AUFA to investigate needs of new members

Up to 50 new members join AUFA each year. New members have raised concerns about a range of issues that they face during the hiring and orientation processes. AUFA’s Membership Engagement Committee (MEC) has begun documenting these experiences in order to identify key issues and potential solutions. This blog outlines what we know so far and concludes with a brief survey for new AUFA members (<2 years) to complete.

Types of Issues and Present State

The issues raised by new AUFA members fall into three categories. In some cases, these categories overlap a bit.

  1. Information needed by potential AUFA members during the hiring process to understand their offer and negotiate with the employer.

  2. Information needed by new members to understand and realize their rights and benefits as an employee.

  3. Information needed by new members about their job duties and how to perform them.

In terms of present state:

  1. AUFA provides information to potential members passively (via the new member information on our website) and reactively (when candidates contact AUFA with questions).

  2. AUFA provides info about rights and benefits to new members passively (website), reactively (fielding member questions), and, more recently, actively (by phoning new hires within a month of starting).

  3. AU is responsible for providing new AUFA members with an orientation to their jobs and job duties. AU does not appear to have a consistent onboarding process. AU often delegates this work to other AUFA members. Orientation is hampered by AU processes that are highly idiosyncratic, fluid, and poorly/incorrectly documented.

Next Steps

MEC has struck a committee to examine the experiences of new AUFA members and document their needs. The new member experience committee is composed of Corina Dransutavicius, Eloy Rivas Sanchez, Susan Cake, and Bob Barnetson.

The committee anticipates using both surveys and interviews to collect data. A report should be completed and available in June of 2022. This report will include recommendations for improvements.

Your Turn

To kick of the committee’s data collection efforts, we have a short scoping survey for AUFA members who joined AUFA after January 1, 2019. The committee will aggregate and anonymize these results and report them back to the AUFA membership.

Corina Dransutavicius, Eloy Rivas Sanchez, Susan Cake, and Bob Barnetson

AUFA New Member Experience Committee

Michael Voaklander