September, 2024
Retention issues?
What if solving retention issues was easier than you think?
In this webinar, we discuss the Top 3 Reasons staff leave senior care jobs – and what DOESN’T make the Top 3 – and what you can do about it.
And no, you don’t HAVE to use Niuz to solve these problems.
But Niuz is what makes it easy.
Watch and see
Transcript:
Thanks so much for joining me today. We’re gonna be talking about the top three reasons staff leave senior care and what you can do about it.
It’s interesting when we talk to leaders of the industry, we ask, what do you think the reasons our people leave? We hear a lot of similar responses.
One of those responses is money.
The statistics behind a survey that was run-in twenty twenty two of direct care delivery staff in nursing homes across US revealed that although better wages were mentioned, it was not viewed by most participants as a primary factor to reduce turnover.
It doesn’t matter how much money you pay me or how much more money you wanna offer me. If I really don’t like coming into work, I’m not gonna be as engaged as I should be, and I’m going to be looking for somewhere else that I can go.
Your culture is reflected in how your staff feel on Sunday evening.
If they’re dreading coming into work, if they’re anxious about showing up, if they’re not gonna answer your phone call because they don’t want to go into work, that’s the problem that we have to face.
Now what is it that leads to cultural issues?
A twenty twenty three McKinsey workplace survey of registered nurses cited several culture related factors as key drivers of their likelihood to stay in their current position, meaningful work, positive interactions, and having caring and trusting teammates.
Meaningful work, we do that. Our frontline staff do that. They provide direct care for residents, and they typically get into this business because they want to care for people.
There’s an absolute reward that comes from providing care for someone.
Positive interactions comes from both peers, from residents, from families, from management, everything that they deal with throughout the day. And then having caring and trusting teammates, if you know that you’ve got support from your peers, from your management, from the people that you see every single day, you feel protected. You feel included. You feel part of something bigger than yourself.
So the top three reasons senior care staff quit, and these three reasons are pulled from surveys from a number of different organizations across the United States over the last fifteen years.
Number one reason, poor internal communications.
We hear this all the time.
Everyone we speak to can raise their hand when we ask them, have you heard this before?
But what does this mean? This is the challenge. Poor internal communications is a problem. Yes. What is the business impact of this problem?
Your staff will feel a lack of transparency.
They don’t know what’s going on. They feel that you are not sharing with them what you could be sharing with them or what you should be sharing with them. That breeds a lack of trust in management. If you’re not sharing things with me, if you’re not including me in these things, clearly, you don’t trust me, so I don’t trust you. This also creates confusion among the frontline staff, and confusion leads to frustration and resentment, and then I’m sick of this place. I’m gonna leave.
The number two reason, lack of appreciation and recognition.
We all know that our frontline staff do some pretty, it’s not a glamorous job, but it has to be done.
Who doesn’t like getting a pat on the back, a thank you, a high five, a smile when we’ve done something that we didn’t really wanna do, but we had to do. Saying thank you is huge. Why does this make people want to leave? It’s kind of obvious. But if you’re not showing appreciation and recognition, your staff are gonna feel underappreciated.
They’re gonna feel like they’re just a number. They’re going to feel like there’s no support from management.
They’re also going to experience burnout faster. You’re gonna have higher levels of sick leave. You’re going to have higher levels of disengagement.
Disengagement leads to a poor resident experience.
All this, of course, frustration, resentment, and if I’m not getting validation and recognition where I work, I’m going to go find it elsewhere because I know that I can.
The number three reason, critical information is too hard to find.
This is especially true when onboarding new staff.
The highest level of turnover exists in the first couple of weeks to first few months of employment.
This is the most critical point in time wherein you can define the culture for your staff. You can bring that person, this new employee, into your community and give them a feeling of inclusion, give them a feeling of trust, give them a feeling of I’ve got your back. The way to do that is to make sure that critical information is available to them, like shift impacting updates, outbreaks, resident deaths. That’s the worst.
