Amenities are nice, but the friendliness of your staff is what’s going to convince consumers to choose -- and remain in -- your continuing care retirement community (CCRC). That was the primary message shared by Mary Tellis-Nayak, vice president of quality initiatives with My InnerView, during the LeadingAge 2014 Annual Meeting and EXPO in Nashville, TN.
“How many of you have heard, ‘I’m going to your CCRC because you have the best laundry in the state?” joked Tellis-Nayak during a session entitled “Turning Employees into Compassionate Caregivers.”
Workers in any business -- whether it is retail, office or residential -- create an environment that makes the difference between satisfaction and dissatisfaction among customers, said Tellis-Nayak.
That’s especially true in CCRCs, where day-to-day interactions give staff and residents the opportunity to develop close relationships. Those relationships become particularly meaningful when workers are caring and compassionate.
How do you make sure your workers are caring and compassionate? Tellis-Nayak says the answer is simple:
- Hire the right type of employees.
- Treat those employees well once they join your staff.
Managers must be caring and compassionate if they expect their employees to be caring and compassionate, said Tellis-Nayak. Caring must start at the top and trickle down.
Tips for Treating Employees Well
Tellis-Nayak offered these tips to managers:
- Pay attention to complaints. “Complaints are the textbook of improvement,” said Tellis-Nayak. “You should embrace them. If you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it.”
- Communicate. Poor communication can be found at the root of most problems, says Tellis-Nayak. Conversely, good communication can solve most issues, especially issues that arise between employers and employees.
- Show respect. The act of listening, rather than just hearing, can change the relationship between a worker and his or her boss. “These are the most frequently said words among frontline nurses: ‘No one respects me,’” said Tellis-Nayak. “If you want a caring caregiver, you must respect them.”
- Consult with workers. Good communication could be as simple as asking a staff person about his or her preferences. For example, said Tellis-Nayak, give nurses and aides the opportunity to express their preferences for the body wash or soap that they will use when assisting residents with bathing. Workers will feel more respected, and will be more engaged in their caregiving duties.
- Get to know your workers. “You should know something about every person who reports to you,” said Tellis-Nayak.
- Honor the relationships. Take note of individual relationship between workers and residents. Don’t separate workers from residents with whom they have built relationships. Keep those workers up-to-date about the resident’s changing health condition. For example, one worker was not informed when a resident for whom she was caring passed away when the worker was off duty. Occurrences like this create weakness in the system and hurt many people along the way, advised Tellis-Nayak.
Impact of Caring Workers
Creating a good work environment will reduce the turnover rate drastically, says Tellis-Nayak. But it will also improve the quality of care, according to a 2014 report from National Research Corporation. The report shows positive correlations between quality of workers’ conditions and the quality of the residents’ conditions.
The caring and competence of staff were the two most important factors driving short-stay residents to recommend a care setting, according to the report. These staff attributes also influenced the satisfaction of residents’ families.
Impact of a Caring Management
According to the report, 4 factors drive staff members to recommend their place of employment to others:
- Care or concern of management.
- Attentiveness of management.
- Assistance with job stress.
- Safety of the workplace.
However, 2 of these factors -- attentiveness of management and assistance with job stress -- received the lowest scores when workers were rating their work environments, says Tellis-Nayak. The other lowest scoring factors were staff-to-staff communication and comparison of pay.
Care for the Caregivers
All this data boils down into one final takeaway: care for your caregivers, and they will pass it forward to the residents. Some aspects of the workplace environment need to change in order to create an atmosphere that workers will transfer to residents, said Tellis-Nayak.
The education programming at LeadingAge conferences is innovative, up-to-date and valuable for those working in the aging-services field. This year, we chose to highlight a representative sample of 25 continuing education sessions from the 2014 LeadingAge Annual Meeting and Expo in Nashville, TN, Oct. 19-22. This “session summary” by Heather Thompson presents the major points from session 84-E, “Turning Employees into Compassionate Caregivers.” Thompson is a recent graduate of Belmont University in Nashville, TN.