Survive and Thrive the Caregiver shortage.

Anyone that has spent any time working inside a busy home care agency office can tell you, expect the unexpected. As the former owner and agency director of a busy homecare agency, I thought I had seen it all but working with agencies across the states I now realize, there is no such thing. Home care can be interesting to say the least.

The reason I mention this is there is often a disconnect between care staff and care managers and it is easy for things to go a wry.

It is easy for caregivers to fail to understand what management experiences day to day, and I have noticed that sometimes care managers are misunderstood by caregivers.

I also suspect that is one of the main reasons that five of the top ten complaints caregivers have about home care agencies are all communication centric at their core.

When caregivers are surveyed they routinely report that they feel underappreciated, and they often state that they do not feel their opinions are respected or valued.

Considering home care offices spend so much time putting out fires, it is easy to understand how a caregiver can mistaken a well intentioned care manager's intent. Especially when in the middle of spinning multiple plates and dealing with multiple issues simultaneously. The perception caregivers have may be unjustified especially when care managers are experiencing a sense of urgency, accurate or not the perception remains an issue for the agency.

High turn over rates are at epidemic proportions, the national shortage of home care workers means that caregivers have the upper hand in the agency, caregiver equation so it is helpful to understand caregiver sentiment justified or not.

In a 2023 study, myCNAjobs reported that 89% of homecare providers were forced to turn away new clients because of an inability to staff new cases.

Home Care Pulse’s 2023 Benchmarking Report informs us that 97.8% of agencies state that caregiver shortages are negatively impacting their agencies.

If that is not difficult enough, the Homecare Association of America reported that 2023 turnover rates jumped to 77% up from 65% in 2022.

The caregiver shortage costs agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in lost revenues and added expenses. When we consider this it becomes abundantly clear, that any thing an agency can do to make caregivers feel more valued is in the agencies best interest.

Many agencies that we perform FCMO services for, are shocked when their agency analysis put ALL IN caregiver replacement costs AT more than $2500 per caregiver (on a cost adjusted year over year basis).

When agency owners that on a national basis turnover costs are averaging home care agencies more than $160,000 a year it becomes sobering to say the least.

To survive and to thrive in the caregiver shortage an agency needs to position it self and become as “Agency of Choice” and any tools and strategies that improve communications is an investment that pays big dividends.

To be an "agency of Choice, there is real need to understand the psychology of today’s caregivers. It is essential to forge better relations with the care team. Agencies cannot put hours on the schedule with out caregivers. To thrive you must build a team of qualified and hopefully somewhat loyal caregivers, and to do that it is vitally important for agencies to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Caregiver relations are at the very heart of success or failure for home care agencies.

An agency that positions themselves as the preferred agency by providing a superior caregiver experience naturally becomes the local Agency of Choice.

Agencies that achieve this status has the most caregivers who desire to work for them. The agency with the most caregivers will be the agency with the most hours.

So where should you start on the journey to becoming the Agency of Choice?

The first thing we help our FCMO agencies is that they need to do a deep dive into an agencies culture. Culture is key when it comes to caregiver relations.

Ads are often the first-place new caregivers learn about an agency so starting there makes sense, and can be really insightful.

It helps to run ads that are authentic??It is easy for agencies to over hype their culture and underdeliver on representations made in an ad.

Care givers report that lots of agencies routinely over-promise in their advertising. They stress all the great benefits offered. In reality only office staff will qualify for those benefits.

When caregivers see "great benefits" offered they tend to roll their eyes, and yawn because they know it is simply not reality.

Agencies lose credibility advertising in this manner. Hyping ads make the agencies reputation suspect. It is starting off on the wrong foot if the objective is to be the preferred agency for caregivers to work for, a more honest approach is best.

Caregivers also talk about how agencies routinely advertise how much they love their care staff, that their care team are valued family members. But once hired they are treated as a commodity and thrown at a client just to fill a shift.

Onboarding is an opportunity to bond with new hires. It is tempting to rush the process to get the caregiver into the field, and I have to admit that I was guilty of doing that from time to time in my own agency.

But I learned that the time spent upfront onboarding and training paid big dividends when it came to building a great team of caregivers. I also learned that making it mandatory for new caregivers to come and spend sometime in he office before going into the field was eye opening for them.

Many times caregivers would say to my care managers I don't know how you do it. They quickly came to realize that the office is not some relaxed slow paced cushy job. To be a great care manager, you have to have a heart for it, and when caregivers experience first hand how chaotic a home care office can be, they gain new insights that help with communications. For newer caregivers, this is a great way to break them in.

Statistically speaking many caregivers report that the feel that they are under prepared by agencies for shifts when they first go into the field and meet a new client, so again onboarding is the key to making sure things get started on the right foot.

