HEALTHTAC West 2024 Panel: Part One of Staffing Challenges — How We’re Solving Them
By Jim Nelson | August 19, 2024
SAN DIEGO, CA — Senior Living News and our sister company, HEALTHTAC, held another executive event recently. The setting was The Rancho Bernardo Inn in sunny southern California. Among the many features of our event were five panel discussions that gave the attendees some actionable ideas they could take back to work with them.
Staffing solutions was the topic of a panel that I moderated, and on the panel were Kristie Kronk, the COO of Arcadia Communities; Chandra Kumar, Goodwin Living’s COO; Calson Management COO Sadek Nassar; and Traci Taylor-Roberts, the owner, president, and CEO at Sodalis Senior Living.
The first question I posed to the panel was, “In the past 12 months, what has been the staffing trajectory at your company? Are things better or worse?” All four panelists said things were better over the past year, which is the same as when I asked the same question at our last event back in March. So maybe things are getting better, but staffing is still a universal problem.
Next, I asked about the culture at Sodalis Senior Living and how Traci and her teams have leveraged it to help hire or retain staff.
“I think first of all,” said Taylor-Roberts, “during COVID people were giving out gift cards and doing all sorts of things, and I realized that as an industry we were very good at appreciating employees, which, if you look at the definition, it’s actually transactional: You do something for me, and I’ll do something for you. And what I realized is that’s not what people want. They don’t want a transactional kind of relationship. People need to be loved, and I realized that appreciating people wasn’t working. I need to love my staff; that’s much harder and it’s much more personal. So, what I decided to do is really focus a lot on our staff’s children. We started doing backpacks for all of our employees; we fill them up with school supplies. We have, like, 800 little people, too, so it’s kind of like a big endeavor. We started a not-for-profit and we buy all of them Christmas gifts. We do intergenerational programs in the summer because daycare is very hard to find; your frontline staff cannot afford daycare, and I don’t want little people at home by themselves. And guess what? We have the very best tutors living with us. We have attorneys, teachers, CEOs, engineers — if your child needs help with math, we have the people that can help. And I think that’s helped us retain good staff. We also pay people what they’re worth. I think it had to do with investing in not just the person, I’m also going to help you be the best mother and best father you can be. And we’re going to take care of your whole family — not just what you can do for me. I think that’s a game changer. If you really let people know, ‘We’re interested in you and your family and I don’t care if you have anything to give me back, I’m going to give it to you and expect nothing in return,’ I think that’s different.”
One of Arcadia’s communities had some fun a couple of years ago mimicking a Super Bowl dance with a TikTok video, so I asked Kristie about it and how it impacted their hiring?
“You may or may not know the TikTok Ladies at Arcadia Bowling Green,” Kronk explained to the event attendees. “First, I will tell you we have an amazing director of life engagement and a director of community relations. The two of them got together and created the TikTok Ladies and a Super Bowl TikTok. How many of you have actually had the opportunity to see [it]? If you haven’t, you have to Google it. They created this video and one of our residents, dressed in red, was [pretending to be] Rihanna, if you remember the Super Bowl halftime show with Rihanna. They had an amazing time. I think part of our staffing challenges [is] the new millennial generation — how do we incorporate their needs and wants and get them to want to be a part of a growing company like Arcadia, or even in the senior-living industry? So, they created this
, and they’ve done several now: we’ve done the Super Bowl, we’ve done Barbie. In fact, the notoriety and the fanfare that they received from Fox News and The Today Show and WDRB in Louisville, and all sorts of channels, along with Rihanna and Jay-Z — they all sent flowers — they were so exhausted from being so famous that they were arguing [about] who was going to have to take the next interview. They’d be like, ‘I can’t do it again. Would you please?’ So, they’re taking a little bit of a hiatus, but there’s word on the street that they may be coming out with something new. It created such a buzz with our staff, which is this millennial generation that we’re all trying to figure out how to embrace, and we’re 100 percent occupied there, we don’t use agencies, we are 100 percent staffed. We have to create a fun environment and an environment of purpose, and the staff was just as excited about our residents as the residents and families were about it. So creating that intergenerational feel and helping them to discover what their purpose is I think is what really has helped us at Arcadia and our staffing challenges.”
