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Celeste Jorge:
“Improving the New Employee Experience Through a Peer Connect Program.” Hi. My name is Celeste George. I am the PHIG evaluator and epidemiologist at the Connecticut State Department of Public Health.

Results from the PH WINS survey in 2021 and 2024 for the Connecticut Department of Public Health indicated some concerns with employee satisfaction and organizational culture. Connecticut DPH is a largely hybrid workforce, and over half of the Connecticut DPH workforce has been with the agency for only five years or less. Because of factors like this, we knew employee engagement was a concern, so the Office of Public Health Workforce Development developed a no cost in house program to address this, and now you will hear from Heather Murphy, who served as a graduate level intern in the Office of Public Health Workforce Development this summer and did a bulk of the work on this evaluation.

Heather Murphy:
Since January of 2024, the Office of Public Health Workforce Development has been facilitating peer connect groups as a part of the onboarding process for 108 new employees. 20 experienced DPH employees volunteered to serve as mentors, engaging with the new hires over their first two weeks. This approach aims to foster a sense of community and belonging and prevent feelings of isolation by providing a group of peers with a survey instrument constructed using Qualtrics, comprising 17 questions with 36 six-point agreement Likert scales and eight open-ended questions for respondents who disagreed with any of the statements. The six points were collapsed into Disagree, Slightly Agree, Agree, and Strongly Agree, for concise visuals.

The Likert scale questions were analyzed utilizing the Mann-Whitney U test on IBM’s SPSS. Out of the 17 items on the six-month follow-up survey, seven were statistically significant at the 95% level. The last question was, how would you describe the workplace culture in three words? Responses range from supportive to stressful, as well as hostile, in the pre-peer connect responses. Peer connect participants cited welcoming and professional as well as siloed and inclusive as the most frequent words. Each pre-peer comparison highlights the shift in opinion between groups, particularly in the increase of the strongly agree responses.

Celeste Jorge:
Some key takeaways: Peer connect was highly valued by employees as an enhancement to the traditional HR onboarding experience. It was a way to engage new employees with each other, but also engaging seasoned employees with new employees.

Some key struggles were highlighted in the evaluation survey, and this data will help to improve processes across the agency. There are some limitations to our program and evaluation findings, partly because of other agency-wide efforts to increase employee engagement and satisfaction. We do have some exciting ideas for future directions of Peer Connect, mostly as a result of the evaluation findings.