Building a ‘destination workplace’ in long-term care requires diverse investments, active listening to staff needs, experts say

Faced with today’s complex array of financial, staffing and regulatory challenges, senior living and other long-term care providers across the care continuum must rely on an equally broad range of solutions, a panel of experts said Thursday.

Providers should be actively listening to their employees’ needs and trying to meet the evolving desires of the labor market, they emphasized during a session on staffing at a McKnight’s Meeting of the Minds virtual event — whether pursuing recruitment strategies, improving staff member retention, integrating new technologic advances or investing in new benefits and professional development for staff members.

“The one area that’s going to undergird everything for your success is paying attention to the most important capital, which is human capital,” said Navin Gupta, the CEO at human capital management platform provider Viventium. “Pay attention to the caregiver experience from recruitment … to retention to recognition and development — the entire journey.”

That journey begins at recruitment, which already should be an area in which providers are using a wide variety of tactics, according to Sarah Friede, senior vice president of recruitment services for the Health Dimensions Group.

Friede briefly outlined the holistic recruitment strategies used by that organization, ranging from social media outreach, job ads, employee referral programs, applicant tracking systems and a variety of other technologic aids designed to track the process and remove pain points for applicants.

“There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach,” Friede said. “You have to use everything in order to get to your candidates and effectively talk to them, have them be a part of your culture and brand and want to join your company.”

Recruiting to retain

The experts agreed, however, that retention efforts are just as important, if not more so, than recruitment campaigns. 

“It’s easier to love on the people who are right in front of you,” said Dana Ullom-Vucelich, chief human resources officer at Ohio Living. “Control your controllables. I’m not going to be able to grow new human beings in the marketplace because there is a people shortage. But what I can ensure is that the people who have already shown up are going to know they’re cared for and respected.” 

No “silver bullet” exists to accomplish that sort of a workplace culture, according to Friede, but providers that actively survey and listen to their staff members’ needs will have a leg up.

Getting there, however, requires flexibility to match a wide variety of staff needs, which might range from transportation assistance to child care, better healthcare benefits or help with mental health, according to Anthony Scarpino, vice president for talent acquisition at National Health Care Associates.

Higher pay and greater scheduling flexibility can be simple wins across the board, but a variety of more creative, niche benefits can add up to big culture wins as well, Scarpino told attendees.

“One of the things that I think discourages our teams when we do some sort of survey or we start a new program is that it’s not necessarily embraced or supported by the majority,” he said. “I would encourage people to not let that stop you from doing anything, because if you can create several programs that are important to the different demographics that you have in your facilities, in aggregate you will be meeting the needs of most of the people.”

Investing in staff

Beyond creative recruitment strategies and benefits, succeeding in the modern caregiver workforce will require investing in caregivers’ careers and development, the experts agreed.

That need for investment will only become more clear as the staffing mandate and other challenges for providers continue to make business in the sector difficult, according to Mark Stoever, CEO at healthcare workforce management company Smartlinx. Provider advocates have said that even though the staffing mandate only directly applies to nursing homes, other providers — senior living communities, for instance — will be affected, because they draw from the same pool of workers.

“We live in a market today where there are increasingly more concerns for providing enough labor to support the macro trends we all see ahead of us in senior care,” Stoever said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

He later added that his main takeaway for attendees was that “you have to create a destination workplace” to stand out among the crowd of providers trying to recruit a limited pool of workers.

Here, members of the expert panel again agreed that listening to your employees’ career goals and giving them the tools and the autonomy to succeed on their own terms and at their own pace is vital.

That could mean using technology tools to streamline work processes and give employees more time to invest in care work and training, they noted. Technology also can be used for career advancement — for instance, recording optional training sessions and making them available for staff members to reference at convenient times, Friede said.

Another underlying help for staff members’ well-being could be investing in self-care and mental health tools, Ullom-Vucelich said. 

A “key driver” for National Health Care Associates’ success, according to Scarpino, has been getting staff involved not just in identifying problems, but implementing solutions. 

“If there’s an issue that is brought forward that needs to be corrected, creating small teams that include the employees that brought it up … to help design the solution is far more effective than us in our ivory tower creating [a solution] and saying ‘I knew what you wanted.’”

The McKnight’s Meeting of the Minds event also featured a session on the use of artificial intelligence in long-erm care. Watch either session at https://mcknights.com/062724MOM (free registration is required).