At Calson Management they’ve started doing preemptive quarterly wage analysis, so I gave Sadek a chance to tell everyone about how it’s working and what they did ahead of time to be prepared for the onslaught of raises that they would be giving out.
“It’s a great question in regard to how we prepared,” Nassar responded. “We really didn’t. When I started with Calson about a year ago I instantly started to identify what is important to our team. You have obviously different levels of your team — you have your line staff, your directors — and each one is motivated by something a little bit different. When we’re talking about increases in minimum wages year over year, and creating that wage suppression that we’re seeing, [we’re trying] to get ahead of it and identify that if there is an issue let’s solve it before the team finds out about it. What I mean by that is the line staff, when they find out that they’re getting paid the same amount as someone who just started and they’ve been with you for two to three years, it’s demoralizing and that’s the way you lose your line staff, in my opinion. My peers here have brought up some great points about the culture and making sure obviously that’s there — that’s no doubt the underlying factor — but making sure what’s important to your team and the line staff ultimately comes down to their pay. Creating this program, or at least just identifying that we need to be doing this more systematically just to see if there is any wage suppression happening, let’s identify it, let’s have these conversations with the folks that are especially your rock stars and say, ‘You’re doing a wonderful job,’ tie it into the performance evaluation and increase their wage so there is a difference between an entry-level employee, and someone who’s been with you for three or four years. It shouldn’t be so close together in pay. So that was the primary reason why we started doing the wage analysis, just making sure that we’re staying ahead of the curve.”
I recently posted on Senior Living News an interview that I did with Goodwin Living’s CEO, Rob Liebreich, in which he told me about a new initiative that they’re a part of whereby they created new nursing opportunities for up to 50 students in the greater Washington, DC, area. I asked Chandra to tell the attendees about it.
“Before I joined [Goodwin Living] I worked for a competitor in the same market,” Kumar explained, “and [Rob] approached me about this opportunity with Northern Virginia Community College. We’re all struggling with finding clinical staff and the school didn’t have enough funding to be able to pay the right amount of salary to attract teachers. As you can understand, the wages are going up for nurses and clinical teachers. We were blessed that we have a foundation that was able to support and, over the two-year period, give us $60,000. He also reached out to other providers to see if we could support as an organization, because even though these are 50 individuals that will be joining the workforce, there isn’t a guarantee that because we were making a donation to this program that we would be able to have the ability to hire all of them. But it really is our focus at Goodwin Living, and Rob’s has been with his leadership, to be able to uplift as people that support and uplift seniors and the caregivers that support them. It may not benefit us today, but it may benefit us tomorrow. How does it benefit our industry and the commitment that was made to supporting seniors? We were able to get a total of four organizations [to pitch in]. The thing that we’ve learned is that we’ve got quite a few of our team members that have actually wanted to go in through the LPN program so they’re joining. Coupled with our tuition reimbursement program that we have internally for our team members it’s really been a good work in progress. It’s still in its forming phases in the sense of we haven’t graduated people yet, but we’re really looking at the collaboration. I think as an industry we’ve really got to look at ways that it may not benefit us today, but how does it benefit us and the people that we care for and service in the future?”
Goodwin Living’s partnership with Northern Virginia Community College is really a “rising tide raises all ships” endeavor and it’s helping all four of the organizations that pitched in.
In part two of our series highlighting the staffing challenges panel at HEALTHTAC West in San Diego we’ll learn about how OnShift’s Wallet program is helping Arcadia Communities; how Sodalis Senior Living is utilizing call centers and AI to help cut costs; how Goodwin Living is helping their immigrant employees achieve U.S. citizenship; and more.
