Year of the Caregiver

This article is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.

by Todd Austin and Sasha Erickson

In a study done on the “Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in a Long-Term Care Setting,” researchers found displaying warmth, affection, and connection had a tangible impact on employee turnover, resident outcomes, and family satisfaction.

Employees who felt they worked in a loving, caring work environment reported higher levels of satisfaction, increased teamwork, and showed up to work more regularly. But the effects of a companionate culture aren’t just felt by your employees.

Research shows that employees who work in a culture of love companionate culture directly related to client outcomes such as improved patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the ER.

A culture like this is only made possible through a conscious effort from leadership to make their employees feel cared for and appreciated. To see similar results in your own business, start creating a culture of love.

Contrary to popular opinion, an employee doesn’t leave their emotions at the door when they come into work. Especially if they work in a service-based industry like long-term and post-acute care.

The emotions an employee feels while caring on the job affects performance, customer and employee satisfaction, and care outcomes.

For example, if an employee is feeling stressed, frustrated, or disgruntled, they will either appear so as they’re caring for their residents and patients or be forced to put up a positive front on the outside while bottling up negative emotions on the inside. Whether these types of negative emotions are revealed in the open or held within, either outcome leads to low satisfaction and high employee turnover.

Instead, be an advocate for your employees’ wellbeing and mental health. Provide resources for mental health support and regularly check-in with your staff at important milestones. Offering competitive benefits, flexible hours, and paid time off encourages employees to tend to their own needs as well as others.

Culture is more than a staff break room with a foosball table. Your company’s culture will create itself, whether you’re in control of it or not.

Creating a healthy company culture requires deliberate and consistent actions from your leadership team. It is your goal to ensure that when your employees think about work on a Sunday night, they feel positive about coming to work every Monday morning. At Activated Insights, our approach centers on understanding and enhancing the employee experience through several key strategies:

• • Culture and Engagement Assessments

    • We regularly administer assessments to identify strengths and areas needing improvement to help us stay attuned to the evolving needs and perceptions of our employees.

  • Employee Focus Groups and Culture Audits

    • We have started administering focus groups and culture audits to gain real insights and solutions directly from our employees. These sessions create open lines of communication where employees can express their thoughts and ideas.

  • Prioritizing Employee Wellness

    • We offer unlimited PTO with mandatory minimums, including one mental health day off each quarter and a minimum of two weeks off per year with at least one period of five consecutive days off. This policy underscores our commitment to employee well-being, ensuring that they can balance work with personal life effectively.

  • Effective Communication and Leadership

    • Continuously communicating, modeling, and reinforcing the company’s vision, values, mission, and guiding principles is crucial. Leaders play a significant role in setting the tone and maintaining a positive culture by leading with transparency, empathy, and consistency.

  • Team Building and Collaboration

    • At Activated Insights our teams are often comprised of both in-office and remote employees. We encourage teams to get together at least annually. It’s imperative that companies are deliberate in providing opportunities for their teams to collaborate, build trust, and break down silos. We find that this improves overall job satisfaction and productivity.

  • Building Trust and Accountability

    • Trusting employees and treating them like adults to manage their work and personal demands is essential. By creating an environment of trust and accountability, we encourage employees to take ownership of their roles and contribute meaningfully to the organization’s success.

By focusing on these strategies, we ensure that our employees look forward to coming to work, feel valued and supported, and are motivated to contribute to a positive company culture.

If you don’t speak two languages, you won’t connect with your employees to make them want to stay.

While everyone communicates in their own way, if you don’t know the language your caregivers will listen to, your recognition efforts are going to waste.

But this isn’t the type of language Duolingo can teach you. Rather, every provider in the long-term and post-acute care industry should become fluent in appreciating their employees.

The Value of Communication

In 1992, Dr. Gary Chapman noticed a pattern of miscommunication after practicing couples’ counselling for years. He discovered that individuals often misunderstand one another’s needs by communicating how they would personally like to receive recognition, without taking the others’ needs into consideration. He concluded that how we respond to appreciation boils down to one of the following categories.

Learn how to speak your caregivers’ language of appreciation to increase caregiver retention, refine your leadership skills, and foster a culture of recognition:

• Words of Affirmation
  • Care employees ranked verbal recognition by a supervisor as their number one preferred form of recognition—and lack of communication from their employer as their top complaint. Actively seek out reasons you can praise your caregivers to boost company morale and foster a culture of gratitude:
    • Send handwritten thank you cards
    • Give your caregivers a shoutout in company newsletters or on social media
    • Recognize top performers using an employee of the month program to give everyone a chance to be in the spotlight

• Receiving Gifts

  • While a raise may be outside of the company budget, 20.4% of caregivers mentioned smaller forms of monetary recognition as their chosen form of acknowledgement. Small bonuses for top performers, extra vacation time, or gift cards are simple forms of appreciation:
    • Give gift cards or free movie tickets
    • Give company branded clothing
    • Offer paid vacation time

• Acts of Service

  • A care employee’s occupation is to literally provide service to those in need—but have you ever thought of ways to serve your care staff? Although it may seem counterintuitive to serve in a workplace where employees are paid, you can offer your staff the relief that they need by helping to shoulder some of their responsibilities:
    • Gather feedback and listen to how you can make their daily tasks or commute a little easier
    • Go the extra mile to make them smile by hosting random appreciation events where you can offer the company donuts, coffee, or even turkeys on Thanksgiving

• Quality Time: Caregiving can be a very isolating job where they receive little social interaction with people other than their clients. Consciously create opportunities to spend quality time with your caregivers:
  • • Hold group training events to create an environment where caregivers can ask questions and learn from fellow coworkers.
    • Schedule one-on-one meetings or lunches to build individual relationships with your caregivers and check in on how they are doing.
    • Support their learning and professional development by discussing your caregivers’ goals and needs

In short: everything.

