August, 2025
In the third webinar of our Summer Series we take a direct shot at how to prevent burnout from taking our frontline staff from us. Burnout is one of the main reasons for frontline staff turnover in senior and long-term care, and you might find it surprising to see how some simple changes can have a profound impact.
Transcript:
Hey. Welcome everyone to today’s webinar. Today, we’re gonna be talking about burnout. Why it’s such a challenge in senior care and how feedback loops can help fix it. Burnout is a big driver of staff turnover, but it’s also preventable.
So in this webinar, we’ll walk through the problem, the cost, and how better communication and recognition systems can change the outcomes.
I know your time is valuable. I don’t like spending an hour on a webinar. It bores me. I’m pretty sure it bores everybody. That’s why I make these webinars as short and succinct as possible. This shouldn’t take us more than ten to fifteen minutes to get through.
I hope you walk away with actionable tips and things you can implement tomorrow to start improving things for you right away.
Tackling burnout is one of the top challenges in senior care. Better feedback loops are a proven way to reduce staff turnover and improve morale.
Burnout doesn’t always show up as a breakdown. Sometimes, it’s silence, it’s short tempers, it’s late call ins, it’s absenteeism.
The only way to know what your team is feeling is to ask.
And burnout in senior care is at a crisis level. More than sixty percent of staff reported feeling exhausted, disconnected, or ineffective in their roles. And this level of burnout hasn’t really changed since COVID. Now, this isn’t just a personal issue, it’s organizational.
Burnout, as I said, leads to absenteeism, which leads to poor resident outcomes, which also leads to high turnover and challenges for you as a healthcare operator.
But there are a lot of factors that contribute to staff burnout. Let’s take a look at some of them. Burnout’s complex and systemic.
It’s heavy workloads, it’s staffing shortages, it’s endless paperwork but it’s also the emotional toll of caring for people. Our frontline staff deal with ethical dilemmas all the time and sometimes a toxic workplace with dynamics like physical and verbal abuse from residents and families, interpersonal issues between colleagues. There’s also the lack of autonomy to be able to make decisions or take action without needing clearance.
For frontline staff, that can feel restrictive.
It feels limiting to them. I can’t do what I need to do because I need to check with somebody first. There’s also work related support and recognition. All of these things lead to feelings of disassociation, dissatisfaction, and disengagement.
And then, of course, all of this combines to become multiple overlapping pressures that all drive exhaustion, physical, emotional, and spiritual.
There are also hidden stressors that impact and increase feelings of burnout and exhaustion, like staff feeling unheard.
What we have on the screen here, these are real quotes collected during the LTC staff voice project in twenty twenty three, and they’re painful to read. When staff feel like no one’s listening, they diminish, they disengage, and then they leave. The quotes that we’re seeing, nobody ever asks how we’re doing. I feel like my opinion doesn’t matter. We only talk when there’s a problem.
As a parent, I’ve heard this from my kids. We hear this in school. We hear this at work. When we hear this at work, this is a really sad state of affairs. This is something that we can overcome. We can work to fix this. And in fixing this, improve the morale of our teams that will then turn into an improved workplace experience for both our frontline staff and for our residents.
According to a Gallup report, employees who feel heard are four point six times more likely to do their best work.
That’s incredible. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you turn that into a a percentage, that’s four hundred and sixty percent improvement in their work engagement simply by letting them know that they’re heard or listened to.
And feedback loops give your staff a voice.
Feedback loops asks for and collects their input. When staff input is acted on and outcomes are shared back, trust grows.
This is the feedback loop.
I ask for your opinion. I ask for questions. I ask for feedback. What can we be doing better?
The response then is, we’ve heard you. Here is what we’re planning to implement. The results then need to be shared back. You asked.
We did. Here’s what happened next. It’s that loop that allows the staff to feel like you’re listening, they’re being heard, and their opinion matters. You’re taking it to heart and you’re taking action on that to improve things for everybody.
Feedback loops can be simple. They could be quick surveys or e n p s, employee net promoter score, just to capture staff sentiment.
Open channels for two way communications to allow for questions, comments, and messages.
Again, giving the staff the opportunity to feel and be heard. And then recognition is such an important element of job satisfaction.
Of course, none of this matters without follow-up reporting to close the gap.
Pulse surveys are something you can execute with very little effort, but they give you a regular read on your team’s mindset without overwhelming them or your admin staff. They can be short, focused, regular check ins, simple Likert scale check ins. They should be made anonymous by design to make sure you collect real feedback without fear of retribution.
And they provide clear, easy to interpret results because you phrase the questions using, like I said, a Likert scale, and you can very easily display that data. How are you feeling today? Give me a rating one to ten, one to five. All of that information could be collected and displayed very easily, very quickly. And you can use that to benchmark and show improvements over time. When you layer that with the actions that you’ve taken based on the feedback that you’ve received, you get a very clear indicator of when people said this and we implemented this, the outcome and the satisfaction reading was this.
