Staffing challenges persist across government agencies as many legacy employees retire from the industry, how can agencies ensure that they are quickly on-boarding new hires and retaining high-quality employees in this landscape?
A majority of respondents (56%) to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2nd annual 2024 State of the Courts report said they anticipated staffing shortages over the next 12 months, which may not be surprising. Higher turnover — especially among more seasoned employees — has coincided with courts’ increased use of new technologies, such as virtual hearings, e-filing platforms, case and document management systems, and of course generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities.
This has contributed to a snowball effect in the legal sector: As knowledgeable legacy employees retire, those employees remaining experience an increased workload, steep learning curves, and increasingly complex legal matters and technology to manage.
For many courts, bringing in new team members may require additional on-boarding resources. Indeed, only 12% of employees in the United States rate their workplace as excelling in on-boarding new hires. This can have a devastating impact, as effective on-boarding procedures dramatically increase employee engagement, productivity, and retention, research has shown.
As knowledgeable legacy employees retire, those employees remaining experience an increased workload, steep learning curves, and increasingly complex legal matters and technology to manage.
While employee orientation includes such routine tasks as completing new employee paperwork, on-boarding is a longer, immersive process that integrates new hires into workplace culture — exposing new employees to shared habits and beliefs within an organization and helping employees to reach their full potential more quickly.
By connecting new hires to organizational beliefs and the why behind work processes, organizations can achieve greater retention, higher employee engagement, and increased productivity. In fact, an effective on-boarding process is one which addresses beliefs and employee strengths and introduces new hires to their strategic partners while outlining their future within the organization.
Best made plans, pre-pandemic
In 2018, King County Superior Court (Seattle, WA) partnered with Praxis Consulting to develop a comprehensive, year-long employee on-boarding program with funding from a State Justice Institute Technical Assistance grant. Geared around reduction in turnover, boosting employee confidence, and shortening the time from hire to full productivity, the All-Aboard: Your Passport to Success on-boarding program was scheduled to launch in 2020, but the court would instead spend the next three years adapting and pivoting through the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Dr. Brenda Wagenknecht-Ivey, CEO of Praxis Consulting, and Linda Ridge, Chief Administrative Officer for King County Superior Court, the pandemic pivot was necessary to keep their ambitious on-boarding program on track. All-Aboard, in its original format, consisted of four phases over the first year of an individual’s employment. The program focused on:
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- welcoming and socializing new employees to their team, department, and the court;
- connecting new employees to their co-workers;
- communicating expectations and teaching new employees their day-to-day responsibilities; and
- integrating them into the court by engaging them in fulfilling the court’s purpose, demonstrating its core values, and achieving its goals.
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Post-pandemic, King County Superior Court now operates in a dramatically different workplace landscape. Today, the court consists of 54 judges, 10 commissioners, and more than 300 staff members. Weathering the pandemic involved a significant number of temporary hires to integrate new court technology and support judicial proceedings in unconventional spaces.
More than 60% of the court’s judicial bench has turned over in the last five years, and while judicial officers and bailiffs are 100% on-site, two-thirds of Superior Court staff now have some form of remote capacity for their role. Further, 25% of employees in 2023 had been with the court less than five years and the organization has new leaders in the Court Chief Administrative Officer role, the Deputy Chief Administrative Role, and numerous other managerial and director level roles since 2019.
The churn of organizational turnover has brought some managerial-level concern that there simply isn’t enough time to engage in a comprehensive on-boarding process at this scale. Leadership disagrees, stressing that cultural and connection, centered on-boarding, are more important than ever before in today’s hybrid work environment.
More than 60% of the court’s judicial bench has turned over in the last five years, and while judicial officers and bailiffs are 100% on-site, two-thirds of Superior Court staff now have some form of remote capacity for their role.
The original All-Aboard program was designed to reduce the chances of employees feeling siloed by giving them the opportunity to understand the larger organization through observing court proceedings, touring the county’s three court facilities, and meeting with various organizational leaders beyond their supervisor. These elements will remain a part of the reimagined All-Aboard program, anticipated to be formally re-launched later this year.
Technology solutions to reduce training time
The time burden of on-boarding often falls heavily on those responsible for training new employees. Best practices suggest that training materials are documented to ensure that training is executed consistently, and resources are made available on-demand in the future. The North Carolina Bar Association suggests that organizations dedicate time to documenting processes and workflows internally to guarantee consistent procedures across the organization and create a shareable resource for both new hires and current employees to access step-by-step instructions as a refresher.
Reducing time spent on compliance and clarification training allows more focus on meaningful connection and culture exposure for new employees. For example, incorporating mentor programs into on-boarding processes can better foster new employee connections. To this end, King County Superior Court is incorporating a New Employee Buddy program as a part of the relaunch of All-Aboard, in which high-performing colleagues (not supervisors) will be paired with new hires to serve as resource for the first three months of a new hire’s tenure. While check-ins can occur online with the new technology in place in King County, leadership still stresses that in-person connection is an important part of employee on-boarding.
As courts across the country continue to weather retirements and higher employee turnover, developing highly effective on-boarding processes is a critical investment. By prioritizing consistency in processes and documentation of how things are done, institutional knowledge can more effectively be retained, and training burdens can be reduced.
In remote, onsite, and hybrid workplaces, on-boarding processes which promote connection to the organization’s mission and culture can help new hires see how their role connects to the larger organization, which in turn can lead to more satisfied and productive employees.
You can download a full copy of Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2nd annual 2024 State of the Courts report here.
