
Staffing Challenges: Best Practices for Getting New Teammates Up & Running
In December 2024, Pure Processing’s Voice of the Customer Committee met to discuss a topic that’s never out of style in sterile processing:staffing & retention challenges. Jessica Hatch, Sterile Processing Manager at Confluence Health’s Central and Marus Campuses and VOC Member, agreed to extend the VOC conversation with us to dive deeper into effective ways to get new teammates off the ground and contributing to the department’s goals. Having onboarded eight new teammates over the last year, she has faced and overcome a number challenges regarding onboarding and training. She’s identified a number of best practices to help growing departments make the most of a new employee’s training.
Assessing New Teammates
Hatch explained that earlier in her career, it was customary to assess new hires with a survey about one month into their training. These assessments are essentially check-ins designed to gauge how people were feeling in their role and whether on pace with learning objectives.
When Hatch opted to move the first of these check-ins to one week into training rather than after 30 days, she discovered something surprising. New hires weren’t feeling confident in their learning objectives and needed more guidance in their initial first week of training. She explained:
“And then I started [an assessment] at the first week and the feedback that I got is they were massively overwhelmed.”
By checking in on new hires earlier in the training process, Hatch found that she could modify training programs and pacing to better meet their needs and offer clarity.
Existing Teammates Are Critical
Hatch also found that getting current teammates on board with training strategies is a critical component to their success. Your existing team
will likely play an important role in the training of new teammates, so ensuring they understand newly introduced training policies, pacing, and methods will help them assist and train new hires in a way that’s aligned with your goals.
Failing to fill them in or not getting their buy-in related to training practices can cause them to inadvertently undermine your training objectives for new teammates. They may teach them ‘old’ ways of doing things and potentially cause confusion as to how certain tasks need to be executed to ensure positive outcomes.
Structure Leads to Success
Structure is a key to success in most circumstances, and that is certainly the case in sterile processing departments. Creating a well-structured training program that clearly outlines weekly training objectives and how to complete them gives a new teammate a clear understanding of their manager’s expectations, as well as sets personal expectations and what they can anticipate working on and learning in a given week.
A well-structured training regimen also helps new teammates determine how their learning material relates to their key competencies, and how it will factor into their day-to-day work within the department.
Structure isn’t only critical in your training program. A clear structure within your department’s organizational hierarchy is also crucial. New hires will undoubtedly have many questions throughout the first few months. Knowing who they can go to for clarity and answers ensures that they overcome hurdles in an efficient, effective way. It can also keep you out of the weeds! When a manager is out of the office, knowing who to go to with questions helps a new teammate immensely.
Create Department Champions
Training within sterile processing departments covers a lot of different topics, tasks, methods, and information, often more than one person can adequately cover with a new hire while still doing their job effectively. Giving one teammate the job of training a new hire can lead to them losing effectiveness in their role and burning out trying to cover everything their teammate needs to know.
Hatch has overcome this challenge with an idea that came about in the December VOC call: creating department champions. As Hatch explained:
“I’ve been creating champions on specific topics by approaching my Tech 3’s and asking them to identify what topic they are most knowledgeable on and having them become the champion of that topic in the department.”
These are not champions in an arena; these are topical champions, people that are tasked with knowing all the ins and outs of specific tasks and processes within a department. Having dedicated teammates associated with specific aspects of a department allows a new hire to get in-depth, practical guidance from their teammates while maintaining the same level of enthusiasm and practical guidance throughout.
Having new hires learn from a variety of existing teammates also has the added benefit of introducing them to the rest of the team in an organic way, improving their integration into the team.
Communication is Key
Effective communication and the clarity it facilitates is key to a new hire’s success. Clarity through communication not only helps a new teammate understand what’s expected of them, but also what they can expect of their teammates and manager. Open lines of communication and openness to regular, candid exchanges between teammates and their managers help new hires overcome hurdles and challenges as they arise, rather than waiting until the ‘appropriate’ time, potentially wasting valuable training time.
Communication needs to go both ways, though. Hatch explained that it’s important for managers to be reflective and communicative about their shortcomings and acknowledge when they make mistakes. Demonstrating that it’s alright to make mistakes in your department, so long as you own them, encourages teammates to share when they’ve made mistakes, or ask for clarity before a mistake might be made.
Conclusion
When it comes to staffing, there are plenty of moving parts that add complexity and difficulty. Finding candidates is one challenge, but getting new hires off the ground and contributing to the success of your department is different challenge entirely.
Using the best practices identified by Hatch can help you streamline your onboarding and training processes, while simultaneously making those processes more effective for your team and continuing to refine them. The sooner teammates begin contributing to the department’s success, the better off the whole team is!
Interested in other VOC content? Click here to see all of our VOC blogs and content!
About: Voice of the Customer Committee
The Voice of the Customer Committee is a panel of healthcare and instrument reprocessing professionals who have graciously donated their time to share their expertise and guidance on current challenges faced by the instrument reprocessing community. Through sharing their insights, experiences, and best practices, we have been given the opportunity to share these findings with our readership. We’d like to thank our VOC members for their outstanding input and insights, as well as their time! Thank you for your continued partnership, and all you do.