In a world where caregivers feel that they do not really get the support they would like it becomes clear that this is key if you want to be the agency of choice.

Caregivers also report that plans of care are often inadequate, or unclear. This is a great opportunity for not only improving caregiver relations but increasing client satisfaction. Believe it or not, the majority of home care agencies do not even follow up with new hires after the first and second shift. Introducing new care team members is a great way to make sure that client's expectations are being met.

Following up with the caregiver and the client should be an essential best practice of every agency providing in home care. This is a great way to address what caregivers routinely reporting, that they feel they do not have a voice, that when they make suggestions, they are often ignored. This is an easy way to differentiate your agency and begin building your "Agency of Choice" reputation.

Agencies of Choice understand that culture is at the heart of delivering a great customer experience.

As far as recruitment is concerned today you have to market just as hard if not harder for caregivers as you do for new clients.

The old school method of just placing Indeed and myCNAjobs ads as your primary source of caregiver recruitment is not going to help you thrive.

Indeed, remains the number one source for hiring caregivers in the industry. But are you aware that caregivers hired on Indeed have the highest turnover rate out of any other caregiver recruitment source.

One reason is caregivers on Indeed view agencies as commodities. They know if they lose a client, or have trouble with an agency that they can just grab a shift elsewhere, right on Indeed.

Caregiver loyalty to agencies has been in decline year after year. Caregivers are working for multiple agencies, SNFs, hospitals, hospice and private clients.

The reality is that todays turn over of 50% to 75% over the first 120 days is common place. If you can keep turnover rates at 30% your an all star. Did you know that the single source of caregivers with the lowest turnover rate is caregiver referrals?

Regardless if you can’t keep them busy, they will find work elsewhere. So, balancing new client acquisition with recruitment and retention is mission critical.

But when you have the best caregiver experience, care team members want to come back to you. Following up with inactive care team members is super important, birthdays, anniversaries and holidays are great bonding opportunities.

Gone forever are the days of the long-drawn-out hiring process. Today the agency that can screen, interview and onboard the fastest and most efficiently is the agency that will recruit the most caregivers.

If caregivers are not showing up for interviews, it is simply because your processes are too slow, you are not getting to them quick enough, someone hired them before you could move them through your process.

Implementing a recruitment funnel is the key to successful recruiting in 2024. Agencies need to be feeding that funnel from multiple sources, and they can never take their foot off recruitment. Marketers should be distributing flyers with QR codes when they meet caregivers in the field. Social media ads, and posts, even your Google business profile needs to feed you recruitment funnel.

Today the majority of caregivers are using their smartphones to search and apply for care opportunities, so your process needs to be mobile friendly.

At Stratophi and the Raleigh SEO Team we use funnels and automation to help position our home care clients as the “Agency of Choice''. AI, machine learning and automations are making so many of these processes easy for staff and the results speak for them selves. Personalized messages go out automatically and no one would ever no they were not actually sent by the management team.

?Automations free the care managers from time-consuming tasks and drastically speed up recruitment for agencies. It allows for faster connectivity with caregivers, we recommend that you get new applicants immediately and with automation that is a snap.

To be an Agency of Choice you need to create a caregiver experience that is better than anyone else in your market.? You need to understand things from your caregivers perspective.

?As mentioned earlier, 5 of the top 10 complaints caregivers have about agencies are directly tied to communications and feeling underappreciated by management. Shift follow up can be automated, and the caregiver will never even know that it was automated unless you tell them. As soon as the replies come in your management team is notified, communications are drastically improved.

Regularly surveying your team will keep you ahead of the curve preventing caregiver turn over, and automations remove the burden from the management team so they can be more productive.

Automations help with staffing no call no shows, and care notes and time sheets being turned in on time so that management has an improved quality of life.

When a care manager is trying to get coverage for an open shift it is easy for a caregiver to misinterpret the care manager’s intentions because they are in a rush trying to get a commitment as soon as possible. When you need to have solid solutions in place and simply reallocate some of the lost revenues that high turnover is already costing your agency you can implement changes that take your company culture to a whole new level.

To be the Agency of Choice live your company culture! Don’t just speak about your company’s culture in your ads!

Market your culture to your caregivers, and keep them happy by improving communications and at every step of the care journey. We have just completed ALPHA programing of the Ebbenstone Home Care Solutions Application that offers all the integrations I spoke of in this article. We are entering into a "Closed Beta" if you are interested in learning more feel free to reach out to us.

If you would like to learn more about being the “Agency of Choice” and how to implement technology to take your recruitment and retention to levels you did not think possible visit us at. Stratophi is entering a closed Beta for a new home care app named Ebbenstone, to be considered for the Ebbenstone closed beta visit: Raleighseoteam.com