July, 2025
The second instalment of our Summer Series, this webinar continues the conversation of recognition and examines how morale can – and should – be one of your top business metrics to track.
Transcript:
Welcome to today’s session. I’m going to be talking about one of the most overlooked but powerful drivers of staff retention and morale recognition. I’ll walk you through the why, the how and what great looks like in senior care settings. Why listen to me? My name is Cameron. I’m the head of marketing for Niuz. I’ve spent about twenty five years in the senior and long term care industry.
Bulk of that time was spent with PointClickCare. I’ve also done work with CareWorks, Third Eye Health, GE Healthcare, Lenovo Global Health, and now Niuz itself.
In my previous webinar, I talked about the top three reasons why staff leave or quit their jobs and these reasons aren’t something I just came up with. They’re the result of exhaustive studies run over multiple years by leading and trusted organizations in both the US and Canada. Organizations like LeadingAge, Argentum, OLTCA, AHCA.
After surveying thousands of care delivery staff in senior care settings, these were the top three reasons why care staff quit. And you’ll notice that money is not in the top three: Poor internal communications, lack of appreciation and recognition, and critical information is too hard to find. My previous webinar, we talked about internal communications. This webinar, we’re focusing on the lack of appreciation and recognition because no amount of bonus or salary increase will make you feel better than being in a place where you feel like you matter.
Recognition isn’t a reward, it’s belonging. Recognition isn’t about gift cards or years of service pins, it’s about feeling noticed. Especially in LTPAC where the emotional load is high, being seen matters more than being paid more. A twenty twenty three survey by Gallup showed that sixty nine percent of employees said they’d work harder and they’d show more loyalty to their employer if they felt more recognized and appreciated.
Just by showing a little bit of recognition and appreciation, two thirds of the workforce surveyed said they they would put more effort into work just by saying thank you a little bit more frequently. Now recognition doesn’t just feel good, it performs. It’s a direct measurable driver of safety, performance, and retention.
In high risk, high burnout settings like senior care, that’s gold. According to the Gallup State of the Workplace Survey, companies saw a forty one percent higher retention rate among recognized staff.
In my previous webinar, I talked about the cost of replacing staff that could run you up to sixty thousand dollars a year for an RN. Well, if you could reduce that by forty one percent, that’s a fantastic number and I don’t just mean the sixty one thousand. I mean if you’ve got three RNs that leave and you can keep one of them, you’re saving sixty thousand dollars a year in productivity, overhead, HR costs, recruitment.
They also realized a twenty two percent fewer safety related incidents because their staff was more engaged with what they were doing. They’re more engaged because they feel better about the work that they’re doing because the work they’re doing is being recognized by their employer. This increased engagement also led to a twenty one percent higher level of productivity. Recognized staff stay longer, they worked more with they worked with more dedication and attention and they did more in less time than non recognized staff.
All these things support the last slide I just talked about. This is two thirds of the workforce surveyed said that feeling appreciated is all it takes for them to put a little bit more into work.
Now why recognition fails in health care? This is a it’s a global problem in health care. The reason being is we often hear things like I don’t have time or my staff know I appreciate them. Of course, they know I appreciate them. But unspoken appreciation is invisible. Without the tools, without the process, without the structure through which to recognize people more regularly and more frequently, if you say it later, it’s too late.
If it’s not publicly visible, it’s not enough. You’re you’re missing the point. You’re missing the opportunity to really show the recognition and appreciation that frontline staff so desperately need. So appreciation gets buried under urgency.
We know this. It’s just part of the part of the workforce, part of our jobs right now. In a fast paced, shifts leave little room for thoughtful praise. Managers assume that their gratitude is understood and automatic.
It’s not. And no consistent system for visible or shareable recognition is a key driver in dissatisfaction for staff.
You can put up as many little photos in the break room as you want about employee of the month, but that’s once a month thing. If I don’t get recognized until month four, I’m probably already thinking about quitting because it’s just not worth it for me. I don’t feel like I’m valued or appreciated in my workplace.
So what staff actually want is just that, just appreciation.
I want to feel seen. I wanna feel acknowledged. I wanna feel celebrated even for the little things that I do every day. It’s not we’re hitting grand slams all the time.
We’re not saving lives every single day. It’s the little things that we do day over day consistently that bring smiles to faces, that improve that resident experience, that improve then the quality of care that they receive, that improves how our families feel about our residents being in our buildings. All of these things can be improved simply by showing our staff that we see them, we appreciate them, we acknowledge them, and we want to celebrate them. Recognition works when it’s timely, specific, public, and repeatable.
The formula for effective recognition is simple. Timely, specific, public, and repeatable. If you can hit all four of these, it sticks. If you miss one or two, your praise is gonna get lost.
It’ll be misrecognized. It’ll end up just as, it’ll get lost in the noise of everyday life.
So here’s an example, and you’ve all seen this before. In the first image on the left, thank you.
Great. I mean, it’s probably timely, but there’s nothing specific about that. It’s also not public. It’s not really a repeatable thing.
