While home care leaders haven’t been able to completely eliminate turnover, some have embraced creative solutions that have moved the needle. Companies like Griswold Home Care and Senior Solutions Home Care have begun to leverage automation, gamification and more.
One of the reasons providers continue to struggle with turnover is because they aren’t focusing enough on preventative turnover, according to Victor Hunt, CEO of Ava.
“We really have to focus on the preventable turnover, those folks who are leaving and going to another agency,” he said during a recent panel discussion at Home Health Care News’ FUTURE conference last week. “These are the people who we really want to zero-in on, and understand what is it that’s breaking the relationship, and why is it that we’re not catching this soon enough to actually address the root cause and bring these people back into the fold?”
Ava — a home care-focused, New York-based AI rewards platform — has cemented itself in the space by working with agencies to help improve turnover and retention pain points. Currently, the company has partnerships with Griswold Home Care, Senior Solutions, Right at Home Gainesville and others.
In Senior Solutions’ partnership with Ava, the ability to implement automation to streamline a caregiver rewards system has been key.
“The biggest thing has been automation — some level of very quick response from a reward and recognition standpoint,” Senior Solutions CEO Kunu Kaushal said during the panel discussion. “The caregivers, at the end of the day, want the reward and recognition. They don’t necessarily need to know somebody spent five hours pulling six spreadsheets to figure out that they’re the one that should be recognized.”
Senior Solutions is a Tennessee-based home care provider and one of the largest privately-owned agencies in the state.
Instead of more traditional recognition programs, such as ‘caregiver of the month,’ Senior Solutions has been able to set up ‘caregiver of the day’ due to automation.
Griswold has seen a notable improvement in turnover since its collaboration with Ava began a year ago. Specifically, the company has seen a 20% reduction in turnover, according to CEO Mike Slupecki.
“I think it’s really, the ones that you have, keep them engaged, keep them on board, and keep them working, and then again, try to find the new ones,” he said.
The Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Griswold is a home care franchise. It provides personal care services in 30 states.
In terms of recruitment, Griswold recently piloted a function that allowed them to reach out to former employees that weren’t on the ‘do not rehire’ list. The function allowed them to gauge which former Griswold caregivers would be interested in returning.
“Our business is a personal touch business, but anything we can automate, anything we can throw AI at – that doesn’t impact the relationship we have with our clients and caregivers – we should,” Slupecki said.
Kaushal believes that it’s important for home care leaders to get comfortable with turnover and its inevitability.
“We actually enjoy turnover,” he said. “We’re digging for gold. We look at it as an opportunity for figuring out who the good ones are. You have to hire, you have to be open to the applications. You have to let them come in through the door, and for us, we are not as scared of turnover as some organizations are. I think we look at it as, finding a diamond somewhere in the rough.”
More broadly, Senior Solutions believes that it’s important to go after potential hires that don’t have the traditional caregiver background.
“We’re hoping we introduce caregiving to a lot of people that have not seen what caregiving can be, the fact that we’re not a sitter service, we are not this antiquated model of what caregiving was, and introduce them to, eventually, the health care world in general,” Kaushal said.
Ultimately, Hunt doesn’t believe turnover is necessarily a lost cause for all home care providers.
“If you’re an agency with 20 caregivers, and your goal is to stay at the 20-caregiver mark, then there’s no issue with retention,” he said. “You know all those [caregivers] names, and you can address issues immediately. You’re responding to text messages. But if you’re like most providers and want to break past that inflection point of being a small business, and become a growing enterprise that can actually scale to hundreds or thousands of caregivers, this becomes a lost cause if it’s done manually.”
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