Beth Cannon is an ECE mentor, speaker, and professional team builder! She loves helping childcare leaders find their purpose, simplify their processes, and create policies that engage and inspire their teams.
In this podcast episode Beth talks about the importance of retaining staff, encouraging a healthy work environment for your employees, and how to properly onboard new staff members.
Read on to see some of the highlights of this podcast episode.
Onboarding New Staff Members and Retaining Them
As a childcare worker, you may be familiar with fast responses and follow-up. These two concepts are also important when it comes to the hiring process as well. Since you’re hiring someone to work with children, you want to be just as enthusiastic as them. Beth talks about the importance of making the person that’s in the interviewing process feel like family. Every interaction that you have with them needs to be intentional. Building a team starts through the hiring process and it's important to make everyone feel important. Moreover, in this new digital age, interviews can be done virtually. In this episode, Beth emphasizes how making the initial interaction or interview virtual, through Zoom, could save both you and the candidate a lot of time. Just from one virtual interview, you can determine whether you want to talk next steps with this candidate or not.
Many people think that your retention strategy starts once you’ve acquired a reliable team for your center. However, Beth mentioned that the very first time you put out an ad for a job posting, is the first step in your retention strategy. The next step in your retention strategy should be to train them properly and immediately link them up with a mentor. Your current employees are going to be your most reliable employees and you should be able to trust them to help you with onboarding. It’s also important to be very detailed in your onboarding process. Similar to how parents are in their enrollment journey, a lot of back-and-forth activity can be frustrating and inconvenient for a candidate.
Check Out the Podcast for More Tips
Building a strong team for your center is important because your employees are the first impression of your brand when a parent walks into your center. You want to make sure that you’re providing a positive work environment where there’s room for growth and development.
In this episode, Beth Cannon dropped some more gems on how to merge new staff members with current staff members and how your employees develop your brand.
To learn more, listen to our most recent episode below.
