Two key priorities for all home care agencies are providing high-quality care and ensuring client/patient satisfaction. At times, however, substantial challenges prevent agencies from delivering on these priorities — challenges faced by all agencies but often only overcome by a few. Advantage Senior Care has created a strategy to help our agency retain caregivers.
- Recruit to retain. Caregiver engagement and retention begin with your recruitment process, right from the job posting, which is your first interaction with future employees and your first opportunity to make a great impression. It’s vital to write powerful job postings that attract the type of caregiver you’re looking for, address the current climate, promote your agency’s culture, and ensure you stand out from the crowd.
- Build effective communication. The top complaint from caregivers is a ‘lack of communication’ from their agency, so effective communication must be a key part of any retention strategy.
- Train and upskill caregivers. Training is a valuable investment in any agency’s most important asset — its caregivers — and is critical to employee retention. Advantage Senior Care will invest in their professional development. We will also consider creating advanced caregiver roles for employees who have completed ongoing training in a specialized field for our clients, such as Alzheimer’s, Dementia, etc.
- Appreciation, recognition, and reward. Advantage Senior Care will expand our caregiver appreciation program. Advantage Senior Care will also give a variety of different cards to the employees.
- Employee Benefits. Create a more attractive benefits package. Examples: pay structure flexibility, daily pay/weekly pay, paid sick leave, employee recognition program, like Caregiver Rewards, discounts at local businesses (restaurants, hairdressers, cinemas, gas stations, daycare centers, etc.), additional perks, for example, a facility where they can go for self-care spa treatments or a more simple/scalable option that your caregivers value. We provide the employees with life insurance, dental insurance, eye insurance, and 401k benefits, with specific employee criteria and restrictions. This will help with employee retention and retain employees.
- Employee referral program. To set up a program for employees for referrals. The agency must communicate the referral program regularly (via SMS, newsletter, online, team meetings, etc.) We would create a bonus structure that would reward the employees for each person they refer.
- Employee Wages. Advantage Senior Care would evaluate the current caregivers’ and new employees’ hourly wages and develop a better pay structure with additional bonuses. We provide payroll raises for employees, including evaluating and raising the pay structure to keep and retain good employees. We also offer better annual and 90-day pay increases.