Successful employee onboarding during COVID

Gathering industry employee benchmarking data over many years, CarePage has long studied the data behind what drives employees to quit and move on, and engagement is a key, leading indicator. 

This year, our analysis has shown that we have started to see an increase in voluntary attrition levels, and we see now that people are back to changing jobs at pre-pandemic levels across the care industry.

Our industry benchmark data has also indicated that the ‘new employee onboarding process’ is critical to increasing tenure with an organisation.

Care providers are now contending with onboarding new employees with the restrictions of covid protocols in place, resulting in a new environment for new starters. It is becoming increasingly critical for organisations to try and on-board new team members in a way that builds engagement and helps new staff to contribute quickly.

Human Resource experts universally agree that there are four key onboarding goals to focus on: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection.

Organisations can create an industry-leading onboarding processes by ensuring these four pillars form the crux of their onboarding excellence programme. In addition, new employees must be clear on performance expectations of their role and feedback must be regular as to whether they are meeting them.

Employees who join organisations are often quite excited about starting and that excitement translates into higher levels of engagement for the first year of employment. Employee engagement data that CarePage has collected, indicates to us this “honeymoon” period is missing for those who onboarded during the pandemic. It is these individuals that are most at-risk of disengagement and likely turnover. Surveying employees at every stage of their job lifecycle has never been more important; here at CarePage, we create detailed employee journey maps with each of our customers, to ensure we understand what is happening at each key employee touch point (from onboarding through to exit).

Moving through Covid, people managers will need to forge better, stronger relationships and ensure their employees are connected to the organization and to their teams. It may be more difficult in the covid environment, but it is possible, and it is critical to listen and act on employee feedback.