Today in health, it, we're going to talk about onboarding a new staff member and how critical and how important that is, but I'm going to go through our process and what we do over here at this week, health. Tell you about it in a minute. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system. And creative this week health set of channels and events dedicated to transform health care. One connection at a time. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders.

Notable service. Now interprise health parlance. Certified health and Panda health. Check them out at this weekend.com/today. Hey, great companies and each one of them has a landing page on our website. Check it out and let us know what you think. Hey. Almost everything we talk about on this show is that this week health.com/news, this specific topic isn't because it's Friday. And on Fridays, I just talk about what has transpired this week.

And I just got done doing our onboarding. DEC for a new employee that is joining us in on a. On May 1st and it's an exciting new hire. You're going to want to stick around. That's a little tease. You're gonna want to stick around. Because, we brought directs on February 1st and that was a big deal and a, this one's a big deal too.

We're bringing on a former CIO. For a health system. So we will have three former CEOs from healthcare. On our team, starting on May 1st, it's going to be. It's going to be fun. Hey, one last thing, share this podcast with a friend or colleague you said is foundation for daily or weekly discussions. On the topics that are relevant to you in the industry. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, let's get to it. Onboarding is critical and onboarding is important for a lot of reasons. One is it gets people up to speed very quickly too.

Is it invites them into the culture. It invites them into the organization. And then you also give them the tools that they need and you give them the path that they need in order to be successful. And so we have a deck. First of all our process. Used to be two weeks. We have shortened it to one week. There's one full week where we don't really expect anything in the way of productivity from that person. We want them to onboard.

We want them to meet with every team member and have conversations. Now we're a 10 person team. It's a little different if you have a much larger team, but maybe they meet with all the department heads. Maybe they meet with whoever they meet with. In order to get up to speed, but they get an opportunity to establish those relationships, develop those relationships. Let me give you a little idea of what's in the deck. The the second slide Firstlight has the person's name.

And I would love to share that with you and I will on May 1st, but I'm not going to just yet. Second slide. By the end of this week, you will get to know the team, our vision and values. Hear the backstory and how we got here. Get to know our operations tools. We use, how everything is organized. Be empowered, knowing how your role fits into the bigger picture.

Getting get clear about your first. 90 days. With this week health. Okay, let me go through those real quick, get to know the team, our vision, and our values. It's important that they understand they are joining a culture, but we are inviting them into the culture. Every person you add to the organization. Changes the culture. We get into this idea of how, the culture is static and people have to melt into the culture.

No. Every time you add a person, it changes the culture. If you added a person to a room, it changes the conversation. It changes everything. We invite them in. Now there are guard rails and it's our vision and our values and the, in our history really become our guardrails for, Hey, this is why we do things.

Here's our vision, here's our values. And so we educate them on those things so that when they get outside of those. And they will, by the way, they just absolutely. And you get to say, Hey, let me bring you back to this. And they'll remember that first week when you talked about some of those things. I think it's important to, for people to know here are the backstory and how we got here as a second item.

And I think it's important to know that they're joining a story already in progress. They are not like the, this is not the first day that the organization existed. They are joining a story already in progress. So you have to give them the first couple of chapters Hey, what's going on? What am I joining?

Where am I at in this story? How has the care, however, the character has been developed? And how did we get here as much as you possibly can. Obviously, our backstory is about six years. When I was at St. Joe's, our backstory was like a hundred years, 125 years, but we did do that. We had a significant conversation about the sisters of St.

Joseph coming to the United States mission for healthcare, actually healthcare or education, but they came during a flu season and they were asked to do, to build hospitals. They went out into the community and they asked, what do you need? And they said hospitals. And they said, all right, we will build hospitals instead of schools. They came back and built schools later, but essentially that's how they got into healthcare.

So they need to understand they're joining a story already in progress. The next time and get to know our operations tools. We use how everything is organized. This is one of the ways we make sure they have access to all the tools they need on the day they start. And so we've been adding this person, giving them the tools.

And so when they join their email inbox, we'll have all these invitations to all the tools that they're going to use. They will also understand our meeting structure and how we assimilate ideas and those kinds of things. Next thing, be empowered, knowing your, how your role fits into the bigger picture.

It's important that they, we hired them for a reason. We don't just hire people and then say, oh, we'll figure out what you're going to do. We typically have an idea of what we want them to do. We want them to know what that is, and then we want them to be clear about the first. 90 day objectives because at the end of 90 days, you know what we do, we meet with them and talk to them about those objectives. We then go, the next slide would share with them what our annual goals are.