That’s a very straightforward algorithm that you can build and follow.
The problem with this is turnover is really expensive.
I’ve spoken about this before and it’s not news, but nursing home turnover exceeds fifty percent annually.
This is annually. This is across the board. Fifty percent of staff turnover in the long term care industry every year.
Now it costs between ten and fifteen thousand dollars to replace a single PSW or CNA, a single frontline worker, and that cost can go as high as sixty thousand dollars for an RN.
But if you’re losing five, six, seven people a year, this is now costing you potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And burnout directly translates into financial loss. There’s operational disruption. There’s increased risk for you and for your residents. There’s a loss of IP or intellectual property. There’s a loss of culture. It impacts everything in your business when people leave, especially if they leave because they’re disgruntled or upset about something.
That also impacts your reputation as an employer and makes it harder for you to replace that staff.
But what if you could turn all that around? What if you could actually take the opportunity to measure the pulse of the staff, to ask them some simple questions and take simple actions to start improving things and then report back to them? Here’s what you asked for. Here’s what we did.
Here’s how that’s going. That’s gonna boost morale across the board. It’s gonna make the team feel like they’re part of something and that they matter. And that’s the most important part.
They want to feel like they matter.
Shamelessly, Niuz is built to solve these problems, but news can’t solve every systemic issue. Niuz doesn’t fix staffing levels or paperwork loads, but it does strengthen communication and recognition challenges, the areas that staff say matter most day to day.
Those feedback loops like poll surveys can help staff feel heard and supported. The key is not to just listen, but to act. And more importantly, again, to show the staff that you’ve acted because of what they’ve shared. And sharing outcomes make actions taken visible.
It contributes to a culture of transparency, trust, and accountability.
I’ll share a quick story. Niagara Region, a recent customer of ours, relatively new to Niuz, they started rolling out the platform to all their homes about a month ago. We asked what they wanted to see change as a result of Niuz. And they said, we wanted to reduce email overload and streamline communication so staff could access timely relevant information without feeling overwhelmed.
Their goal was to make it easier for staff across all homes to stay connected, informed, and engaged.
All of these things contribute to job satisfaction.
All of these things contribute to reducing the feelings of burnout because they’re engaged and communicated with and included.
Throughout the onboarding process with Niagara, we work with them to keep an eye on specific KPIs in order to validate their decision to implement news and also for us to understand how staff are responding to our platform.
I’m very happy to say that across almost two thousand staff, the feedback has been nothing but positive. According to their leadership team, staff love being able to access updates, events, and resources in one place, and managers like that important messages don’t get buried in email.
And most, I mean, higher than eighty percent of their staff are checking Niuz on a daily basis.
Quotes that we got directly from their team include, verbatim, the shout outs are great, I feel recognized, and it boosts morale.
It’s so much easier to find updates now. I don’t have to dig through my email. And I love being able to see what’s happening in our homes. It makes us feel more connected as one team.
All of these things are great wins and they all fall in line with what Niagara Region was hoping to achieve. I want to improve communications. I wanna make, information easier to find and access, and I want to improve recognition.
They’ve done that. In a month, they’ve been able to do this and they’re getting adoption numbers through the roof, which is fantastic.
Like we said at the beginning, when staff feel heard, they stay longer and they care better. They bring more of themselves to work. They’re gonna be more engaged.
Pulse surveys are a form of proactive retention.
If I ask you what your problem is and you tell me what your problem is and I can take action on that, at least listen to, discuss, and make a plan to solve and then share what it is that I’ve done to try to solve these problems for you. That’s going to improve the morale in your organizations.
You can also mitigate some of the contributors to burnout with the right feedback loop. Like we said earlier, staff don’t feel heard. Nobody cares what I say. My opinion doesn’t count. Yes, it does.
When you feel like your opinion matters, when you feel like you have a voice at the table, you’re more willing to come to that table with more of yourself.
Niuz makes listening a habit, not a burden. It’s a very simple app that can run on your cell phone or on a desktop or tablet or laptop and it helps you keep in touch with your entire staff in seconds every single day. This is what we believe at Niuz: Retention starts with respect. Respect starts with listening and surveys are how you make listening scalable.
We can stop burnout. We can fight burnout. We can prevent burnout from taking our staff away from us by putting a little bit more time and effort into listening and providing feedback.
I told you this would be quick. I kept my promise. We’re under fifteen minutes. If you’re ready to catch burnout before it starts and build a team that stays, we are ready to help. You can visit our site to book a demo or you can reach out to our team directly.
I hope this was time well spent for you. Thank you so much. We will see you next time.