senior living’s top business priorities

Four Steps for Solving Today’s Labor Challenges

by kate risa and brittany riese

brittany riese

HR Business Partner; Paychex

The senior living industry is poised for scalable growth to meet exploding market demand. That brings great opportunities — and new barriers to capitalizing on them.

Operators now have a host of tools and techniques they can use to solve today’s most pressing challenges. Let’s review four key steps operators can take to meet today’s top business priorities.

Four Steps for Solving Today’s Challenges Armed with new tech and a collaborative spirit, the industry and its residents are coming back.

New technologies and their wide acceptance are a silver lining stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. With more and more people relying on innovative software to live their daily lives, the door is open to broad solutions.

“It’s a shift in mindset,” Risa says. “Not too many people stay with an employer for a significant amount of time anymore and senior living leaders need to understand and accept this, then find ways to extract the best skills and service from employees while they are with them.”

There are four steps emerging that operators can take to address the HR challenges facing the industry today: Step 1: Develop Talent from Within Senior living can be one of the most welcoming, inclusive and diverse places to work. But for those just starting in the industry, entry could stand to be a bit easier, says Britt Riese, senior human resources business partner with Paychex’s senior living team.

“I do think there needs to be a focus on hiring new employees, but I think there needs to be perhaps a larger focus on current team members,” Riese says. From where she sits, empowering your team leaders in a community will make all the difference and will help new workers see that there is indeed a career path in senior living.

Senior living provides a groundup opportunity for a career that can be both financially stable and intellectually and spiritually fulfilling. But leaders within the communities will need to see that and help newer staff visualize that possibility.

“It can be kind of hard for someone who’s just starting out — they may not see a career path there,” Riese says. “Do they know that there really is a pathway to grow your career path in senior living?”

Part of empowering new employees comes by recognizing when you have a rising star in your midst and developing them into a senior living care expert. By investing in your home-grown workers, you not only prevent turnover — you create synergy through continuity, and you bolster the culture of that community and your brand.

Step 2: Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits In a recent senior living survey, 93% of operators reported that they’ve increased wages to recruit and retain new workers, something that they will need to continue to do moving forward. With the bottom line impacted so heavily by wage costs, operating a senior living community has become a fine line with a small target for operating margin.

On one hand, offering salaries that are too high will attract more workers while driving up wage costs.

On the other hand, offering salaries that are too low will make recruiting difficult, once again driving up costs.

To help fill the gap, Risa and her colleagues took a deep dive into paid time off (PTO) practices and found that by retooling PTO programs, offering more flexibility, and setting some PTO to expire at the end of the calendar year, they could give every employee more days off and still cut costs.

In addition to increased salaries and more PTO, health care insurance and retirement offerings that are personalized for employees play critical roles in recruitment and retention.

In researching the best practices for choosing health care plans, Risa found that many community workers don’t want high-level, complex health care plans. Instead, they want affordability and access to care.

Paychex found a way to design a health care plan tailored specifically to hourly employees in senior living communities — an affordable plan that fits their needs and lifestyles that includes minute clinic care, telehealth service, traditional copays, and affordable prescription medication.

Step 3: Create a Scalable HR Solution Community directors and managers do not have the bandwidth to recruit, screen and onboard new employees. Because of that, many in the industry are prioritizing big-picture solutions.

To streamline the process, some operators whose portfolios span multiple states are creating centralized command centers. But those command centers can create growth stagnation. For example, there could be a lag between realizing a need for more staff and that worker actually reaching full efficiency. And with some communities focusing on increased occupancy sorting, screening, interviewing, hiring and training, new workers can’t be an operator’s most intensive focus. Operators who have already realized this have chosen to opt-out of the process entirely by outsourcing their HR department, thus systematically cutting costs year after year.

For an operator that wants to outsource HR, a third-party provider can assist with various functions and help support solutions that help operators attract, train and empower workers.

Since its founding in 1971, Paychex has worked with more than 700,000 clients in the U.S and in Europe and is the largest HR company for small- to medium-sized businesses. As a third-party provider focused on HR, their solutions come equipped with a technology platform capable of making the entire experience even faster.

Step 4: Prioritize Culture and Brand An ever-growing portion of today’s workforce is expressing the desire — even the need — to feel fulfilled both in their lives and in their careers. This demand within senior living has awoken community leadership and renewed their focus on holistically serving the whole person.

Providing care for residents is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling jobs an hourly worker can hope to perform. Now more than ever, operators must emphasize the positive experiences workers can gain from working there and find new ways to provide more meaningful work to their staff.

Risa is reminded of how one community found a way to create some fun, engaging and manageable events by holding a rally week, similar to a high school spirit week. “Every single day would have a different theme such as a sportsthemed day, twin day or a mismatch day,” Risa says. During rally week, the nursing staff would get breakfast served by directors and residents, participate in team building activities and, most importantly, hop from station to station completing their required continuing education units (CEUs).

In a study, Paychex found that employee financial, physical, social and emotional wellbeing predictably plummeted in 2020 in the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion Today senior living providers are choosing to outsource the hiring process to a third-party that will implement a centralized approach. Other operators are opting to set up an in-house hiring department to address the recruitment and retention of talent.

“A lot of workers today value their work/life balance over moving up the chain quickly… people want that flexibility,” says Risa. “We have to find ways to be an employer that’s engaging and fulfilling for employees because if we don’t, they are going to leave and work for someone that does.”