It’s it’s a one time text message to someone. Thanks. Yeah. Okay. Great.
What will be better is if that was a face to face thank you of that person in front of their peers. Absolutely, yes. But we don’t always get the chance to be face to face with our staff. So let’s revert back to the text messaging side. The second example, it’s better.
It’s definitely timely and specific. Thanks so much for running the immunization clinic today. Wouldn’t have happened without you. That’s great.
It’s timely. It’s specific. But, again, it’s not public. And it’s not an easy thing to repeat because you’re just doing it as a one off text message.
There’s a better way. Oh, look at this fantastic one. In a best case example, we see that the recognition hits all the pillars. Right?
It’s essentially real time. We’ve taken a picture of this person in the act and posted it. It’s specific. It’s calling out specific actions, people, times, and results.
It’s public. This recognition post was shared with the organization for all to see, and it’s repeatable. This type of recognition with the right tool is easily repeatable. It become it it becomes a daily, if not hourly, activity for management and it takes thirty seconds to do.
Looks all fancy. I wonder what app that is. Oh, it’s Niuz. Niuz makes daily recognition easy and visible.
Niuz was built to make this easy. It gives every manager and even peers the ability to say great job in a way that everyone can see and celebrate. No extra meetings, no extra tools, no extra work. You can post kudos in real time from any device.
You can tag roles, behaviors, values. Recognition feed is visible to the whole team, to the whole organization, to a specific building, however you wanna set it up. All this sounds all great, but does it actually work? Will my doing this actually have any positive impact?
Because it sounds like work. It’s a little bit. A little bit of work. But here’s a social proof I wanna give you.
One organization went from segregated and separate to a connected community across four homes in six weeks.
This is one of my favorite stories. So pictured here is Christina on the left. She’s the head of HR and communications for Crown Ridge Healthcare. There are four home, soon to be expanded, long term care organization in Eastern Ontario.
Christina was charged with developing a culture of family based on the mission of the organization to make their homes a place people wanted to be. That includes staff, residents, families. They wanted to build a really strong, connected culture so that their staff would want to come into work, and they would want to engage more with the residents. So Christina would spend time visiting each home, spending time with the staff doing what we all typically do, trying to strengthen the culture with newsletters and posted memos and staff pictures in the break rooms, hosting events and parties and things.
But even the staff who picked up shifts in multiple buildings in the organization said that each home had its own vibe and that there wasn’t really any connection between the buildings or between the staff.
Staff members that moved between buildings had completely different experiences in each one of those buildings because each building acted as a separate entity.
So Christina found Niuz and we talked with her about their goals and challenges and got to work. And just days after launching Kudos and Niuz, just days after her walking into her buildings, taking pictures of people and sharing it across the organization, of course people ran away at first but they got used to it, staff started to pick up on it. Staff started to bring more energy into work. Staff wanted to be recognized because that’s exactly what all of our staff want. They wanted to be recognized in front of all their peers, not just in the break room or not just on the bulletin board in the hallway.
So it created an entirely new layer of team culture, one that leadership didn’t have to force. Now when Christina walks into a building, she knows everyone by name and they know her. They share stories about staff from other homes, they pull up pictures to talk about, they coalesce into a thriving, caring and connected community. And it’s because Christina has adopted Niuz as her tool to publicly regularly post timely and specific kudos in recognition of her team. Of course, can do this with other HR tools. Other HR platforms give you the opportunity to publish and post kudos. The challenge then becomes who logs into your HR platform.
I’ve used platforms like Bamboo before with other companies. I’ve used platforms like SAP, like Kronos, like UKG. They’re great, but I have to log into that system and then see the information information versus just having it show up on my phone. It’s just an easier, more accessible way of sharing kudos with your team.
Morale drives retention. Recognition drives morale.
So a healthy culture starts with simple acts of appreciation. If you want retention, you start here. Recognition and appreciation creates morale. Morale reduces burnout and feelings of frustration. Retention follows.
And with improved job satisfaction comes improved job engagement which naturally leads to better care.
And the regular consistent recognition process that this creates, this culture flywheel speeds up and becomes more efficient and effective over time because more people become involved in it. The more people become involved in it, the more weight, the more inertia it creates, the faster it’s going to work for you.
Recognition is the beginning. It’s not the cherry on top. It’s where we start and everything else will follow behind that. Shameless plug. Sorry. So Niuz connects communication, recognition, and feedback. It’s a mobile first platform that lets you share updates, post kudos, track sentiment, and make sure everyone across shifts and sites feels connected.
If you’re ready to start looking at building a stronger culture, one built on daily appreciation, Niuz can help. If you want to explore news, if you wanna get a personalized demo, we can run through a demo in about twenty minutes. It’s a very easy tool to learn and pick up. If you have any specific questions, you can reach me, cameron at Niuz dot com, or you can reach out to my counterpart, Julia at Niuz dot com. I will thank you for your time. Have a wonderful afternoon. I hope you learned something today.