For many employees, onboarding is the last step before they can begin their job. It’s a deluge of paperwork, federally mandated workplace notifications, and agency-wide directives. Sometimes, training videos are also required. Once this process is completed, new employees can finally begin their job, meet their team, and learn about the reality of the job they’ve accepted.
If this sounds like the onboarding process at the agency you oversee, this is a problem. Onboarding should include the information so important that employees can’t begin their job without it. But if employees aren’t engaged in the process, they aren’t internalizing this information. This means they’re starting their job before they’re even qualified to work at the agency.
Onboarding should be spread out over a few days, instead of packed into a single day. Day 1 and Day 2 tasks are likely to be required by law or necessary to perform any work at the agency. Beyond these must-complete tasks, however, employees benefit much more from a drip of valuable information than from the flood that they get in many onboarding processes.
This is especially true of information about how to interact with investigative teams, such as Inspectors General, ethics boards, ombudsmen or other similar groups. If information about reporting fraud and whistleblower protection is delivered on the same day as an employee’s healthcare forms, payroll information and details about their working environment, they’re extremely unlikely to remember anything about your team. If it’s delivered alone, several days after they begin their job, it will get far more attention.
In marketing, this approach is called a drip campaign. Rather than flood customers with information about a company’s products, services, and special offers, a drip campaign provides one small piece of information at a time, spreading communications out over weeks or months. You’ve almost certainly been on a drip campaign – nearly every marketing team uses them. They’re prevalent because they’re effective.
A drip campaign doesn’t have to end after a few weeks, either. Employees can be reminded of how to report fraud every 180 days after their first day of employment, for instance, ensuring that there’s never too much time between witnessing misconduct and being reminded how to report it.
How are the employees in your agency notified about what misconduct is and how to report it? Is it delivered along with other information critical to them, or is it delivered alone? Is it delivered once, or is it kept top-of-mind with periodic emails or other communication?
If it’s getting buried in the onboarding deluge, it’s probably worth revisiting. In fact, if you can, it’s well worth planning out a communication schedule for your office to agency employees. This will greatly increase your chances of employees reporting waste, fraud and abuse on a timely basis, and may also help prevent it from happening in the first place.
To learn how CMTS can help your investigative team close cases more quickly, call us at 855-345-6363 or email us at Team_CMTS@securecasemanagement.com.