December, 2024
Presented in December, 2024 as a part of OLTCA’s KnowledgeBreak series, this webinar discusses the impact internal communications has on senior and long-term care organizations. From examining all the things we’re all doing wrong today to offering practical tips and guidance on how to make changes tomorrow, this webinar will help you see how improving communications really does improve everything.
Transcript:
For today’s agenda, I’m going to walk through the challenges that we all face caused by poor internal communications.
I want to talk about the ripple effect that those poor communications have on operations, on staff, and on resident satisfaction. And I’m going to finish off with some practical tips and insights and some stats to hopefully inspire change, in your buildings.
Before I get started, I want to start off with a story to help set the context of what I’m gonna talk about today. My mom, who is in her late seventies, lives about twenty minutes away from me. We have her here for dinner every Sunday. She’s very active. She still works, although she’s retiring soon.
Very busy person.
And she loves to keep my brother and I updated on all sorts of things, whether we ask her to or not and whether it matters to us or not. Some recent examples, of course, it’s cold out.
Yeah. I know. I got gas for three cents cheaper earlier. Great. Here’s a recipe that I just found I think you’d like.
Absolutely, I would. Bernice, some woman at her office I’ve never met before, is expecting her fourth grandchild in the spring, and they don’t know whether it’s gonna be a boy or a girl, so she brought in cookies. Great. All of this stuff is important to my mom, not necessarily important to me and my brother, but what irks us is that she gets very angry with us when we don’t respond or comment on the things that she shared with us.
The challenge that we face is she’s sharing these things on any platform she feels like, whatever she’s using at the time. I get text messages. I get emails. I get Facebook messages.
I get Instagram stories. I get threads. I get TikTok. Yeah. She’s on TikTok. It could be a text message.
It’s a phone message. They’re all over the place, and there’s no consistency in where she’s sharing these things. The only consistent piece is the guilt trip that we get for not responding to her. And I keep saying to her “Mom, you’ve gotta tell me.
Let me know that there’s something I need to look at.” If I know that you’ve shared a recipe for me on Instagram that’s gonna be important for me to look at maybe for dinner this weekend, let me know to go there and look at it because I don’t sit there with all these apps open all day long waiting to find out when mom’s gonna tell me that gas is cheaper down the street. If she helps me know where to look, I’m gonna make her happier. It that’s gonna reduce her guilt tripping.
I don’t think she wants that, but my brother and I do. I wanna make things easier. So just tell me where to go and where to look to find the information that I need. And that leads us into what I wanna talk about today.
There are some communication challenges, the chaos in communicating in senior care. All of it relates back to what I just described.
So what we face then is you’re sharing fragmented information through overloaded channels that leads to staff dissatisfaction, and that results in operational inefficiencies.
Poor communications causes chaos across the board. Now when we talk about fragmented information, think about your bulletin boards. You’ve all got them.
Every single nursing home, every single senior building I’ve been in has them. But how effective do you think they are at ensuring everyone sees important information?
Because they’re not. Bulletin boards are just part of the furniture. If it’s not glaringly different, people won’t notice your new document. And if you actually just have to read something you just posted, like a new policy or shift requirement, some might, most won’t.
And the more time something gets unpinned and repinned to the board, the more likely it is to end up on the floor or the front page gets folded over where the important information was and nobody sees it anyway. And it’s not just bulletin boards. Think of all the memos you print and stick to the walls and elevators every day. Everybody has these.
And what about the emails that you send and the phone calls you have to make? And I’m sure you also send text messages to groups of people maybe on WhatsApp. And if they’re not in your contact list, it’s just a phone number in this list of people you’ve sent the notice to. You don’t know if they’ve read it.
You don’t know who’s responding.
All of this adds to the confusion and fragmentation of your communications. There’s simply too many messages being sent too many ways for people to keep up, just like mom does to my brother and I. We talk about overloaded channel the channels as bulletin boards are just part of that overloaded channel. You don’t just use your bulletin board.
You print memos. You send emails. You have meetings. You have phone people. You send more emails, then you send more emails.
The problem is, as of twenty twenty four, the average person receives over eighty emails per day. Some of you don’t get eighty. That’s fine. Maybe you get fifty.
Maybe you get sixty. Regardless, we’re flooded with emails, and half of that’s spam.
Of course, email providers are smarter now, and they can automatically filter out a lot of spam into our junk folders, but that’s just the unsolicited garbage that we get, the the crappy your shipment’s stuck at the border by UPS or you’ve been selected to win a prize pack. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Think of all the subscribed emails you get from travel companies, airlines, stores, Amazon, Netflix, newsletters for this, that, the other thing. The amount of information that we get in our inbox is ridiculous, and we expect our work emails to stand out.
