Tough competition, dead-end career paths and lack of clear culture hurt many operators
By Tommy Comer, Commonwealth Assisted Living
All across the world, human resource leaders struggle with the same challenges: talent retention, education/training and building a strong corporate culture. These challenges are no different in the senior living industry, but they are significantly more important.
These HR building blocks so crucial because, as senior living providers, we are in both the hospitality and healthcare businesses. The intersection of these two areas makes our responsibility all the more important for the residents we serve and their loved ones. Senior living providers understand that it is paramount that their employees be a pillar of compassion, care and respect as residents approach the end of life.
Why is it then that our industry suffers from a high employee turnover rate? The answer is complicated.
First, there is a significant gap between the number of certified, skilled workers and the need for those workers. It is estimated the industry needs 1.5 million new caregivers by 2025. As a result, providers have become much more aggressive with compensation packages.
Other factors such as on the job stress, poor management practices and a lack of corporate culture contribute to skilled employees jumping from provider to provider. All of these issues harm not only the senior living communities themselves, they irrevocably damage the experiences residents have.
Finding the Root of the Problem
Several years ago, Commonwealth Assisted Living took a very hard look at data about our associate retention rates, job satisfaction, work environment, training and several other factors. We realized that quick fixes were not going to solve the challenges.
We flipped the organization chart completely around and focused all of our efforts on putting our associates first. This meant building a completely new culture within the company and re-allocating all of our resources towards the betterment of the front-line staff.
Before we could accurately gauge the challenges and possible solutions, we needed to do our homework. That meant opening up new lines of communication with everyone through one-on-one interviews and surveys with current and past employees, restructuring our management divisions to be more accessible, and creating additional opportunities for communication.
The data that we collected during this process was tremendous in helping the senior leadership team develop a plan to move forward. However, it took some creative thinking to make and the plan work well. We needed to create systemic solutions to the challenges we faced — not just Band-Aids.
Among the first challenges we found was education and training. Argentum estimates that there will be a need for 2 million additional senior living professionals by 2025 and the competition for those professionals will be fierce. It would require a creative strategy to not only help meet the growing demand of talent, but also be in a position where we are an employer of choice for prospective associates.
Destroying the Dead-End Job
We had hundreds of associates who felt “stuck” in their positions even though they had numerous talents, the drive and, most importantly, the heart to be successful in more senior positions.
The biggest obstacle was the certifications and training they needed in order to move to a higher position. These educational opportunities were often out of financial reach given the cost associated with classes and tests. A simple offer to pay for the classes is neither meaningful nor in keeping with the culture we want to cultivate. That is why we decided to launch CAL University, an internal training and development program open to associates.
CAL University consists of six programs that allow our employees to grow within the company. We designed each program to meet the specific needs we learned about in our surveys and interviews.
Programs include Jump Start, our new-employee orientation. One of the biggest reasons cited for turnover in organizations across the country is a lack of programs designed to assist new hires in adjusting to their jobs and work environments.
Some other programs are Executive Director in Training and Future Resident Care Director. Through a combination of classroom instruction and on-the-job experience, both of these programs offer participants the opportunity to learn new skills that provide a road map for success in the future. Given the demand for these two specific roles, this has been an immensely popular choice and has successfully developed new executive directors and resident care directors at our communities.
Beating Tough Competition
The talent-versus-need gap with skilled senior living associates has created a compensation struggle between providers. This is another challenge that is not easy to fix. We conduct independent audits and studies with analysts like PayScale to make adjustments to our salaries and benefit packages, but these are only temporary fixes. Salaries and benefits change on a daily basis.
We needed to take a step back and learn more about the needs of our associates. One of the most significant findings we discovered was that a large number of our team members were terrified by the unexpected. Specifically, they were scared by unexpected medical, family or housing emergencies.
Using this as a foundation, we created Commonwealth Cares, an independent nonprofit organization designed to provide employees (both full-time and part-time) with funds to help an emergency.
Considerable effort was taken in order to make this benefit easy for front-line staff to use when needed, and as transparent as possible. Our executives, directors, employees, partners, residents and other friends fund Commonwealth Cares.
The feedback that we have received has been tremendous. It has helped to foster a huge increase in the morale of our employees, who have embraced it as an important part of their benefits package.
Investing in a unique initiative like Commonwealth Cares has a profound impact on associate loyalty. It has helped to reduce turnover because team members see firsthand that the company is actively developing new ways to support them.
Spreading the Vision Across the Portfolio
The final and most complicated challenge we had to overcome was building a stronger corporate culture.
With 22 communities spread across a wide geographic area and over 1,000 associates, creating a unified sense of community is difficult. That is why we went out to all of our team members and asked them what it meant to be a part of Commonwealth Assisted Living. Their feedback created our Core Values.
Every company has Core Values nowadays, but nine times out of 10 a corporate office dictates what those values are. That is not the type of environment that cultivates happy and successful people.
When you look at some of our values like “We do the right thing” and “We are passionate, have fun and celebrate success,” you can see that these are not the typical talking points of senior living providers. They are statements of cultural significance that guide all of our associates.
When we recruit, our Core Values are often one of the first things that we share and ask job candidates about. We want people who have a heart and are compassionate about the work that we do for our residents. These Core Values set the expectations and are a foundation for future success.
Since the implementation of the Core Values, our overall satisfaction among employees has jumped 20 percent over two years, while the satisfaction about our residents has jumped over 10 percent. The approval ratings of specific core competencies like training, development, resources, corporate culture and communications saw 10 percent year-over-year jumps, which is almost unheard of in the senior living industry.
The industry itself has a long way to go to improve relationships with our front-line staff and develop new talent. Even as we work hard to constantly improve the experiences of our associates, it really takes some creative thinking to make talent retention, educations/training and building a strong corporate culture a reality.
The same old tactics that were used in the past will not work any longer. By investing in your team, you will see a radical improvement, which will translate to better care for residents.
Tommy Comer is vice president of human resources at Commonwealth Assisted Living, where he leads company-wide HR operations including employee relations, benefits, recruitment, training and development. Comer earned a Ph.D. in education (Ed.D) from Argosy University, an M.B.A. from University of Phoenix and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arizona.