Our frontline staff develop very meaningful relationships with our residents. That’s part of the job. When you care for somebody day in and day out, you build that relationship.
If I’m only part time and my favorite resident passes away, if it happened while I was off and I got notified, it gives me the opportunity to grieve the way that I need to and then still show up to work and do what I need to do. What about real time emergency notifications?
We’ve all seen this every single day in the news. The weather is going bananas.
There are disasters happening more and more frequently.
Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes.
But when hits the fan, you need to keep people up to date. You need to give them real time communications. You need to make sure that they understand what’s expected because muster stations might change, because the power might go out, because the hospital you’re gonna be transferring people to or should be transferring people to is now full. They cannot accept any more people. You need to reroute.
They have a call list and emergency contact information that needs to be updated on a regular basis.
And then nonthreatening things like job specific information, policies and procedures that change. We know regulations change almost at whim.
To let people know that there’s something new expected of them is important from a compliance perspective, from a safety and regulations perspective.
If my staff don’t know what I need them to now do differently than they did yesterday, I’m at risk. They’re at risk. My residents are at risk. I need to make sure that they’re aware of what’s changing.
And then, of course, again, all of this leads to confusion, frustration, resentment, and ultimately, turnover.
So top three reasons, poor internal communications, lack of appreciation and recognition, and critical information is too hard to find.
Now I’m gonna take a guess at what you’re probably already doing about these things because everyone is doing something about this. It’s not like everyone’s sitting around waiting for the magic to happen. You are doing things about this. Let’s explore what I think you’re probably doing.
I think you’ve probably got bulletin boards.
Every senior care building I’ve ever been in has bulletin boards in it, and every single bulletin board is covered with documents, printouts, pages, compliance procedures, handwashing procedures, information about events and news updates and job postings and event calendars and just a a cacophony of things exist on bulletin boards. The problem is if you’re using a bulletin board as a communication tool, it’s like standing on a soapbox shouting on a busy noisy street. Nobody’s paying attention.
Bulletin boards and all the post it memos you have around your building in front of the elevators, on the elevator doors, on the hallways, at the front door, by the nurses’ stations, by the front desk, Nobody really notices them because they’re just part of the furniture. It’s not an effective communication tool. You’re probably also doing email newsletters, but email newsletters and memos get buried really quickly in inboxes.
It can be really challenging to manage an update.
Working within a template can be hard to do. Trying to find stock photography or stock images to throw in there, word art, trying to control word count so that it doesn’t expand beyond the box that you’ve got to fill.
Managing the distribution list can be a real pain in the butt.
And email is almost never real time because email doesn’t get attention.
Email just becomes, again, part of the things that we’re used to ignoring.
Phone lists. Good lord.
Calling everyone is a waste of time. Calling everyone in an emergency? You can’t. Now there are tools like call apps that will work that do give you the ability to reach out to everybody in an emergency. Absolutely. Yes. They work if you have everyone’s correct phone information.
But what about temp staff? What about agency staff? What about the people that aren’t on your active roster on your payroll, like environmental, housekeeping, the OT, and PT?
Everyone that comes into your building needs to know what’s going on in your building. If you can’t reach them, that’s a problem.
And leaving messages can leave you guessing.
And, also, people aren’t answering the phone if you’re calling them. Again, that leads back to the culture thing. But if I see my boss calling oh, he’s not listening. I’m probably not gonna ask the phone because I might not wanna go into work. I might not wanna take the shift. I might not wanna do what he’s asking me to do because I’m not really loving what it is that I do.
So what can you do about this? We’ve talked about the three top reasons why people leave. Now let’s talk about what you can do about it, and it sounds simple. I’m gonna say I’m not saying this in any trivial way.
You can improve internal communications. You can show public appreciation and recognition, and you can make critical information easy to find. And you’re probably trying to do this. Everyone is trying to do this.
