I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a new hire for a major medical center. The medical center had been recruiting for this position for a number of months and was convinced that bringing on someone in this specialty was going to make a huge difference to the bottom line and to the health and well being of a significant number of patients in the community.
It is often easy when in the nitty gritty of negotiating to get sidetracked by any number of things. However, employers who are clear about why they are hiring, recognize that getting lost in the minutiae of negotiation serves no one. My client however, did a masterful job of listening carefully to the expressed needs of the soon to be new employee. Her diligence and thoughtfulness, assured that we arrived at the other side of the negotiation with all parties feeling optimistic about the transaction and enthusiastic about the long term potential of working together to accomplish some really neat things once the new hire arrives to begin work.
The take away from this is simple – for the new hire expectations are personal; for the employer the stakes are relative. Even when seemingly deal breaker obstacles in negotiation surface, there is always a careful and purposeful way to assure both sides feel heard and that accommodations are made that meet the needs of both parties. In the situation with my client, the client merely kept the ultimate gain at the top of mind and the details took care of themselves.
Note, that over and over again, I’ve seen the power and finesse of the facilitated negotiation led by a sharp recruiter/search consultant. With the search executive as the go between, there is a buffer between enthusiastic expectations of the soon to be new hire and the reality of the prospective employer’s benefit package. The most significant contribution is that the search executive enables both parties to work out their issues conceptually in a safe space – within the conversation with between search executive and candidate/client. Then edges are smoothed for both parties as the negotiation proceeds. Most importantly, the recruiter can help prevent candidate “fall off” by testing the candidate’s expectations well in advance of the actual negotiation. With the up front known expectations of the candidate, the vision of the new hire’s contribution and the reality of the hiring company’s employment offering – the end product was a successful negotiation – both parties looking forward to a mutually successful future.
Happy & healthy hiring.
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2 comments:
My perspective is biased as it comes from experience at my organization, Pathworks. While I accept it may be biased, I do not believe it is wrong. The key issue is worker productivity. The process of taking a Worker from new hire to productive employee is broken. No matter how qualified and how talented the new hire is there are unique processes and procedures in Hospitals a Worker must navigate in order to become productive. These broken processes result in lost days of time from your already productive employees and lost time to activity from the new hires. Typically this is broken into two discrete elements, the HR on-boarding and the Hospital specific activity on-boarding. The HR on-boarding is ensuring the infrastructure to perform the worker’s role is in place. Getting on the payroll, setting up security access, providing desk space, getting in the employee directory, instigating benefits, all these tasks must be performed in order to get the new Worker active. All mundane tasks that while repeated ad nauseam, still do not always get put in place in a timely enough fashion to have the requisite environment ready for the Worker to be productive. This creates Patient confusion, slows time to value as the Worker is unable to perform their tasks correctly; perhaps their phone doesn’t work, something as trivial as this which ultimately can have a major impact on the operation harmony of a Hospital.
The second phase is getting the Worker to fully understand their role, their own personal daily tasks and activities, and prepare them to manage the variances that occur in unusual circumstances, such as a multi-patient emergency multi-patient or mass casualty incident.
The typical process for on-boarding a new Worker is on-the-job mentoring or buddy systems. You take a talented and experienced Worker from their daily productivity and apply their skills to walking the new person through their new tasks one at a time. All too often this is not performed in a structured fashion, even with appropriate training, a mentor is still required, usually the best staff. If not the best staff? Then you have inferior staff training new Workers in inefficient or inappropriate activities. New Workers are missing key pieces of information to perform their roles effectively. It is impossible to ensure that every process, task and activity is taught correctly so the new hire gets their job done right the first time, every time. The new Worker will come across situations that are out of their daily routine and at best, need to rely on others to help them resolve the problem, or worse try to solve it on their own without recourse to the skills and experience of others.
This inadequate process results in a number of tertiary problems that is costing your Hospital money and patient satisfaction issues. The hand off from HR to the functional unit is not always seamless, leaving new hires waiting unproductively to be moved through the process. There is no method of measuring how effective your process is at getting employees as productive as possible, as quickly as possible, and therefore there is no method of improving this process using empirical evidence. Over any given year, this results in lost productivity, lost time to value from the new Worker, a drop in employee satisfaction, increased turnover, and in poor patient experience. The net result, this poorly managed and documented process is costing business dollars off the bottom line.
What is needed is an active, living employee handbook that is one consistent document taking an employee across departments, from HR to the line of business, each step documented and managed as they migrate from new hire to productive Worker. This living document needs to have all of the information required to move a new hire though the learning processes and provide them with a reference source to initially train them and to which they can refer as their role progresses. Ultimately this produces a Hospital tool that gives management insight into the process of Worker on-boarding, delivering visibility in the time to value of bringing on a new hire, and understanding when and where processes can be improved.
The solution is a new hire on-boarding process solution that is an always-available employee handbook, not only covering the traditional elements of an employee handbook, e.g. HIPPA policies. It must include all the activities, tasks and actions the Worker requires to do their job from the first day and support them as they progress through the Hospital, and multiple situations. Without this solution Hospitals are wasting millions of dollars trying to paper the cracks in the miasma of documents, and spoken word that is the new hire on-boarding process of today. The innovative solutions available today for employee on-ramping offer a rapid time to value for your organization and for the Worker. We refer to this process as Pathworking, it is about taking a worker through every step of a process along a path a step at a time. Pathworking results in every worker knowing what to do, when to do it and how to do it.
Onboarding is a new term meant for hiring and orientation. There are many onboarding companies which develops and uses onboarding software for its HR purposes. Some of the companies include Silkroadtech, Enwisen, Taleo etc.
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