November, 2025
Building a strong culture across multiple homes, shifts and teams is one of the toughest challenges in senior care. This session shows you how to bring every location into one shared story using clearer communication, consistent recognition and a simple, repeatable framework. You’ll see what fragmented culture looks like in real settings, learn why communication gaps drive disengagement and turnover, and walk through practical steps you can apply across all sites. If you want a more connected workforce and a stronger sense of team across your entire organization, this webinar gives you a clear path forward.
.
Transcript:
Hey, thanks so much for joining me today. Welcome to building a strong culture across sites, a webinar hosted by Niuz.
In today’s presentation, I want to talk about culture in general. How most senior care teams don’t work in one hallway or just from one schedule. They work in different buildings, on different shifts, often with different leaders.
This session focuses on culture across locations, not just inside one home or unit.
Now, that being said, if you are a single home, you have multiple shifts and multiple units. The same concept applies. Culture in plain language translates to how work feels day-to-day, how people treat each other, and how clearly they see the mission that you’re on. And I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to sell technology in this presentation. Niuz as a platform can absolutely contribute to and help you build a strong culture. But the process, the tools, the tips that I’m going to give you are platform or software agnostic. Take what I’m telling you today and apply it to however you choose to move forward.
I’m talking about people. I’m talking about connections. And I’m talking about communication. I’m not going to focus on the platform. And I want to talk to you about a digital town square idea as a just as a simple mental model. One shared space where staff from every site and every shift can see, read, and hear the same story of the organization.
So, who am I? My name is Cameron Micules. I’ve been in the long-term care industry for 25 years. Um, dealing my most of that time has been spent with PointClickCare. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with Careworx, ThirdEye Health, GE Healthcare, Lenovo Global Health, a lot of pharmacy and other tech companies, and currently I’m the head of marketing at Niuz.
The situation today is this fragmented culture is now the norm, not the exception. Current workforce data shows that there’s a level of instability that is unsustainable for us. Let alone what’s going to happen in the next few years with the silver tsunami coming to the shores of our workforce. But we just cannot sustain what we have in place right now. In Ontario alone, 80% of long-term care homes reported difficulty filling RPN shifts in 2024. And more than 40% of those reported difficulty filling PSW or CNA and dietary roles. 80% of our homes had trouble filling care delivery shifts.
That same report showed that 45% of homes in Ontario had a change in at least one senior leadership role. At least one. That’s a DOC, a DON, ADOC, or an administrator. also in 2024. The problem this creates is leadership churn makes a consistent culture very hard to maintain.
Why? Because when leaders change, communication habits change. Each new leader brings a different style with them, different channels and different priorities.
When you operate multiple homes, this problem multiplies. One home might have a highly engaged director. Another might be in transition. Another might not engage whatsoever. or they have a different approach towards communication.
So look at it this way. If I walked into three of your homes today, would the culture feel the same or completely different? Would I walk in expecting to see and feel the same energy level, the same interactions with staff, the same answers to questions that I would ask? If the answer is no, that’s something we need to solve for.
The reason why I bring that up is you can feel fragmentation before you can measure it. And as the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. So, let’s say that one of your homes still leans on bulletin boards as their main communication channel. And another one uses group texts because everybody uses group text. And another forwards really long email threads, which is fine. It’s standard practice. It’s it’s habitual.
The problem is none of these channels reaches everyone. and none of them is going to give a consistent story. The bulletin board has way too many people posting way too many different things to it in different sizes, fonts, shapes, colors, orders of magnitude, orders of priority. Group texts. The problem with group texts, this is a bit of a sidebar.
The problem with the group text is this. If you include me in your group text and I don’t exist as a contact on your phone, all you’re going to see is my phone number. You have no idea who I am other than through my phone number, which you then have to look up. Compounding that problem is if I, part of your staff, decide to leave your building, that entire chat history stays on my phone. Even if you kick me out of that chat group, I still have access to everything that happened beforehand. Everything that you have said to me on a chat or a text message on my phone stays with me. Just keep that in mind.
