Evaluation of a peer onboarding partner program in home care
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Nature and scope of the project: The U.S. Bureau of Labor predicts more than 200,000 new nurses per year are needed to fill the gap of a retiring workforce (Padilla, 2022) and the average cost of a nurse turnover is $46,100 (Advisory Board, 2022). This project evaluates an existing program in the home care setting that pairs newly hired nurses with a peer partner during the onboarding process. The objectives are to increase retention at 90 days of employment by 5% and increase job satisfaction by 5% as evidenced in the employee satisfaction survey between T1 and T2. Synthesis and analysis of supporting literature: Social exchange theory is linked to peer onboarding with organizational commitment as the strongest predictor of retention (Bell & Sheridan, 2020). Literature relating organizational commitment to retention of nurses found mentoring programs vary widely with goals, scale, and design (Hoover et al., 2020). Project implementation: The program was evaluated by comparing retention and satisfaction results of nurses hired between March 2021-July 2022 (T1) with those hired between August 2022 and December 2023 (T2). Retrospective hiring and peer interaction data were used for analysis. Significant challenges related to data quality and organizational variation were present, requiring multiple iterations of preparation and cleaning of data prior to analysis. Evaluation criteria: Changes in outcomes between T1 and T2 in retention rates at 90 days of employment and employee experience survey results were evaluated using IBM SPSS software. Outcomes: No statistically significant differences were identified in comparison of means between the nurses in T1 and T2. Neither objective was met with a 38% decrease in retention from T1 (46%, n=104) to T2 (28.3%, n=64) and a 1.5% decrease in employee satisfaction from T1 (85.3%, n=284) to T2 (83.8%, n=314). No statistical significance was seen between the number of interactions and retention H(9) = 15.46, p = .08. Recommendations: To increase effectiveness of the program, development of a manual and training for peer partners would streamline the onboarding process and create consistency. Creation and implementation of a structured data collection platform will improve data quality and decrease organizational variation.
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