And even if they do, even if we’ve managed to crack that code that they do stand out, here’s the kicker. It’s reported that sixty one percent of employees really admit to skipping over internal emails.
Two thirds of the workforce don’t even read the emails that we send them. I’m guilty of it. We’re all guilty of it. You see something come in, you’re like, I’ll read that later, and then you don’t because the flood continues.
So in health care, frontline staff and nurses, they don’t have easy access to email. They’re on the floor working. You’ve got don’t look at your phone policies. And if nurses do check their email throughout the day at a desktop or on their phones, important updates can get overlooked because of the volume of email that they get.
And frontline staff, they don’t even see what nurses see because a lot of them don’t even have a corporate email address. So they have to check their personal email whenever they get around to doing that. And it’s not like everyone’s jumping on the email as soon as they get home from work to see what they might have missed. And even if they did, two thirds of them don’t read it anyway.
So beyond this just being flat out discouraging, email accounts for our staff cost us money.
A Microsoft Exchange or Gmail account can run as high as $18 per person per month. Over the course of a year, let’s say there’s fifty accounts that barely get used because those people are part time or they don’t feel they need to check it. Those end up costing you almost $11,000 a year. And, yeah, they have lower priced, options.
The lowest tier plans for Exchange or Gmail is about $6 per user per month. So that adds up to fifty accounts times six times twelve months. It’s $3,600 a year on email that’s not even being used. Even if it’s just fifteen people that don’t need email addresses, it’s $100 a month you’re burning. And what about the printing costs when you add on to that? How many things are you printing on a weekly basis in full color at whatever cost per page you consistently have to print and replace?
What about onboarding documents for new staff? You don’t need to print those, but you do. Policy updates, iPAC updates, how much is all that costing you? If you’re printing it, it’s already a digital document. If it’s a digital document, you don’t need to print it because you can share it digitally.
There’s easier ways, more efficient ways, more cost effective ways to do this.
The third challenge we’re looking at is staff dissatisfaction.
It exists. Of course, it does. Poor communication is consistently cited as a top reason for staff burnout and turnover. And why? When staff don’t know what’s happening, when they don’t feel informed or up to date, they feel like they’re not being respected.
Like, why was it not important for you to tell me about something that’s gonna impact my day? It affects me, but you didn’t bother to tell me. Like, why?
It erodes culture. It breeds contempt. It fuels toxicity. And, ultimately, all of this rolls downhill to your resident experience.
Happy staff means happy residents. Frustrated, angry, defeated, overworked, burnt out staff means your residents are gonna get the short end of that stick every single time.
And cost wise, from a bottom line perspective, organizations with a hundred employees could face turnover costs between six hundred and sixty and two point six million dollars a year. Now it sounds ludicrous.
This includes the loss of productivity, the cost of replacement, the cost of training, the paperwork, the benefits, on and on and on. This number also considers that new employees can only operate about twenty five percent efficiency for their first month, if not longer. So there’s overtime hours. There’s doubled up training shifts. On and on and on it goes.
This is obviously gonna lead into operational efficiencies. Right?
You’re sharing information that isn’t seen, which means that things aren’t getting done. They’re not getting done right or on time. You pay for emails that aren’t read, which means that staff aren’t aware of what’s going on or how expectations have changed, and you’re burning cash. Your staff gets frustrated and they leave because they feel left out or treated like a number.
It puts pressure on those that stay. Your residents suffer because it’s the workforce is thinned out. Your business suffers because of that. Think about rehospitalizations, falls, outbreaks, compliance issues.
And all of this adds up to you fighting the daily battle of not murdering people.
These are the challenges that we’re facing. Now why is communication a key to everything to make all this go away?
I’ll tell another quick story. A nursing home, Shane, that I know of, I won’t expose names to protect the innocent, they were under pressure from the care delivery teams to build a more staff friendly schedule.
Who’s not heard this before? So after weeks of talks and planning, considering as many requests as they could, and great on them for doing so, management finally reached consensus, and they built a new schedule. They printed it out. They, they had new, shifts.
They had new assignments. They they took into consideration as much as they could. They, posted them in breakout rooms. They printed memos and posted around the buildings.
They sent emails. They did what they always do to keep their staff informed.
Day one of the new schedule, and things are off to a rocky start because staff are showing up for shifts early or they’re late or they’re not even showing up. And the responses from to management from the question of what’s going on here is the same thing back from staff. I don’t know. What’s going on here? When did this change? What are you talking about? Why wasn’t I told about this?
So when they dug in, the management found out that nobody even noticed their memos because nobody notices the memos in the first place.
The pinned up schedules in the break rooms looked almost identical to the previous ones, so nobody noticed the change. And most people were so used to seeing emails come in about schedules that they just ignored them if it wasn’t obvious that it was important to them at that moment.