You also have night shift or weekend staff. They’re going to get stale information. They’re going to learn third-hand about events that they missed or policy changes that they never saw or the recognition that they never received.
What about agency staff that bounces between your homes? If they don’t see or feel a shared culture, they’re going to stay in visitor mode and never fully invest themselves in the team. This has a massive impact on the care delivery that your residents receive. If I’m constantly in visitor mode, if I know I’m not going to put down roots here, if I don’t feel like I belong to something, I’m not going to bring everything I could to my job. I’m going to do what I need to, but it’s going to be very transactional. And transactional relationships are not those that engender trust in family and are not those that improve quality of care over time because they’re looking at the instant transaction, not the historical record.
For multi-sight groups and multi-sight homes, what about the partners that you deal with? If they get different answers depending on which home they call or which staff member they talk to, that’s going to erode trust in your brand as a whole. that’s going to make them always be guessing how is this going to work out for us.
And this is not a bad people problem. It’s a communication system problem. This is something that we can solve very easily. And I will say very easily because it is an easy solution that you can deploy. It’s going to take a little bit of work, but nowhere near the amount of work that you think it will.
What it does come down to is change management. Poor communication drives disengagement and turnover.
This is a a no kidding statement, but there’s a lot of data that supports this. A 2025 systematic review on internal communication and employee engagement. This was run by a company called the journal of information and systems engineering and management. The report found that clear, consistent internal communication supports higher engagement by building trust, clarity, and connection to organizational goals.
Again, no kidding. Do we need to say this? No. And yet, this is not something that we hold as a priority and it needs to be a priority.
There was a white paper released by a company called CERKL, not C I R C L E – C E R K L. And they proved that clear internal channels and two-way feedback improve morale, belonging, and retention. The key part there is two-way feedback.
This is not a I’m going to spout everything down on my staff. This is a conversation that you want to have. This is opening up the both lines of conversation so that you can hear and receive feedback from staff and then you can act upon that and show them that you’re acting upon it because that shows the respect that they need.
A 2025 study on turnover in health and welfare sectors noted that negative organizational culture, including poor communication, lack of trust, is a key factor in staffing over intention. And that’s just intention. That’s them thinking about leaving. That’s even before they get to the point where I’ve had enough.
Poor communication and lack of trust and negative organizational culture. As soon as I feel that as an employee, I’m already thinking, I don’t want to be here anymore. The starting point, the realization of that for a staff member means the start of their disengagement. They’re going to bring less and less of themselves to work. it’s going to become a transactional relationship, not a long-standing relationship for them.
So then if we carry that forward, research on staff engagement in healthcare obviously shows that higher engagement is associated with better patient safety and outcomes.
Again, if you’ve spent the time to build a relationship with the residents that you care for, you know their quirks, you know their their idiosyncrasies. you’re going to spot something that’s changing well in advance of any other diagnosis. But if you don’t know these things, if you don’t get to know the person, if you don’t know that their food can’t be touching or that they have to have purple socks, you’re going to miss out on something important. So, when your staff across sites or even across shifts feel like they’re out of the loop, they disengage. When they disengage, they’re more likely to leave. And when they leave, they leave with all of that relationship, all the equity, the sweat equity they put into the relationships with the families. Care quality is going to suffer.
So culture across sites, across sites, not just in a building, but across sites and across shifts, it’s not a soft nice to have. It connects directly to retention, agency use, and resident experience. Now, let’s look at this as though we’ve solved this problem. So, same story but different buildings.
Another long-term care research report shows that staff engagement rises when teams feel positive, supportive, and inclusive and where staff feel part of a team, a team that cares for and supports each other.
Another study from Biomed Central found that better nursing teamwork correlates with more patient centered care. Now, this is different from what we were talking about, better nursing teamwork. So the team sharing stories, sharing information on shift handoff, part of the documentation process, part of the note-taking process, the collaboration among the team members translates directly into more patient centered care. So it’s not just me providing the care, it’s me bringing the stories back to the rest of the team, asking for advice, guidance, tips, tricks, sharing this information so that we can all deliver better care for everyone involved.