We narrow our annual goals down to three items. Okay. Dynamic partners, dynamic resources, dynamic community, and we have an individual metric under each one of those. Things so that they can look at it and go, oh, that's it. That's all you want to do now. There's obviously a lot of things underneath each one of those, but that's it.

We want to have dynamic partners. We want to have. We want to be a dynamic resource for the community, and we want to have a dynamic community which is our 2 29 project. We then go through our values. I'll spare you on the values. Maybe someday. I'll tell you what our values are. And then we share a video. Which is the foundation of our culture.

It's called a culture of honor. At some point, I'll come back and share some of this with you in the podcast. But Meghan LaClaire, who is in charge of our 2 29. Events is very much into studying culture and successful cultures. And she's had that. Bug since she was a college athlete at a division one school. And and she has done talks for coaches and other things in the in the world.

And she has this culture of honor that she has brought to us. And we've created a video for people to watch, by the way, we have four videos that they have to watch. Cause we figured we might as well capture it. And put it together. We're also good at it because this is what we do. And so they will watch that culture a hundred video.

Each of the videos is probably about 45 to 50 minutes long. And that's why we give them a whole week. All they're doing is watching videos and doing some, a meeting with people and doing some things that we get them to do. Next we give them are critical success factors. Around those three goals and we say, Hey here are the, let's see three, six. Nine. 13, we have 13 critical success factors in four key areas that they need to know and understand. Then we tell them about our quarterly priorities, how they, how we establish them and how they are measured.

So everybody in the organization. Has a set of clear objectives and clear metrics that they are measured by. And and this person, when they get added, they actually get a box on here. Where they have to put their objectives because they're going to be over a specific thing. And and what the what the metrics are that they're going to be doing.

And we update that on a quarterly basis. We then share some of the things like we have a slide with all of our team members, critical team members that they're going to have to relate to and talk to and get to know. We then tell them, Hey, here is your key priorities for the first 90 days. It's very simple and we tell them. We put them in order.

It's most important that you get number one, done. If you only work on number one and get that done for us, that's going to be a success. But this person specifically, because they're fairly high powered has four items that they're going to be working on. And then and then we, on a weekly basis, I have a one-on-one with all Mikey leaders and Mikey leaders have one-on-ones. With all the people that are under them and that we call that a personal priority.

Speed check. And what we do is it gives them an opportunity for at least 15 minutes every week to meet with somebody. Now, a lot of you have huddles and that kind of stuff. We do huddles as well, but this is an opportunity for them to meet with me. And say, Hey, one of the things I'm waiting on from you, or one of the things that you could provide clarity on, we are huge on clarity.

Everyone needs to be clear on what's happening. It's one of the ways that I believe that this remote work actually functions well, is that if everybody's clear, there's no roadblocks and we keep things going. Then we have a meeting structure and we try to adhere to this as much as we possibly can. We do not have meetings on Mondays or Fridays.

We try to keep them clean. And those are days. We expect people to get stuff done, get the strategic stuff done. By the way, this is internal or external, we try to keep those days clean and we have people whose job it is to meet with people externally. Jaris is in charge of our partners. But we still try to squeeze all of his meetings into Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday external.

So that on Mondays and Fridays, he can. Work on the strategic items. I try to do the same thing. I'm not always successful by the way. I will cheat from time to time. I threw that just today through a meeting on Monday. That we were unable to fit in this week. And I just threw me the on Friday as well.

It's so easy to fall back into it. But try to protect it. And my admin knows to try to protect it as well, but then we share with them our meeting structure. So we have a leadership meeting. Once a week, that's an hour, we have a staff meeting, all staff meeting 30 minutes. Every week where we get on, on, on board with each other. And then we have standup meetings throughout the week.

Now I do not attend the stand up meetings. It really is their opportunity to meet without me and to talk about me if they need to. We then have a few things that help them to acclimate. One of the things we found is people come in and they have all these great ideas and they just start throwing them out.

And I had to be the one to say, no, we're not going to do that. No, we're not going to do that. What we decided to do is get in front of that. And there's a criteria that's in my head that helps them to understand what is good and what is bad from an idea standpoint. I want them to bring forward ideas. But I don't want to become the department of know either.