So management took a hard look at how they were communicating.
They asked the staff about their communication preferences. They made some changes. They’re still struggling with making a more staff friendly schedule. Of course, they are. But at least everyone knows that. Everyone knows what to expect and when to expect it and where to go to find this information.
They’re more informed so the staff feels more comfortable in knowing that management is working in their best interests.
So the ripple effects of both poor and good communication. If you’ve got good communication, you can reduce staff frustration and confusion, as I just talked about, which will improve morale and a sense of community and help reduce turnover.
This leads to improved consistency of care and safety for your residents, obviously, happier culture overall. Happier staff are more engaged and much more likely to recognize subtle changes in resident habit or interaction, which is the key to preventing deterioration of physical or mental capacity. Noticing the little things is paramount to early detection and diagnosis of much bigger things. This is where your frontline staff can have the biggest, most meaningful impact.
And then, of course, this leads to better record keeping because your staff is more engaged. They’re noticing more things. This is gonna reduce the likelihood of fines due to rehospitalization or neglect. It’ll improve compliance.
And then monitoring and tracking the engagement that your staff has with the information you share also helps with ensuring you’re meeting information sharing requirements and regulations, another part of compliance. We had a client recently tell us that during accreditation, surveyor came in, asked for some information on how they were sharing things. They said, let me show you how we do it. They logged them into their system. The the surveyor basically went, this is fantastic. Tick, tick, tick, and off they went. They took a few days of process down to a few minutes of process because they were sharing information in a more consistent, in a more accessible way.
So how do you achieve these these gold star for communications?
There’s some three basic rules of excellence. It sounds harder than it really is. First one, your communication should be consistent. Everyone receives the same message at the same time in the same way.
Like I was saying about my mom, like, just let me know where to look. If you tell me there’s something new and I know where you’re gonna tell me there’s something new, I can go and find that thing. Even better, if you make all those things in the same place, easier for me to find what I need. Your communication should be concise.
Eliminate the fluff. Staff don’t have time to read novels. They don’t care about fancy email templates. I know you’re probably using Constant Contact or Mailchimp or Emma.
They don’t need all the fancy templates.
Just the straight information is fine. Just the goods, please. And, like, they’re not reading them anyway, so don’t bother with that. And then communication should be accessible. They need to be easy to use. They need to be easy to find. Make it a single source of truth that respects their time and their personal space, but they don’t have to go searching for.
Tell me where to look. And for a second gold star, deploy tracking and reporting to measure engagement, to measure receipt, and acceptance of what it is that you’re sharing. If you can follow these rules, you’re gonna be light years ahead of the rest of the industry.
Now above all this, there are some important statistics, to consider. A Mayo Clinic report from last year ran through, some measures, and they they discovered some really important correlation. They measured leadership communication score. They didn’t expose the math or the algorithm they use for this, but what it comes down to is what I just described, how frequent, how consistent, and how concise and transparent is information from leadership. This relates to a score for leadership communication score. What they found was for every one point increase in leadership communication score, there was a direct correlation with a seven percent decrease in employee burnout and an eleven percent increase in employee satisfaction.
If you communicate better, your staff will feel better, period. That’s it. Simple as that. How does this translate over into care delivery? The Journal of American Medical Associates said that a ten percent increase in nursing staff turnover was associated with a decrease in quality of care measures.
The more people leave, the less quality of care your stat your residents receive. No kidding. The kicker with this is the second, data point here from the Jamba research in twenty twenty three, a high turnover intentions, just thinking about quitting. I’m frustrated. I’ve had it up to here with my job.
Because of poor communications, because of burnout is, directly impacting care quality for the residents.
Just like I said, if I’m frustrated at work, that’s gonna translate over into the work that I do. If you can avoid that frustration, you can avoid that that, carryover effect to your residents.
All of this, even here, the empirical data stipulates that, all of this pertains back to communications, letting people know what’s going on, giving them fair access to what they need.
Let’s imagine something together.
Let’s imagine an organization where everyone from top to bottom feels informed, feels included, feels appreciated and connected. Imagine everyone knowing what’s going on and what’s expected of them and others and how they can all work together and come together when they need to act as a cohesive team marching and rocking out to the same drumbeat.
The pulse of your organization, consistent, reliable, measured, a place where nobody feels left out. I’m wondering why wasn’t I told about this.
When did this change? It’s just understood. I know what’s happening. Where anybody can find something they need without having to ask nine people or wait nine hours or get nine different responses, where everyone at any moment can be appreciated and publicly recognized simply for doing whatever they’re doing with a smile on their face that’s gonna boost morale, boost culture, and make everyone feel like they’re part of something.