When expectations, values, and recognition are visible in the same way in every home, staff feel like they’re part of one organization. Again, this goes back to if one building does an employee of the week thing and it’s posted in the staff room, the other one does employee of the year and is posted out in the front hallway. Why are there two differences? When you deploy a consistent recognition program across all of your buildings, let’s say a a care aid in home A sees recognition post for a colleague in home B. That post highlights the same values and behaviors leadership talks about locally. It feels unified. I just saw a picture of Janice in our sister building and she’s being recognized for bringing smiles on people’s faces because that’s what this company was built on. And that’s what I hear from my managers all the time. I see that now this is the expectation. This is the value that the organization places on that mission and I can buy into that. That’s an easy lift for me as a frontline worker. I can do that easily. I can subscribe to that and feel like I’m part of this team.
Studies on team inclusion also show that when staff feel included by co-workers and supervisors, they report higher engagement and lower intent to leave. So again, getting back to the teamwork, the collaborative teamwork. If the team recognizes, supports, champions, talks about, communicates with everyone else on the team. That collaboration not just of the care delivery team but with management as well and supervisors. the rest of the team is more likely to engage more frequently because it’s reciprocal.
If someone were to move from one of your homes to another, can they still see the same culture in action or does it feel like a different company?
Now, let’s talk about bulletin boards. We all have these in our buildings. None of us need these in our buildings. And I say that truthfully. You don’t need to have a bulletin board. There are things you need to share with families, with residents, with visitors. Absolutely. Yes. It does not need to exist on a cluttered, messy high school science fair looking bulletin board. So, bulletin board culture is a sharp contrast to a digital town square.
The old model is print a memo, pin it up, hope people see it, replace it with the next memo. Nothing really changes. You have no way of knowing if anybody actually saw what you posted.
The new model, the digital town square model is publish information once, reach every staff member instantly, and know who’s seen it. That’s much better that I can track, that I can measure, monitor, report on, and improve upon.
So, Digital Town Square isn’t just it’s not just a communication tool. It’s a daily touch point where people experience the culture on that platform. You can share stories that you tell, the people you recognize, the priorities you highlight, the things that you hold dear and that you value that increases exposure to expectation. That increases the understanding of the staff. This is what needs to happen now.
So, what would this look like? Broadcasting updates that reach all homes at once instead of just one. Let’s say there’s going to be a a weather notice coming out. Let’s say roads are iced over. Let’s say there’s some sort of an emergency notification. What if it’s just a regular old, “Hey everybody, want to wish you all a merry Christmas and happy holidays. You can reach everybody at once.” Then there’s sight specific posts when something matters in one home, like there’s a flood, like the front door is broken, like you’ve got new staff coming in, like you want to recognize somebody for a birthday or a milestone in their career.
And then recognition posts that highlight values and behaviors that you want to see replicated. Like I said earlier, take a picture of Nancy. Look at the smile she’s putting on the faces of the people around her. Once you’ve got those out, you can also use a digital town square to run surveys. Surveys that give staff a voice and track morale. You can do quick pulse surveys and send it out to everybody asking them on a weekly basis, how are things going today? Thumbs up, thumbs down. And then do you want to share anything? You can make if you have the opportunity to, you can make those surveys anonymous so that people feel that if I say this, I don’t really want to get scrutinized for it. Feel free say whatever you want to make it anonymous. You’re going to get much more unfiltered, much more raw data back, but it’s also going to be actionable data.
And then also that the replacing the bulletin board with a digital town hall means you’ve got a resource hub as you have with a bulletin board now for documents, policies, benefits, info, procedures, whatever. But instead of me having to go into the lunchroom to find this thing underneath all the other folded sheets, I have it available at my fingertips in my digital town square.
