Is our new onboarding process decreasing teacher turnover rates?

 
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Family Resource Agency wanted to identify whether their new onboarding process was helping to decrease teacher turnover rates in order to help meet program goals centered around turnover. The teacher turnover rate in Year 1 was 32%. Their program goal was to decrease turnover to 30% in Year 2, to 28% in Year 3, and to 26% in Year 4. Strategies were implemented in year 1 and 2 that did not decrease turnover rates, they had actually increased.

A new onboarding process was implemented in 2017-18 to provide more support & training to new teachers. The onboarding process for new teachers consists of a two-week cycle which includes Orientation, Head Start 101, New Teacher Training, CLASS and TPITOS training, Childcare Education Institute online courses for state trainings, CPR/First Aid, Fire Safety, and Peer to Peer training with selected Peer Trainers. In addition, Mentor Coaching and ongoing professional development throughout the year to assist in the overall success of staff.

Analysis

FRA obtained teacher turnover numbers from their Human Resource data system, People Trak. Then, they graphed the numbers in a Microsoft Excel Column Graph to compare teacher turnover rates and program goal desired outcomes by program year.

Result

Even though FRA had implemented strategies to decrease teacher turnover rates, in year 1, the rate was a staggering 32% and rates increased to 34% in year 2. FRA determined that their strategies didn’t seem to be working and needed to either be adjusted or taken off the table completely.

FRA tried out a new onboarding strategy in year 3 and saw their teacher turnover rate decrease 6.5%. With this initial success, FRA discussed the onboarding process with staff and made additional adjustments in year 4 to better meet the needs of new teachers, site supervisors, and Peer-to-Peer trainers. They saw a significant decrease in turnover with these changes, with teacher turnover decreasing another 7.8% in year 4, for a total of a more than 14% decrease in just two years.

By graphing the data, FRA was able to visually see that the new strategy was working and that they were meeting their program goal to decrease teacher turnover. Once they discovered how successful the onboarding process was, they began providing it additionally to substitute teachers, in order to prepare them to fill any upcoming vacancies and hopefully decrease the turnover rates even more.

Additional details

Audience: Leadership, Management

Level of Analysis: Grantee

Difficulty: Moderate

Content Area: Human Resources, Program Management

Data Sources: People-Trak, Excel

Considerations/Caveats: This analysis should work no matter what HR system you use, as long as it is able to specifically generate teacher turnover rates.

Alternate Audiences: Board, Policy Council

Technical Appendix

  • Data you’ll need:

    • Year-by-year teacher turnover rates from your HR/personnel system.

    • Program goal for teacher turnover rate each year.

  • Enter your own program data in this template to create your own graph.

    • If your program has more than four years of data, you can simple type in the row below year 4 and the graph should adjust automatically. If it doesn’t, click on the plot area of the graph and drag the blue highlighted box (from the bottom right corner) down to cover all relevant rows.

    • If your program has fewer than four years of data, click on the plot area of the graph and drag the blue highlighted box (from the bottom right corner) up to cover only the rows you want.

Questions about this use case? Email them to analytics@nhsa.org and we’ll get in touch with the author for you!

All, Human Resources, Program ManagementVictoria JonesExcel, People-TrakComment