How Octave Scaled Onboarding By 10x, Driving Engagement and Belonging
Octave is creating a new standard for mental health care that's accessible and high quality for more people, while sustainable for providers.
Octave's success metrics:
10x
Scaled onboarding as hiring increased more than 10x
4.5
Consistently high employee satisfaction scores at 4.5 out of 5
97.8%
Engagement rate in HR programs (top 3 of all Enboarder customers!)
⚙️ The Challenge: How to Quickly Connect Contractors to Your Culture
How can you make mental health care more accessible to even more people? One way is through hiring more therapists. To better serve its mission, Octave made a strategic decision to build out its pool of therapists with external contractors.
Building a community of providers presented a unique challenge: How could Octave instill a sense of belonging with a group of contractors who have a lot of autonomy and often work off hours? “We didn’t have any infrastructure set up to support that,” recalls Kristin Manisco, program director of provider relations at Octave.
So the team went through a thorough process to figure out all the steps needed to quickly and seamlessly onboard the new providers. “We were doing OK, but we were only onboarding about 10 contractors per month,” says Kristin, who adds that the team was heavily reliant on Google Sheets and manually emailing checklists and forms. “It wasn’t super user-friendly.”
💬 “Then we saw what our talent acquisition team was doing in terms of hiring … and it was hard to imagine being able to manage an increasing volume at scale,” she said. That’s when the decision was made to look for a different solution. “I said: ‘OK, we have to get something in place before we start drowning,’” says Kristin.
💡 The Solution: A Workflow That Automates Communication and Connection in One System
A member of Octave’s operations team had used Enboarder in a previous role and really liked how the platform allows you to easily group people and give them the information they need based on specific characteristics. So Octave chose Enboarder to help automate and personalize communications for contract providers.
“It ended up only taking a month to get everything built out in Enboarder, which is really fast,” says Kristin. Now Octave’s marketing team gets an alert from Enboarder when someone’s coming on board, so they can start working on a bio for the website. Scheduling teams now get alerted through Enboarder so they can immediately start getting clients booked before they even start.
The programs Kristin and her team build are now connecting stakeholders from all over the company to their new providers at scale. One example of this hyper-personalization is Octave’s “Pro-Tip Series,” which is all about providing contractors with bite-sized information at the right cadence based on their start date. After day seven, they receive one tip each week, such as “how to communicate with clients” (week two) or “how to graduate clients” (week 12).
💬 "I loved the live orientation and the fact that the onboarding experiences was very ordered and organized." - Provider testimonial
“This is a unique thing that Enboarder allows us to do because it's all tied to their start date,” says Kristin. “With an email marketing tool, we’d have to blast everybody at the same time. Instead, this is based on individual journeys.”
Octave has also integrated Enboarder with its ATS, so backend logic now ensures contractors are entered into the correct pre-boarding workflow, saving Kristin and her team precious time and resources.
👑 The Results: High Satisfaction Scores and Plans to Build More Workflows
Thanks to Enboarder’s automated workflows, “nothing is falling through the cracks and everything is done at the exact right time it needs to be,” says Kristin. Over the course of one year, Octave grew from hiring 10 providers per month to more than 100.
What’s more, the engagement rate in Octave’s onboarding process is one of the highest out of all of Enboarder’s customers. Kristin laughs: “There’s no big secret to the high engagement rates. We set up our programs in a way that contractors will have no choice but to move through all of it.” But it’s working to improve the experience; the team is consistently seeing new hire satisfaction scores at 4.5 out of 5.
The team is also working on two-way communication, regularly soliciting feedback from providers that helps improve the onboarding experience. “We’ve built a lot of training collateral and a lot of those resources were born out of feedback from providers.” Keeping a pulse on the provider experience is top of mind for Kristin and her team: “We’re in the Enboarder dashboard multiple times per day,” she adds.
Octave is currently using onboarding and offboarding workflows but has plans to bring other internal teams onto the platform, from credentials, to marketing, to clinical hiring teams.
💬 “The biggest impact has been being able to manage such a high volume of people coming through – getting them trained and knowing where they are during the onboarding process. And providers have shared that it’s a much more structured onboarding than they’ve experienced before,” says Kristin.
Putting this structure in place immediately connects contractors to Octave’s culture, and fosters a sense of belonging and community right from the very start.