How do people get at this sort of thing? How could it work? There are tools out there, Niuz is one of them, that work on smartphones, that work on tablets, that work on nursing station, that work on kiosks in break rooms, that work on laptops, on med carts. The goal is to remove the excuse that I didn’t see that.
If it’s on a bulletin board, if it’s taped to a wall, if it’s packed away in a binder, I didn’t see that. Becomes a very a very easy excuse to make.
If it’s on your phone and I’ve sent you a notification, yeah, you probably saw it. Now, I want to make it clear. This isn’t adding another channel. This is consolidating many scattered channels into one.
This is you doing away with the reliance on a bulletin board and not having to worry so much about sending long thread emails or not having to continue along the lines of a bunch of different text message groups or another survey tool or a survey monkey or or or put them all into one single piece. It makes it easier for your staff to know where to look for information that they need. Makes it easier for you to share that information in the place they know where to look.
Niuz is a practical way to create that digital town square for senior and long-term care organizations. It was built specifically by senior care experts to improve culture and job satisfaction. It’s built as a single source of truth for updates across all homes. Leaders can send an urgent update to every home in seconds or target one building or department. No more guessing on who saw what. It’s got a social style recognition that builds culture every day. Staff can post kudos that everyone can see, not just one breakroom.
And this builds a shared story of what good looks like across all of your locations. You can send out surveys and pulse checks to monitor morale by site. HR and leaders can run quick pulses or deeper surveys by home, by region, by role, and then find dips early and act fast. And then onboarding and policy hubs for new and existing staff.
Think about this. Policies, education, benefits, onboarding content, all live in one place. New hires don’t have to rely on photocopied binders that differ by sight. They don’t have to worry about notes that someone has written on something that doesn’t make sense to them. They don’t have to worry about missing something that wasn’t printed or got lost somewhere. It’s all consolidated in one digital folder.
Now again, this what I’m describing is Niuz replaces scattered channels like bulletin boards, like email blasts, like text chains that were never designed for multi-sight or multi-shift teams. As I said at the beginning, I’m not trying to sell you Niuz. I would love to sell you Niuz, but I’m not trying to sell you Niuz, although I think I’ve done a good job of selling Niuz. But I want you to try this for yourself.
I want you to consider how could I go about changing culture fairly easily just by implementing a couple of simple strategies. Resist the big bang adoption in every site at once. If you have multiple homes, focus a pilot across two or three homes that represent different realities like urban versus rural or high versus low turnover.
So, I want you to do is define one or two clear goals for this pilot. Goals like what, Cam? How about increasing cross-sight recognition posts by 50%. If you’re sitting at zero, that’s not hard to do. Ensure 90% of staff see monthly policy updates. Okay, how are you tracking that now? And how could you do that digitally? How about improving staff sentiment about communication scores by 10 points in a pulse survey? Again, not a hard thing to do, but not something you can achieve if you don’t set the goal.
So, how would you go about doing this?
Let’s outline a simple content rhythm for the next 30 days. Weekly leadership video. Yeah, video. Take a video of yourself on your phone and share it out. And that message goes to all the pilot homes. Hey everyone, we’re starting this pilot. We’d really love to get you involved. We see an opportunity to change things and improve things for everyone. We’d love it if you could contribute and uh take part of this pilot with us. And then beyond that, daily recognition posts across all sites. However you choose to do that, recognize somebody on the daily basis and share that with as many people in the organization as possible and make it clear what it is you’re recognizing them for because again, you want to show this is what good looks like. And then a short survey to collect feedback on communication and culture. Starting point, baseline, finish line. I want to know how we’ve changed.
That’s it. An easy, simple thing that you can do. Does it require a little bit extra work? Yeah, a little bit. Is it replacing a lot of the things that you’re currently doing? Yes.
That’s the point.
We’re not trying to add channels. We want to consolidate.
So, again, this goes back to the research that I talked about. Internal communication that is regular, that is clear, and two-way supports higher engagement. So, I I encourage you to share the pilot results with the staff and involve frontline teams in refining the approach. At the end of your pilot, 30 days, share back. Here’s what we learned, here’s what we heard, here’s what we tried, here’s what we changed, here are the results that we got from that. We would love to get your feedback and include you on did this work, did it not work, how could we improve going forward. This is going to reinforce the voice and ownership of frontline staff which engagement studies highlights as very important.
