From Hire to Retire: How Relias Improves IDD Staff Experience

Building a thriving, resilient organization begins with investing in your people. From hiring the right talent to fostering their growth and well-being, every step in an employee’s journey shapes their experience and impacts their ability to provide exceptional care. Whether through improved hiring practices, tailored onboarding, or continuous learning opportunities, empowering staff is essential to creating a supportive and high-performing workplace. This article explores how tools like Relias Assessments and Relias’ industry-leading training platform can help you attract, develop, and retain top talent during the entire hire to retire journey, while enhancing organizational effectiveness and the quality of care delivered.

Improve hiring and onboarding

The first step to improving your staff’s hire to retire journey with your organization is to improve the hiring process. By improving hiring, you can bring on staff members who not only have the right knowledge to do the job but will be a good match for your culture.

Relias’ validated Assessments is a highly reliable tool used to gauge job fit based on clinical, behavioral, and situational assessments. When combined, these assessments show strong correlation to on-the-job performance and eventually, sustainability in a chosen role. With this tool, you can:

• Explore more than 140 validated assessments.
• Take Assessments in 40 specialty areas.
• Assess job fit for over 350 roles.

Once you’ve hired the right staff, the next step to supporting their journey is through the onboarding process. New hire orientation and onboarding are the first experiences staff members have of what it means to work for your organization. As such, these events will set the tone for their tenure. Creating a welcoming environment and providing new staff with relevant, expert training will get them up and running smoothly and productively.

Relias Assessments empowers you to do just that, by optimizing onboarding for safe, independent practice. With Relias Assessments, you can gain an understanding of your clinicians’ strengths and knowledge gaps, meaning you can personalize the onboarding experience. This approach lets you focus on areas requiring further development to optimize the path to competence.

Invest in staff through training

Effective training is one of the best ways to improve your staff’s confidence and desire to stay with your organization. In fact, the 2023 Relias DSP Survey Report revealed that most respondents (61%) wanted more educational opportunities to increase their confidence in their DSP skills. And this makes sense. A DSP’s ability to learn and utilize new knowledge directly impacts the care they provide for their clients, and caring for clients is a large reason they became DSPs in the first place.

With the Relias Platform, you can easily and efficiently provide effective learning solutions to your team during their hire to retire journey. Relias’ industry-leading course content improves care outcomes while our technology helps you keep pace with the needs of today’s IDD professional. With Relias’ award-winning training, you can:

• Standardize your staff’s education, ensuring all your DSPs have high-level competencies.
• Elevate your staff’s on-the-job knowledge and skills.
• Empower career growth and development with personalized training plans and comprehensive courses.

With Relias, you can also ensure your DSP staff remains compliant with the requisite governmental and accrediting bodies. The ability to take compliance courses in the same digital platform that houses on-the-job skills training removes stress from staff members, because they can take their compliance courses and testing when and where it works best for them.

Promote career growth and well-being all the way from hire to retire

In our 2023 DSP Survey Report, we found that DSPs who were satisfied working for their current organization also reported significant levels of satisfaction around available training, career advancement opportunities, and how their organization promotes well-being.

The Relias Platform gives you a space to not just train your DSPs, but offer them upskilling and reskilling opportunities. Reskilling involves teaching staff entirely new skills to prepare them for different roles, while upskilling enhances current skills to improve performance in existing roles. Here are examples that clarify the distinction:

• Reskilling: A direct support professional (DSP) transitioning to a supervisory role requires new skills such as managing staff records and supporting DSP career development. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some organizations reskilled DSPs to work in residential support when community programs were reduced.
• Upskilling: A counselor at a federally qualified health center (FQHC) taking courses in suicide prevention to address community needs is an example of upskilling. The focus is on strengthening current expertise without changing roles.

By investing in reskilling and upskilling programs, your organization can build staff and organizational well-being. These opportunities give staff members the opportunity to grow and demonstrate that your organization is invested in their future. Staff will feel more psychologically safe, ultimately leading to greater well-being and satisfaction across the whole organization. This has the added benefit of:

• Increasing staff engagement and retention
• Improving care quality for those served
• Strengthening overall organizational capacity

By prioritizing learning and development, your organization creates a happier, more capable workforce that is better prepared to adapt and thrive in changing environments.