So we talked to them about when they go, Hey, I have this idea for a new event or a new podcast or a new thing. We talk about it. We have a value diagram that they can literally look at the value diagram and put up. Point in that value diagram and then say, oh, I see why this is not going to work. It doesn't add enough value to the healthcare leader, or it doesn't add enough value to the partner.

It doesn't add enough value to us as a company, so they can answer their own questions and say, okay, how can I change this? So it adds more value to the healthcare leader or so forth and so on. So there's a value process. There's a creative process as well within our organization. And what we found is people were coming in, they were going into our meetings and spouting off all sorts of really cool things that we should do.

And by the way, this is all across the board. Everybody would come in and go, I have this idea. The weekly meetings is not the best place to do that. The best place to do that is with a creative team or governance group. And that kind of stuff. Now for us our, our creative processes essentially. Have a one-on-one with bill. And that's how it is today.

Now it will change over time, but that's how it is today. So they sit down with me and go, I have this idea. We go through it and I will either encourage them and say, Hey that's close. Let's try to do this. And then let's bring this to the leadership team. Or I will say here's why that doesn't really fit what we do. It might be great for backers might be great for health system.

CIO might be great for someone else, but that's not necessarily in line with who we are to the industry and those kinds of things. And so it becomes a education process and hopefully encourages them to come back with more ideas, better ideas. As we move along, I'm going to keep going. I know I'm over.

And then we share with them, some of we share with them our profit model, like how we make money that may or may not be important to you, but maybe it is, this is how we measure it or how we measure our organization. We share with them some key processes. Then we have key links to diag to documents, right?

So we have our leadership and operations deck that we it's the same deck every week that we go through and we just keep updating it. We have our staff meeting deck. We have our critical success factors. This is our dashboard for the entire company and it's in one when Google sheet. And then we have the personal priority speech X, so they can be prepared for their one-on-one. And then there's a bunch of master files and that kind of stuff, but it's a 4, 8, 9.

We try to simplify whenever we can, if things can come together. We do that. So there's nine files that people should know about. So that they can reference at any given time and they don't have to send emails off to somebody and go. Hey, when is that show scheduled? There's a show schedule, click on that link.

You can see everything you need to see, or where are we at with that metric? We have one file for all those metrics. And then we have the tools that we use. And we just list them out. These are the top 10. These are the 10 tools that we use as an organization. And you've gotten access to all of these tools.

Just ensure that you have access to all of them. If you need training on any of them, they'll let us know. And it's also this is a primer for how we communicate as a company. We used things like we use email, but we use slack as well. And we have a communications framework for when it's appropriate to use email when it's appropriate to use slack, when it's appropriate to use text. When it's appropriate to make a phone call. We decided to formalize that because it was driving me nuts is primarily, when you're a 10 person company and, people aren't picking up a phone at a certain point, you just say, okay, here's our process.

Let's make sure we follow it. And then we introduced the four videos so that they are ready to go with those four videos. And then we talked to them about a handful of other things that are relevant to their specific job. And again, then we give them, Hey, this is what this week's going to look like.

Here's what you're going to be doing. And. And I've talked to you about the fresh eyes project before. We have everybody when they come into the organization. Give us the greatest value they can, which is a set of fresh eyes on all of our stuff. And they'll look at our production process. They'll look at our website, they'll look at the listen to some of our podcasts and they'll say, Hey, why don't you or. Have you considered or, Hey, there's a spelling error on your website, so forth and so on. And we have gotten hundreds and hundreds of changes and ideas as a result of the hiring process.

So that is our onboarding. I think it's critical. To spend time if you were the leader, I think it's critical to spend that time. A lot of you might just hand this over to HR and oh, they did the company onboarding and use it as a throw away. Don't use it as a throwaway, even if HR does their thing.

I think there should be an it organization onboarding. We had it at St. Joe's when I was CIO, I thought it was critical and it gets people up to speed quicker. It gives them a better chance of being successful. Keep in mind that the best hiring manager is 50 50. 50 50% chance. They're gonna do a good hire, a 50% chance they're gonna hire the wrong person. You want to increase those odds as much as possible in a good onboarding process. Does help that process. All right.

Hey, that's all for today. If you have questions about it, shoot me an a, you know how to find me, don't forget, share this podcast with a friend or colleague. You said as a foundation to keep the conversation going and to mentor. We want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Notable service now, enterprise health parlance, certified health and 📍 Panda health. Check them out this week. Health. Dot com slash today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.