I want to talk to you about a very specific successful use case and I’ve talked about this in earlier webinars. This is one of my favorite stories about Niuz. Pictured here is Christina, head of HR and communications for Crown Ridge Healthcare, a 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.
Before starting with Niuz, she would visit each home, spend time with the staff, and do everything she could to build a culture. All the things you’re probably doing, um, newsletters, posting memos, staff pictures in the breakout rooms, employee of the month, employee of the year, events. But even the staff who picked up shifts in multiple buildings in the organization said that each home still had its own vibe and that there wasn’t any real connection between the buildings.
So Christina in her search for a solution found Niuz and we talked about her goals and her challenges and we got to work. And just days after launching kudos in Niuz, her staff took it and ran with it. 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’ve coalesced into a thriving, caring, 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. She walks into the buildings, she takes pictures of her staff, she writes a brief little blurb about what that good looks like and shares it across the board. And because she does the exact same thing in all four buildings, all four buildings now operate the exact same way from a cultural perspective. And all four buildings recognize staff from other buildings if and when they walk in. They know them by name because they’ve seen their face. They’ve heard their stories and they champion and support each other because of it. So, I want to end with a simple checklist that leaders can act on immediately. Number one, choose a primary staff communication channel for all of your homes.
If you already use Niuz, fantastic. Confirm that everything important goes there first. If you’re already using Niuz, great, you’re winning. But make sure that you try to stop using the things that you’ve used in the past. Stop sending mass emails. Stop leaning on the bulletin board. Move everything over onto Niuz. The change in habit and the forceful change of habit will trickle down to the rest of the staff. They will no longer go to those old watering holes. They will go to the new spot to get the information.
If you’re not currently using Niuz or if you don’t have a plan like this in place yet, a single source of truth matters for engagement and retention. If I hear from somebody that there’s a new thing posted on the bulletin board, but then it got taken down and I missed it, that’s no good. If somebody talks about an email that I never saw, that’s no good. Consolidate things. Pick one spot and make that your central communication channel and let everyone know this is how we’re moving forward.
Then I want you to move recognition into a place where everyone can see it across shifts, across sites. Help them see recognition as an always on culture tool, not a once a year awards program. Maybe you don’t do daily because that would be tough to do. Maybe it’s weekly, but something consistent. Not just in implementation, but where it appears and how it appears and what does it sound like and what does it mean to the staff.
Then I want you to set a weekly commitment from leadership to publish one short whole organization message that keeps everyone focused on the same priorities and values. And again, whatever communication channel you choose, one short whole organization message, it’s just reminding everyone why they’re there. What is our mission? What is our guiding light? And in that short message, in that short story, write about something that you’ve seen throughout the week. do a recognition piece included in that.
Find a way to make it meaningful to the team. I want to make sure that you understand that better internal communication and visible leadership messages help build engagement which connects to lower turnover which connects to better care. If your staff across every site felt informed, in the loop, appreciated, and connected, what do you think that would do to your turnover numbers and your resident experience over the next year?
I’m sure you’ve heard in exit interviews, I didn’t know. I barely met with my supervisor. My onboarding was terrible. This is an opportunity for you to start changing that. I’ve run up against time. I want to thank you for joining me today.
I hope this was worthwhile. I hope I’ve been able to at least give you a a bit of a path to follow in order for you to improve your culture starting next week.
2026 is right around the corner. Why not develop this program for the month of December? so that by January you have new habits instilled in the rest of your organization and you’ve got a clear path towards a stronger culture going into 2026.
If you’d like to, we’d love to show you a demo of Niuz. Please reach out to my uh colleague Julia. You can use her email julia at niuz dot com or you can go directly to Niuz.com and click on request a demo.
Thanks so much for your time. We will see you soon.