Is Off-Boarding the New Onboarding for Senior Care?

Many companies have carefully crafted their onboarding practices, spending a great deal of time welcoming new employees, offering orientations, tours and training. While an onboarding program is incredibly important to set new employees up for success, many employers have failed to recognize the importance of off-boarding.With high turnover rates across the senior care industry, leaders should be paying as much attention to how employees leave their organization as they do to how employees come into their organization.

Here are 3 reasons off-boarding should be your next workforce initiative:

1. Boomerang employees are more common. According to a survey by Workplace Trends, in the past five years, 85% of HR professionals say they have received job applications from former employees, and 40% say their organization hired about half of those former employees who applied. 46% of Millennials would consider returning to their former employer. But if your company does not take care as employees are leaving, great former employees may decide they would never want to work for you again. In a competitive talent market, good former employees can be great return hires—they already understand your culture, and most likely will need less training.
2. Former employees can be brand ambassadors. A June 2015 CareerArc study found that 52% of job seekers researched employers on company websites and on social media before applying. 17% said they asked for information from personal or professional contacts who had knowledge of the company. Help former employees tell a positive story about your organization with a strong off-boarding process.
3. Former employees can help with referrals. Referrals identify the best candidates according to a July 2015 Jobvite study. If you can provide a positive and seamless off-boarding process, you have a better opportunity to maintain positive relationships with past employees and add them to your referral networks.

What does it mean to have a successful off-boarding process? Ultimately you want your former employees to be advocates for your organization.

Remain positive in your interactions with the employee and in your communications with other staff members during their transition out of the company. Decide ahead of time if you are willing to re-hire former employees and any stipulations attached. Make sure every departing employee is aware of the rules.

Before the employee leaves, ask for some honest feedback, both positive and negative. This is a great way to learn possible causes of turnover, and ways to fix it. Be open to what the employee has to say, and ask for suggestions to improve. You may also want to ask departing employees to fill out a survey, so you can track trends overtime.

For example, in a recent survey with McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, we found that the top three reasons senior care employees left their jobs were:

1. Poor work-life balance (42%)
2. On-the-job stress (36%)
3. Working un-preferred shifts (32%)

If you’ve seen similar trends at your organization, consider offering employees work-life balance by allowing them to work preferred shifts. It may seem like a big task to tackle, especially if your organization is using pen and paper to create schedules, but a flexible, automated scheduling platform can make it a lot easier.

Addressing common reasons for turnover can help prevent it. Some employee turnover is unavoidable, but the goal should be to reduce turnover as much as possible, and minimize the negative impact of any turnover that happens. When top-performing employees decide to leave, it’s easy to write them off and wish them good riddance. But taking the time to help them have a positive transition can only benefit your organization. Your company’s reputation is tied to former employees, for better or worse.