What if doing all these things is actually easier than you think?
Is it easier said than done? Not really.
There is an app that can act as a single source of truth for all critical communications to keep everyone up to date.
It’s an app that provides a social media like staff recognition for improving morale and culture, and the same app allows you to provide anywhere, anytime access to job related benefits, information, policies, procedures, updates, onboarding documents, logins to payroll and scheduling for everyone. And, again, not just frontline staff, but for everyone.
The one thing that really works the best about an app are those little red dots.
We’re so trained to see those little red dots as something of importance that we need to clear off of our home screens. But when we tap, we know that we’re gonna be exposed to something. In this instance, like Twitter, like Facebook, like Instagram, a short form piece of content that I can consume very quickly. That’s what I’ve been trained to use my phone for.
Another thing that works, high fives work. This is both figuratively and physically.
Regularly showing public recognition and appreciation for staff is proven to increase satisfaction, engagement, and retention.
And like I said earlier, more than a few extra dollars will.
If you show public recognition for your staff, they will love it.
I have a great story. One of our customers, her name is Christina, is the wellness manager for a four building organization to skilled nursing to senior living.
From the moment she started to use news, she has seen the culture and the energy in their four buildings improve.
Her staff now get energized when they see Christina walk in the building because they know that if they’re happy and outgoing and more boisterous and more engaged with residents, they’re going to get recognized on the app. She’s gonna take their picture and share it with the rest of the organization to say, way to go, Beth. Love the energy you’re bringing to work today. And the entire organization is seeing this. They’re smiling. They’re enjoying it, and they realize that management is watching.
This has improved the culture in her organization exponentially.
This also then translates into an improved resident experience, which turns into an improved family experience, which turns into an improved reputation in their community.
And then anytime, anywhere access to info works, availability and transparency of information is proven to increase feelings of trust and respect, especially during those first few weeks or first few months of employment when I’m not quite sure what’s expected of me. I don’t know where to go for this sort of thing. If I have this information provided to me in an easy to find way in a simple app in a single place, I don’t have to worry about SharePoint logins. Even if I have a corporate email address, SharePoint’s hard to navigate. Without a corporate email address, I can’t even use SharePoint.
If I push all my documents onto a single app, it’s easy for me to find them, and that shows me that you’re considering my problems, my lifestyle, the way that I need to work.
All of this leads to improved job satisfaction.
At the beginning, this is what we were talking about. If I don’t like my job, I don’t care how much more money you give me. I still don’t like my job. I might do it for a while just to get the money, but I’m going to be looking to leave versus if I really enjoy my job, if I love going to work with the people that I work with because I know I’m gonna be respected, I’m recognized, I’m appreciated, I have fun, I’ve got support from management, I’m gonna look forward to going into work.
It reduces the draw for me to look for validation elsewhere, to do other things. Because even if they’re gonna give me a little bit more money, I kinda like it here. I’m gonna be less likely to leave. Building the culture is gonna help keep more of your staff.
This, of course, leads to improved retention and engagement. I’m not gonna wanna leave. I’m gonna put more time and effort into this because the more time and effort I put into my job, the more fun I put into my job, the more recognition I get, the more valued I feel, the more appreciated I feel.
This is gonna turn into an improved resident experience, which translates directly into an improved family experience, which translates directly into an improved reputation in your community.
Studies show that a more engaged staff is directly correlated to a reduction in rehospitalization, a reduction in falls, and a reduction in sick leave.
If your staff know that by being more engaged, they’re going to get more appreciation and more recognition, they will be more engaged.
We all wanna feel validated.
So if anything I just talked about makes sense to you, and I hope that it does, we would love to continue this conversation with you.
We’re going to be at the ACCA and CAL conference, October sixth to ninth, at booth twenty two thirty five. Please come by, say hi to us, and we can show you what news actually looks like.
If you want to, you can also request a demo.
Thank you so much for your time. Have a wonderful day.