And this might sound like a fairy tale, but it’s actually not. I actually know of organizations experiencing all of this right now, and they did it with, yeah, a little bit of work, a little bit of consistency. The Atomic Habits framework of small but consistent change has helped them achieve not this nirvana, not but the gold stars of communication that we talked about earlier. And here’s what they did.
This sounds like a lot of process. It’s not. You’re likely already doing this. You just don’t realize you’re doing it, and, formalizing the process will make things easier for you.
First thing you have to do is look at how you’re communicating.
What’s working and what isn’t? Are you using Teams? Does that reach everyone? How many groups of people do you need to reach? How many emails do you send? How many get lost or ignored? How often do you print something that you have to repost?
How often do you replace those? How often do you remind people? Look at all of the ways that you’re communicating with your staff right now, all the different channels, and ask them, what are your preferences? How is this working for you? How often do you receive this and understand what I’m sharing with you?
Second thing to do is define a structure around how you’re then gonna communicate. Taking this information, taking the preferences, I now know what I need to do to make sure that everyone’s aware of what’s going on. Designate individuals in your organization to be the key sharer of information on specific topics. You’re already doing this. Your EDs, executive directors, your DOCs, your IPAC administrators, they’re all sharing specific information that is applicable to their function.
But what about the people they need to reach?
What about ensuring that housekeeping is is informed on things and maintenance? What about, all your part time staff and your PTs and the people that come in that aren’t part of your organization? They need to be part of this as well. How are you gonna reach them?
Now you need to implement policies on how often what is shared? How do you respond to feedback and commentary?
What does good communication look like? And then you make that a mandate. If it’s an email, how much of an email or how much goes into the email?
What’s the follow-up look like? Is it going out to a BCC list?
Are you gonna know who received this? Are we gonna be able to track that? You need to implement policies on who, what, where, when, and how.
And then lastly, when you’ve got all this figured out, you’re ready to invest in something. Is it training? Is it more staff? You don’t need more staff. What I’m discussing and what I’m proposing then is finding the tools that allow you to do this in a much more efficient way. Just like I was saying with my mom, one place.
Tell me what I need to look at. Give me one place to look, and I’ll find what I need very easily, and everyone’s gonna be happier. There are tools available that do this sort of thing. Some rhyme with snooze.
That can help you do away with mass emails and text messaging and phone lists and relying on bulletin boards. And they’re designed to make communications easier, more concise, more effective, and more measurable, which is the key. If you’re not measuring it, you can improve it. So as a quick recap of of everything we just talked about, internal communications need to evolve.
They have to. Effective communication can and does and is proven to increase staff satisfaction and decrease turnover.
And decreasing burnout and turnover means better care for your residents and more efficient operations of your organization.
I will share a story from one of our clients speaking again now about the the practical tips and and how people have changed things.
Christine is an HR manager in a four building organization. They’ve got two nursing and two senior living. For years, she struggled with keeping everyone up to date on what was happening and really needed to find a way to improve internal culture. It was almost a us versus them feeling in and amongst the different buildings.
People felt worn out. They felt underappreciated and disrespected. They weren’t very happy at work. So Christina tried what we all tried.
Right? She did staff events. She did surveys to measure engagement. She did training programs. She spent loads of time on making pretty email newsletters and pretty memos and spending a lot of time at her computer doing all this.
And when she did walk into a building, the staff would roll their eyes because it’s just they figured it’s another time she’s just gonna ask them about covering a shift We’ll remind them about a memo she posted or another event that they wouldn’t wanna participate in.
She had it, and then she found nudes.
And she started to, recognize staff using nudes on the social feed and, showing that she saw them. She would take pictures of them interacting with residents and congratulating them and thanking them for the job that they were doing, and everything changed.
Within two months, she saw that when she walked into a building, the staff were more energized. They smiled more. They laughed more. They engaged with the residents more.
When they saw her coming, they look forward to it. They get more energized. They get more energetic. It’s almost become an internal competition inside of these buildings to see who’s gonna get recognized more just for doing what it is that they do anyway, but now they’re doing it with a little more of a smile, a little more pep in their step.
She’s adding quick notes of thanks to the entire organization, to the dietary staff, to, food services, housekeeping, maintenance, night shift. Everyone is getting recognized through this app and everyone is having a much better experience at work, which is directly translating into a much better resident experience.
Families are happier. Residents are happier. The reputation is increasing, and their staff are actually recommending people and referring people to come and work for them, and they don’t have a staffing issue. They’re full, all because she’s changed the way that she’s communicating with her staff.
Improving communication in your organization can and will improve everything. Your staff will be happier. Your residents will be happier. Families will be happier, and your business will be happier. We’ve seen it. There’s data proving this works. We can help make it work for you.