Context
Headquartered in the US city of Minnetonka, Minnesota, UnitedHealth Group, Global Fortune 13, offers a broad range of products and services through two business platforms: UnitedHealthcare, which provides coverage and health benefit services; and Optum, which provides data and technology-based health services. Through these two companies, UnitedHealth Group provides health benefits to people in all 50 US states and in more than 130 countries, serving more than 70 million people, only in the United States.
Nowadays, more than 300,000 people worldwide work at the UnitedHealth Group, sharing their entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to quality – including 85,000 health professionals who focus on helping people lead healthier lives.
Until the launch of this project, new employees onboarding took place through a face-to-face program for everybody, which is a difficult task to maintain the uniformity of the corporate message, considering the capillarity of the company and its dynamics, since it has acquired new companies on a regular basis in Brasil. As 80% of the new employees work in hospitals, the face-to-face format for their integration was the best solution at the moment.
Challenge
Standardize the new employees integration and to transmit the group’s culture, formed by several companies with distinct corporate and regional cultures, at the same time maintaining their local characteristics, besides allowing localization for each specific audience.
It is a yet bigger challenge because the existence of different corporate culture within a group of more than 80,000 employees in Brasil. In addition, the face-to-face format must exists to this large group because many employees have difficulty access the LMS and have no e-learning culture.
Solution
A new employees integration program was developed to standardize the content and align the attitudes in this first contact with the company, offering several tracks and different stages.
The main focus of the program was the culture of the Unitedhealth Group.
On-line and blended learning objects were developed, besides support tools for different characters involved in the integration of new employees.
A guiding material has also been developed for the program facilitators, with all the content and approaches, in a checklist format, and also editable support materials, so that each facilitators can locate it, including its specificities and use it to, at the same time, to ensure the uniformity to the corporate culture and discuss relevant content to the audience.
One of the strategies is a final dynamic where the employees are oriented to form teams to participate in a game that will evaluate the contents retention discussed throughout the program, in addition to increasing the engagement of the group.
In the online version, which can be accessed by all employees, but which has a main focus on employees working in the corporate areas, all the contents of the face-to-face integration are addressed in more detail because it is a self-instructional course organized in layers, offering the possibility of the employee accessing the complete content or only the critical information. In this version, the final dynamic was replaced by an individual game, with the same content as the face-to-face version.
Results
The new employees corporate integration program with a uniform message on the UnitedHealth Group’s culture has leveraged the adoption of group values from the very beginning.
- The facilitators started to have a guide to lead the integration of the new collaborators.
- Managers, at various levels, have a tool for receiving and welcoming their new employees.
- The integration among the new collaborators was intensified by the activities developed during the program.
