Senior Living Operators: how to retain key employees in times of change?
Senior Living Operators: how to retain key employees in times of change?
Employee turnover is a major concern of businesses of all sizes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40% of new hires leave within the first year, and there are approximately 1.1M job openings in the healthcare sector. On average, the cost of turnover in Senior Living ranges between $3,500 - $5,000 per employee. This high employee turnover rate is detrimental to your business; causing burnouts, decreasing revenue, negatively impacting employee culture, leading to a lack of consistency and a drop in the quality of care, and much more. Learning how to decrease the turnover rate and building a strategy that anticipates some amount of employee turnover can improve your community performance and provide long-term, high-quality care for seniors.
In this article, we provide actionable insights to keep your top talent.
Make team members a part of your community
Regularly engage your employees, reinforcing your aims and mission through continuing training and engagement. Interdisciplinary care plan meetings, supervisory training, coaching seminars, team building, and professional development opportunities are just some of the possibilities.
Use employee recognition programs to encourage and reward individuals who go above and beyond the call of duty. Provide feedback through informal and formal skill and performance evaluations at least once a year. Introduce a conversation about possible career options, which will reaffirm the employee's long-term worth to the community.
Senior Living communities use platforms like Cubigo to publish staff-related news articles, organize events for team members, and also install displays in break rooms for reminders, short training videos, personalized content, and messages for team members in their communities.
Quick tip: most Senior Living operators do not provide a professional email address to all of their employees. This makes it difficult to communicate with them or to have company-wide communications. You can use Cubigo as a corporate intranet, without any additional cost for new employees.
Expose staff to high-value meaningful work
Healthy Senior Living staff will keep coming back to work, but healthy has much broader connotations today than only physical wellness. Prioritizing staff wellbeing means ensuring time off to care for loved ones, mental health support to reduce risks of burnout, and appropriate tools and systems availability.
When your staff is overwhelmed with all the paperwork, they do not have enough time to do what really matters - delivering high-quality support and care to your residents. Having the right tools in place will not only save time your staff spends on administrative tasks but also boost their productivity and motivation to spend more time with residents.
For this purpose, Cubigo keeps all your non-medical operations and tasks in one place, allowing your local team to manage all the administrative tasks just in a number of clicks and spend the rest of their time on resident engagement and support while being motivated and enjoy what they do. No need to collect resident census data during the meals, no need for manual data entry for invoicing purposes, no need to sign in residents, all of those tasks are automated within Cubigo.
Onboard staff with seamless self-explanatory workflows
Onboarding is one of the most important aspects of facilitating engagement among employees, right from the start. Employee turnover is the highest during the first 90 days of employment. This is especially true in long-term care and Senior Living, which has historically struggled with high turnover.
To make the onboarding process as smooth as possible, Senior Living communities should have all the tools and paperwork ready in advance. Make sure that all the systems the new hire will be using have user guides, training materials, and support. This will save time for both your staff and new team members in the onboarding and learning processes.
For the seamless self-explanatory onboarding process, Cubigo provides your new employees with tailored training sessions, access to the Cubigo Academy, and all the onboarding materials they might need. On top of this, using Cubigo will help new employees to learn more about community and residents, workflows, and processes, as Cubigo is an all-in-one platform that stores all your daily operations, communications, and workflows.
Utilize time and work-saving technologies
Improved workload management and productivity mean more time for caregivers to provide direct care and enjoy their interactions with residents, with less time spent on emergencies. Provide seamless flows across applications by implementing electronic scheduling, email, communication, service management, engagement building, and residents support tools.
Make sure your systems are integrated with each other and not only provide a single sign-on, one-click experience for staff and residents but allow you to expand your data lake across your existing applications to make data-driven decisions. This will also help you to keep all of the data safe and secure, since the dismissed team member's account will be deleted automatically across all of your systems, ensuring that they no longer have access to confidential community information.
Cubigo is playing its role in facilitating Senior Living technology by integrating with third-party systems to help break down data silos. This improves the resident experience and allows you to get a bit closer to your resident-centered well-being.
Cubigo is a fully integrated cloud-based platform, digitizing the non-clinical services in Senior Living to add life to people's years instead of just adding years to their lives. Senior living communities, that use Cubigo and other software systems together with the right Employee Retention Strategies, are selected as Best Workplaces for Aging Services by Great place to work. If your Senior Living organization wants to stay ahead of the curve and keep your staff motivated and engaged at work, please get in touch with us at getintouch@cubigo.com.