Your ability to create a companionate culture of recognition for your care staff will be the difference that pulls you out of the revolving doors of recruitment and retention.

The quality of your leadership within your company directly impacts your quality of care for the long-term and post-acute care industry.

In 2024, spend more time consciously creating a companionate culture and start to see your employee retention and client satisfaction skyrocket.

# # #

As a highly accomplished executive, Todd Austin, COO & President of Activated Insights, is recognized as a leading voice in the rapidly-growing care industry. With over a decade of experience in executive leadership roles, Todd brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to his current position as a key member of the Activated Insights team.

With a background in sales, marketing, management, operations, and finance, Todd is a true Renaissance executive with a rare combination of strategic and tactical skills. His expertise in developing and implementing growth strategies, optimizing operations, and driving profitability has made him a sought-after advisor to many organizations.

This article is part one of a two-part series from Activated Insights, formerly Home Care Pulse. Come back next week for the continuing story. Read more about Caring for the Caregiver here. 

by Todd Austin and Sasha Erickson

Healthcare employees admit that the 3 main factors contributing to the most stress at work are:

• • Concerns about being trainied for the required workload
  • Worries about job security
  • Finding the time to balance work and personal life

As a result, almost 60% of those working in the healthcare space reported their self-assessed level of burnout to be between moderate and very high—which can be attributed to the high-level emotional investment required for the job.

While the long-term and post-acute care is one of the fastest growing industries in the nation, it also ranks in the top 5 workforces with the highest turnover.

Fortunately, the care employee burnout crisis is fixable.

The cure?

Treating our staff, and ourselves, with a little more conscious compassion.

For most other industries, employee turnover peaks at one year.

But for the long-term and post-acute care industry, 40% of turnover occurs within an employee’s first 100 days.

Which isn’t leaving much room for providers to retain their staff. According to the 2024 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report, annual care staff turnover increased by 14% within the last two years, averaging a total of 79.2%.

But there is hope in the data.

What if we told you that simply thanking your care staff more could get them to stay longer than 3 months?

According to the Benchmarking Report, recognition received the lowest satisfaction score from employees. Care staff are most dissatisfied with the appreciation they’re receiving after a job well done, followed by feeling inadequately prepared for the field.

Not only are feelings of unappreciation causing turnover rates to skyrocket, it’s also having a detrimental impact on the state of the industry.

As a result of not feeling appreciated or recognized for the work they do, your employees may be showing warning signs of impaired grief processing:  

• • Irritability or anger
    • oddly negative behaviors or attitudes that are uncharacteristic for the employee
  • Obsessive thoughts
    • rumination over certain patients or issues that is constantly brought up and seems to never be resolves
  • Hyper alertness or overreactive behaviors
    • intense, erratic behaviors or excessive attention to work that is unwarranted or outside of the normal response
  • Self-harming behaviors
    • gravitation to overworked, exhaustive behaviors e.g. refusing to take breaks, taking on added tasks unnecessarily
  • Apathy or numbness
    • lack of reaction to items that would normally cause a response, decrease in emotions, or refusal to address difficult emotions

Contrary to popular opinion, an employee doesn’t leave their emotions at the door when they come into work. Especially if they work in a service-based industry like long-term and post-acute care.

The emotions an employee feels while caring on the job affects performance, customer and employee satisfaction, and care outcomes.

For example, if an employee is feeling stressed, frustrated, or disgruntled, they will either appear as they’re caring for their residents and patients or be forced to put up a positive front on the outside while bottling up negative emotions on the inside. Whether these types of negative emotions are revealed in the open or held within, either outcome leads to low satisfaction and high employee turnover.

Instead, be an advocate for your employees’ wellbeing and mental health. Provide resources for mental health support and regularly check-in with your staff at important milestones. Offering competitive benefits, flexible hours, and paid time off encourages employees to tend to their own needs as well as others.

# # #

As a highly accomplished executive, Todd Austin, COO & President of Activated Insights, is recognized as a leading voice in the rapidly-growing care industry. With over a decade of experience in executive leadership roles, Todd brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to his current position as a key member of the Activated Insights team.

With a background in sales, marketing, management, operations, and finance, Todd is a true Renaissance executive with a rare combination of strategic and tactical skills. His expertise in developing and implementing growth strategies, optimizing operations, and driving profitability has made him a sought-after advisor to many organizations.