Why Onboarding is Key to Building Your Health and Wellness Practice
“There’s a saying in group therapy that goes ‘When you bring someone new into a group, you must acknowledge you have a new group.’”
This is a piece of wisdom Matt Lundquist shared with us when we spoke about how he onboarded nine team members to his Manhattan-based psychotherapy practice, Tribeca Therapy. To Matt, Founder and Clinical Director, culture and onboarding are interwoven. A big part of his job is building a culture where his team feels valued and heard from the moment they’re hired. This helps them contribute to the practice’s operations and growth.
Over the span of Tribeca Therapy's 12 years (and counting), Matt has uncovered and refined several onboarding principles he swears by. They’ll help shake up your current perspective on hiring and building your practice. Let’s dive in.
The interview process is an important first step for onboarding
Having success with onboarding begins during the interview process. This is the time to be clear on your practice’s values and needs. The “wrong people” won’t mesh with your onboarding and training, leaving everyone worse off — clients and peers alike.
“Values are a huge part of success in our practice,” shares Matt. “They’re essential to discern during the interview process, so the people you bring in are in alignment.”
For example, Matt and his team found that asking people, “How do you feel about peer supervision?” would elicit an enthusiastic response from candidates.
But this question failed to show the candidate the Tribeca Therapy approach to supervision.
Their supervision is rigorous and challenging; they ask staff to think deeply about all aspects of their approach. That includes presenting their ideas, having the grace to accept feedback or alternative perspectives, and just as easily being able to defend their rationale to a little intellectual scrutiny.
So how do they figure out if people will enjoy this process?
In the interview, Matt not only has candidates walk through a case study — he also offers a real-time critical analysis of their answers. It’s not to poke holes in candidates’ thinking for the sake of it; rather, it’s a way of weaving in Tribeca Therapy’s values into the process, so the candidate can experience the culture first-hand.
This doesn’t have to be your exact approach, but Matt does recommend having at least one interview question that maps onto your values and that you can tease out live.
Ask the "heartbreak question"
Matt has found that asking candidates the “heartbreak question” tells them a lot about someone.
"Tell us about a patient you treated in grad school or in a previous job where things didn’t go well, where someone was let down, and your heart was broken. What happened?”
This question is a beautiful way to discover the humility this person brings to their work. “We’ve heard some real truth from people in their answers. Folks will say, ‘I really missed something, or I got triggered and didn’t say the right thing and impacted the client, I have deep regrets about this, etc.’”
Examples span across life stages and roles, from camp counselors to grad school to internships, where interviewees share a time they let themselves down.
If your clinic requires this level of self-awareness and vulnerability, consider incorporating the heartbreak question into your interview process.
When someone new joins, capture their fresh ideas
A new team member will bring a fresh perspective on the way your clinic operates. It’s important to avoid saying “‘Well, we do it that way because we’ve always done it that way.’ This perspective doesn’t serve anyone,” says Matt.
Feedback should be shared freely and informally, but it’s also a good idea to have a more formalized process, too, like a weekly check-in or an anonymous survey.
However, sometimes there are good reasons for why things are done a certain way in an organization. What matters in those cases is communicating honestly with your staff on the “why” behind your policies, so they can understand your thought process.
Overall, capturing new ideas is a three-part process: 1) creating a culture where feedback is welcome, 2) having a process to capture the insights of new hires, and 3) setting clear boundaries on how and why decisions are made.
Spend intentional time together
“Sometimes in healthcare, you’ll go years casually seeing another person’s face, and wonder what you really know about them. We don’t want that to be the case here.”
The work Matt and his colleagues do in psychotherapy is challenging. And when he sat and thought about why he created a group practice, it wasn’t to have multiple people renting office space beside one another, not interacting. It was to create a team that could support each other through the hurdles of the profession.
“It was a no-brainer for us,” Matt notes, about the decision to coordinate therapists’ break times. He admits it was a disruption for some people, but ultimately a benefit. One that they make sure to plan outside of peak client hours.
💡 Quick Tip: Matt believes it’s best to start people in twos or threes. This way, you have a teammate who is new, who also doesn’t know how the printer works, where the kitchen is, and how to use the booking system. If you start team members this way, it can help them feel welcomed and supported.
The intentional time together means the therapists are able to share the ups and downs of the job as they happen, support each other, and ultimately, grow and develop in their work. Everyone is happier and more effective.
Taking breaks all at the same time may not be possible for every clinic, but there’s something to be said about finding moments to connect.
Why it's okay for new hires to make mistakes
All new hires are human, and humans make mistakes!
Matt recommends becoming “truly tolerant” of failure, which includes treating those inevitable mistakes with some light-heartedness.
For example, let’s say someone forgets to refill the paper towels in the bathroom during their week to stock up. Someone else in the office might say, “Good job, you made a mistake!” The idea is not to shame them — in fact, just the opposite: by celebrating the mistake out loud, the staff helps normalize the fact that the learning process takes time.
Note that there’s a difference between giving lip service to being tolerant and actually accepting mistakes. The proof will show when a mistake is made — perhaps something more serious than a paper towel refill — and your staff sees how you respond.
Is there an open dialogue and two-way communication about what happened? Are there serious negative repercussions? This will all depend on your clinic’s offerings, culture, and commitments.
To truly set employees up for success, though, it’s important to keep in mind that people need onboarding information more than once to retain it. Schedule onboarding check-ins the first weeks and months into someone’s employment to review their materials.
These don’t have to eat up tons of time, either! A simple 20-minute check-in will do. Build this into your process so the new hire feels supported and heard along the way.
Another tip from Tribeca Therapy’s success story is to space out important information. Don’t expect folks to spend eight hours reading materials. While they can do it, it’s unlikely they’ll retain information in a meaningful way. Give them enough time to do other tasks and digest your processes over time.
How to measure onboarding success
At Tribeca Therapy, it’s rare that you’d sit in on a client’s session to evaluate a practitioner’s effectiveness.
So how does Matt measure if onboarding has been successful, and how can you?
Matt and his team have an auditing process where they check in with new hires a few times a week to start, then every other week as time goes on, eventually decreasing to a couple times a month.
What do they look for?
They see if regular clients are being filed in a timely manner, if the notes are up to snuff, and if their calendar looks the way it should. These are small but valuable proxies for a therapist’s skills.
Long-standing clients may also give you feedback directly on a new practitioner if you have good communication with them. This comes with time and trust.
Overall, the Tribeca Therapy approach to onboarding is compassionate and holistic:
- Matt expects mistakes and celebrates small failures to encourage honesty and trust.
- He understands that part of his role lies in making sure the right people come through the door, so he builds his values straight into the interview process.
- At Tribeca Therapy, two-way communication always remains open, not just when someone is brand new, but throughout their employment.
All of these aspects create a great onboarding experience and a culture where people love to work.
We hope this advice can offer you a fresh perspective to how you currently onboard new team members to your practice. There are always new ways of doing things!
Looking for more tips to help build your team? 💡
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You can also hear from Matt on Radio Front Desk 🎧 — learn more about his unlikely journey to group practice in this episode with Denzil Ford, Host and Editor-in-Chief of Front Desk Magazine.
