have to ask yourself: do we want to devote valuable face-to-face time for information that could be handled differently? Online? Internet-based?
Focusing on the human/heart/emotional aspects of orientation is what drives engagement. Highly engaged employees are 38% more likely to have above-average productivity. (Source: Workplace Research Foundation) So even if you wanted to focus on productivity, policies and procedures, it still makes sense to start with the heart.
After "mystery shopping" and debriefing a client on some of the improvements she could make to her health system's new-employee orientation experience, she responded that she thought I was some kind of "orientation guru." While not ready to equate myself with the highly learned and revered spiritual teachers of the Hindu and Buddhist religions, I'm happy to adopt the more modern meaning and hope to teach new-employee orientation best practices as a sort of "guru."
In future blog posts, I'll dissect specific elements of what it takes to create engaging, informative orientation experiences with impact, including practical learnings from healthcare organizations who have found success in creating great orientation experiences. I look forward to our exchanges on these pages.
Comments