Onboarding during COVID-19: Create structure, connect people, and continue adapting

Quality Assessment of a Virtual Post Offer Placement Assessment in Employee Occupational Health Services

OBJECTIVE

The rise in remote work and increased access to technology allow opportunity for virtual onboarding. The aim of this project was to assess the quality of virtual onboarding versus the traditional in-person onboarding.

METHODS

A multidisciplinary team utilized a survey to evaluate staff and new hire candidate satisfaction with the in-person versus virtual post offer placement assessment (POPA).

RESULTS

The virtual POPA process maintained a high-level of quality and satisfaction among new hire healthcare candidates compared to in-person onboarding, with shorter appointment times. Employee Occupational Health Services staff and new hire candidates reported a preference for the virtual POPA process over traditional in-person onboarding.

CONCLUSIONS

The virtual POPA option reduced the length of appointments and maintained satisfaction and quality of service.

Faculty Onboarding for Workforce Readiness and Belonging

INTRODUCTION

An academic anesthesiology department benefits from recruiting faculty from various centers, from new graduates to experienced clinicians. Two critical objectives for a department are getting the faculty members up-to-speed thoroughly and efficiently and retaining the faculty members to benefit from their contributions over time. Onboarding plays a pivotal role in meeting both objectives. A successful onboarding process is critical to the enculturation of new employees into an existing work environment. Organizations focusing on improving onboarding practices increase overall success, decrease attrition, and enhance member performance and satisfaction. In this study, we examine our onboarding practices and then create structured tools to improve our processes.

METHODS

A survey gauging the effectiveness and satisfaction of our existing onboarding practices was administered to 11 faculty members hired between 2016 and 2018. Using feedback from the survey, our team identified critical components for improvement and quality measures for onboarding from before faculty arrival until after starting clinical duties. We also measured faculty satisfaction with the onboarding process at different time points. Updated onboarding practices targeting identified areas were implemented in one hiring cycle. Thirteen new faculty members hired over the course of the course of six months assessed the new system's effectiveness. The experience of the previous cohort was compared to the new cohort, highlighting the impact of their feedback on the onboarding process.

RESULTS

Our new best practices model, implemented to address primary gaps in our system, has shown promising results. The post-intervention cohort reported more favorable responses to the process, suggesting a positive shift in the onboarding experience. Further free-text feedback included recommendations for additional updates, offering a proactive approach to continuous improvement.

CONCLUSION

A structured, feedback-responsive onboarding process improved the overall experience for new hires. While the response was overwhelmingly positive, further refinement with subsequent iterations is needed to continually improve this process.

Keeping the frogs in the wheelbarrow: how virtual onboarding creates positive team-enabling cultures

INTRODUCTION

The post-COVID-19 great resignation puts both employee retention and the onboarding of employees in the spotlight. In an effort to maintain workforce levels, healthcare leaders are turning their attention to both recruitment (ie, bringing new frogs into the wheelbarrow) and practices that create positive, team-enabling, cultures (ie, keeping frogs in the wheelbarrow).

METHODS

In this paper, we illustrate our experience in building an employee onboarding programme as an efficient mechanism not only to immerse new professionals into existing teams but also to improve workplace culture and reduce team turnover. Key to its effectiveness, and in contrast with traditional large-scale culture change programmes, is that our programme provided a local cultural context via videos of our existing workforce in action.

RESULTS

This online experience, primed new joiners in cultural norms, helping them navigate critical early period of socialisation into their new environment.

A Literature Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic’s Effect on Sustainable HRM

The ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to emerge across all facets of the world of work, including the field of human resource management (HRM). Sustainable HRM, drawing on the triple bottom line elements of the economic, environmental and social pillars of sustainability, provides an ideal basis from which to understand the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and HRM. In this systematic literature review, we analyze peer reviewed articles published in the nexus of the pandemic and sustainable HRM, identifying the dimensions and extent of research in this topical area of study. Our CEDEL model—complicator–exposer–disruptor–enabler–legitimizer—conceptualizes our understanding of the role of COVID-19 in sustainable HRM. This paper provides a framework from which future studies can benefit when investigating the impacts of COVID-19, and a comprehensive identification of future research avenues.