McKnight’s reports that the average turnover rate for assisted senior living facilities falls right around 42 percent. The cost of replacing each staff member can cost up to 46 percent of the lost employee’s salary, leaving you short-staffed and losing money. If those numbers — or higher ones — sound familiar to you, you probably continually work to find ways to hold on to valued employees. Consider implementing these three ways to retain your senior community staff:
Let Senior Living Community Staff Know They Have Meaningful Value to You and the Residents
Communicate your employees’ worth to them through regular recognition. Employees who work with seniors often have long days that can run the gamut from quiet and uneventful to nonstop action.
Observe their accomplishments and commitment to their jobs, especially for those who show a deep bond with the residents and often choose to go above and beyond their duties. Post your staff’s accomplishments in your community newsletter and create incentives to earn bonuses based on feedback from residents and other metrics that you set to encourage an upbeat work environment.
Use Technology to Give Your Residents Autonomy and Raise Their Spirits
You probably count on your employees to help support residents who miss their families. IndependaTVe™‘s Angela is a smart TV program that helps you improve the lives of your residents in a few key ways. Angela works to help your residents manage their daily routines as well as helping to lift their spirits. Both of these results can help stabilize your turnover rate among employees by helping to free up their schedules to manage and attend to their standard duties. Angela will give your residents more autonomy, reminding them to take medications and keep appointments.
More importantly, Angela will help lift residents’ spirits, since they can easily flip through photo albums that family members can send via smartphones and tablets. Giving your residents the opportunity to watch their grandchildren’s soccer games or ballet recitals through Angela is priceless, helping your residents keep in touch with their loved ones’ daily lives. The feature that lets them call with a single click makes it easier for residents to connect with long-distance family members than ever before.
Offer Professional Development and Training Opportunities
Give your staff opportunities to learn and grow to improve their chance to earn a higher wage or salary and to take on new challenges. Employees generally do not like to feel like they are stagnating in their work; therefore, by offering training courses and by hosting professional development seminars to learn new ways of working with residents, you let your staff know you care about their sense of fulfillment in their work and their plans for their professional future. Some training that staff members can seek might involve learning more about care for Alzheimer’s patients or leadership courses.
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About Independa
Independa believes that the elderly are vitally important to family members, their community, and our culture as a whole. That’s why we created IndependaTV™and IndependaTVe™, the world’s first and only TV with an embedded engagement platform designed for older adults.
IndependaTV™ enables stronger connections between caregivers and their elderly loved ones with a beautifully designed and user-friendly TV that allows you to monitor their health and wellbeing, coordinates appointments and events, and engages them with their families through video chat when you can’t be there.
Independa TVe™ enables senior living communities and their staff to generate a higher occupancy ramp, reduce staff inefficiencies, and improve the quality of life and engagement for their residents.
IndependaTVe Plus™ is integrated with a wide range of medical, environmental and activity monitoring devices allowing clinical staff to respond when something isn’t quite right.
