From the Desk to the Ward:
How MercyAscot Is Implementing Experience-driven Onboarding
MercyAscot is one of New Zealand’s largest private surgical facilities, with 19 operating theatres, an intensive care unit and coronary care facilities. With more than 650 staff across three locations, they are committed to delivering exceptional patient care.
The Problem
MercyAscot had already embarked on an extensive onboarding transformation process when they came across Enboarder. The People & Capability team took the onboarding process back to square one, reconstructing the program from the ground up.
Challenge one - flexibility
On any day of the week the MercyAscot team might be onboarding a registered nurse, an anaesthetic technician, a clinical nurse advisor, IT help desk staff, a customer support team member, a marketing advisor, or someone who is joining the operations team. Some of these people are shift workers, with non-standard work hours.
One of the challenges MercyAscot’s People & Capability Manager Rob Eden wanted to address was how fragmented the onboarding process was across different departments, while also taking into account the practicalities and requirements of different roles.
“People who were starting jobs in the corporate office were having a very different experience to those who were starting in the wards. It was really important that we established a great process that achieved consistency but was also flexible enough to cater to the different sorts of roles that we hire for.”
Challenge two - digitally-optimised engagement
“Managers were needing to fill out four or five forms to arrange IT set up for new hires.”
As part of their onboarding rebuild, the People & Capability team had developed an ‘onboarding handbook’ that outlined all the things that people needed to know on day one. It was up to the managers to spend time finding the handbook along with all the additional administrative forms on the intranet, printing them off, and sending the documents through internal mail.
“We had no oversight of what managers were doing and what stages new hires were at in the process.”
The team spent hours chasing up internal stakeholders for status updates - had the hard copy of the signed contract been received? Has orientation been organised? Have the pre-employment checks been completed?
Rob’s team knew they could make the entire onboarding process smarter and easier with the help of digital solutions.
The tool also needed to enable them to engage with people well before they turned up on day one, and also to ensure all the necessary tasks were being completed without relying on individual managers to run the processes individually.
“We wanted to engage with new employees as soon as they signed their contracts and continue that up to day one – it was a big gap in our process and a huge opportunity that we were missing.”
We looked at a range of onboarding solutions, but those offered by the bigger HRIS providers were too generic and did not offer us the flexibility to customise the process.”
The Solution
Rob’s team are using Enboarder to onboard all new staff that join MercyAscot. It has worked so well for onboarding that they are also in the process of incorporating offboarding, and bringing an additional business, radiology practice Mercy Radiology, on to the platform.
The People & Capability team are now in the process of integrating Enboarder with SnapHire to enable a seamless experience flowing from recruitment through to onboarding, and they are also looking at opportunities further down the line to integrate Enboarder across their wider HRIS strategy.
MercyAscot’s team knew they wanted a software solution that would deliver on the engagement front – and that’s why Enboarder topped the list. In addition to the engagement piece they wanted a solution that was:
- digital
- customisable (including being able to brand it)
- could track tasks
- easy to use
- didn’t require an onerous setup process
- met their important security and data privacy requirements
The Results
The People & Capability team have seen outstanding results from Enboarder, enabling greater efficiencies and boosting engagement:
- Managers are saving up to two hours of work for each person that they hire (a reduction of at least 50%)
- By automating time-consuming manual processes, the team has seen a significant drop in email volumes
- They are now able to collect valuable engagement data, allowing them to identify pain points and respond to them effectively
- Feedback from new hires and managers has been overwhelmingly positive – and participation rates are through the roof (for January-March 2019, employee participation rate was 94% and manager participation at 88%)
- Managers are more accountable and it’s easy for the People & Capability team to track when tasks are completed and ensure that the process is running smoothly and consistently for every new hire.
“For an onboarding process to deliver, we knew it had to be focused on the human experience and how a new hire actually feels when they start a job. Enboarder has enabled us to build an onboarding program that is truly experience-driven and we are delighted with the results.”
“We wanted to engage with new employees as soon as they signed their contracts and continue that up to day one – it was a big gap in our process and a huge opportunity that we were missing.”
Managers are saving up to two hours of work for each person that they hire (a reduction of at least 50%)
"Enboarder is a fantastic tool and has gone above and beyond, not just transforming our onboarding but also empowering our team to lead a game-changing digital shift within our organisation. I’ve been working with HR technologies my entire career and most platforms manage to do one thing well but there is always some sort of limitation or ‘but it can’t do xyz’. Enboarder is the exception to that rule."