As kids, most of us were taken to visit the doctor — despite the lies our parents told us about the power of apples to prevent it. For some kids, those visits were for really tough situations. Medical facilities can be scary, impersonal, confronting places to be.

At Heart of the Valley Pediatrics, the staff are well aware of the stressful nature of a medical visit, and they’ve put a lot of effort into creating a reassuring, compassionate experience for every new patient and their caregivers. They know that a calm, friendly environment contributes to the best possible outcomes.

Anna Pawly is practice manager at Heart of the Valley. It’s a small clinic with two doctors, eight full-time staff, and additional part-time help as needed, and the role of practice manager encompasses administration, HR work, payroll, finance, and whatever else needs doing.

When Anna joined, the practice had been recently started up under a temporary manager who had installed systems based on their personal familiarity. There were manual spreadsheets for tracking time and leave and cumbersome tools for common admin tasks. Coming in with fresh eyes, Anna was able to identify places where some small changes could generate big efficiency improvements.  

She puts it like this:

“I was hired about a month into operations, and that was task number one on my to-do list: We’ve got to find something better. Our employees need to be able to see what their time off looks like. They need to be able to see the schedule. They need to be able to see when they’ve clocked in and out for lunch and things like that. And we need to be able to pay for it.”

That’s how Anna ended up finding Buddy Punch, which reduced a lot of time-tracking and scheduling effort both for her and the team. 

It’s easy as a new person on the team to feel like things are set in stone. You assume things decided before you arrived must have been that way for years — and for good reasons. Anna was coming in early in a position of administrative authority, so she had a license to make changes, but that’s not always the case for new hires.

The value of effective onboarding

Those first few days and weeks in a new workplace are critical. Adding more staff represents a long-term increase in capability, but in the short term, it can suck up a whole lot of time and energy from a team who are only hiring because they are already overburdened. That’s why it’s important to get onboarding right.

Often, our newest team members arrive with skills and experiences nobody else on the team has, knowledge they could be adding to the group if they had the opportunity and the encouragement. At the same time, many new team members are held back by a lack of clear and accurate documentation on tools and processes. 48% of leaders in Buddy Punch’s 2025 survey cited poor training or onboarding as a root cause of workflow breakdowns. 

In addition, the sheer number of tools to learn and operate can create its own friction. The time spent swapping between them, or deciding which tool is the right one, slows down daily work. In “The Invisible Workplace Problem Stealing Hours,” 52% of organizations say they’re using too many tools, making training harder, workflows more complex, and important data fragmented.

When Anna joined Heart of the Valley Pediatrics, she took time to speak to the existing team about the systems they were already using, quickly learning that the limited time of doctors was already being lost with others on the team having to step in to help.

“I know just from talking with our doctors in particular about their experience — they would spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out a problem and then kind of give up and pass the buck along to someone else to try to solve the problem.”

What does it look like to create a workplace where getting up to speed as a new employee is smooth and relatively straightforward? Part of it, certainly, is picking the right toolset, one that gets out of your way and lets you spend less time on the admin and more doing the work — whether that’s treating patients, putting up buildings, or troubleshooting an HVAC system. When she switched the team over to Buddy Punch, Anna braced herself for a tricky transition:

“I was anticipating a number of questions from the staff… I kept waiting for the questions to come in, and they really didn’t. I would ask, are you guys having any issues? And they were like, no, this makes sense. It was intuitive.”

One reason that clunky, inefficient tool stacks stick around is that after a while, everyone on the team has developed workarounds and habits that avoid the worst of the problems. The tools can almost feel intuitive when, in fact, they are just familiar. Once they stop being actively annoying, problems tend to become invisible. That’s where a new hire can be really useful; they come in fresh, seeing everything for the first time.

When you have a new staff member, let them know you want them to ask “why” questions. “Why do we use this tool?” “Why is that the process we follow?” “Why does the coffee machine make that weird gurgling noise after Jerry uses it?”

If you can remain open to questions, you can notice opportunities to improve, perhaps switching tools or perhaps just documenting more clearly how things are intended to work — and why they work that way. Then, every newcomer can help smooth the path for the people coming behind them.

Clear, well-maintained documentation can also save your existing team from some of the costs of bringing on a new team member. Having to explain things over and over can be frustrating… you only have to watch a TSA worker in action to see that. If your new team members can refer to some documents or videos, and trust that those reflect the actual way people work, they can self-educate at their own pace.

Documentation should cover not just the tools but also the sort of company rules that can catch people by surprise. When are people expected to clock in or clock out during the day? How far ahead do they need to book a day of leave? Too often people only discover those rules when they accidentally break them.

Don’t waste those fresh eyes

What’s your current tool stack? Is it really working for you, or are you working around it? Ask your newest team members what they have noticed. Encourage them to ask the questions they might have been keeping to themselves.

Onboarding is a moment when things can be seen through fresh eyes. With some intentional effort, you can both improve the speed and effectiveness of a new team member and take advantage of the different perspectives they bring to your company.