Lucinda “Cindy” Baier
Brookdale Senior Living executives shared the company’s efforts to improve move-ins, resident satisfaction and employee retention when they appeared Wednesday at the 2019 Nashville Investment Conference. Here are five takeaways from remarks by the leader of the country’s largest senior living provider.
The senior living industry needs to do a better job of promoting itself.
Only 11% of eligible older adults have chosen to move into senior living, so the industry has a “huge opportunity” to increase its customer base by appealing to the other 89%, Brookdale President and CEO Lucinda “Cindy” Baier said.
“So our job, and the way that we can push rate even more, is by really educating seniors about the value proposition that senior living provides,” she said, “because most of our residents realize, once they’ve moved in, that they should have made the decision sooner. And so I think our whole industry can improve by doing a better job of explaining the benefits of senior living.”
Pilot projects could improve market penetration.
Brookdale is conducting “a number” of pilots with healthcare systems that offer “a real chance to change the conversation,” Baier said.
“If you think about the social determinants of health, the need to bend the cost curve in terms of how much the U.S. spends on healthcare, predominantly for people who are appropriate for our communities, there’s a real opportunity to get upstream and increase their health span by giving them proper nutrition, proper purpose, exercise — all those things. And those things are provided in senior living,” she said. “So by partnering with payers, with hospital systems, with other members of the healthcare ecosystem, we think we can actually improve penetration, because there’s such a huge advantage for many, many people to have more people take care of themselves. And a private-pay senior living solution is a wonderful solution, but it’s also something that just needs to get more visibility.”
A company spokeswoman told McKnight’s Senior Living that additional information about the pilot programs will be forthcoming.
Move-ins increase when prices are online.
This year, Brookdale tested including pricing information on its website to find out “where pricing helps you and doesn’t help you,” Baier said. “That’s something that we had not done before.”
What did the company learn? “We have actually been able to increase the number of move-ins by putting more price transparency on our website,” the CEO said. “That’s been something that’s been pretty important to us.”
Brookdale to develop CNA career path with first Labor Department-registered apprenticeship program.
“People who come to Brookdale are often attracted to the mission. They love working with seniors, and that’s why they join us,” Baier said. “But what has historically been part of the issue is, there hasn’t been a robust enough career path. If you start with us as a server or you start with us as a housekeeper, how do you get the skills to advance to a higher level in the organization?”
The opportunity to develop career paths for some employees is one of the reasons Baier said she “couldn’t be more excited about” a new national certified nursing assistant apprenticeship program that Brookdale will offer. It’s Brookdale’s first Labor Department-registered apprenticeship program, and the company plans to explore expanding such training to other positions in the future, according to a press release dated Wednesday and provided to McKnight’s Senior Living after Baier’s remarks.
“Having this Department of Labor stamp of approval allows us to take our associates’ career development and give them on-the-job training as well as classwork [time] to help them in their career,” she said. “So we can help them become a CNA.”
According to the company, Brookdale plans to pilot the “earn-while-you-learn” program at communities in Chattanooga, TN, early next year and may expand the program to other cities. Each apprentice will be paired with a mentor for coaching and support during what is estimated to be a year-long program.
Participants will be eligible for up to three pay increases during the program. In addition to career development, associates who complete the program will earn a nationally recognized CNA certificate.
Brookdale is taking other steps to try to attract and retain employees, too, the CEO said. The company’s size also means there are more communities where career advancement can be facilitated in other ways, she said.
“That gives you career progression, once you’re in leadership, to go from leading a small community to a large community. And then we’ve added more area director roles, or if we’ve got a strong [executive director], we allow them to oversee another community or two so that they can get better management skills,” she said. “And that gives them a bridge into the district director of operations role. So we’ve done a lot of things to make sure that the career path is more of a ‘gentle slope’ so that people can get higher wages and a better quality of life.”
Benefits, especially for part-time workers, also can differentiate an employer in a competitive job market.
By giving part-time workers benefits such as paid time off and pet insurance — “believe it or not, it is one of the most popular benefits,” Baier said — “you actually improve the ‘stickiness’ of the part-time associates. And that’s been something that’s just been really, really well-received,” she said.
Happy residents stay longer, so make sure residents are happy. And don’t forget their families.
Being the largest senior living company in the country provides Brookdale with a large sample size when it conducts surveys.
“With regard to our residents, a key part of our strategy is making sure that our residents are happy so they stay longer,” Baier said. The company recently saw a 20% improvement in the nationally recognized customer satisfaction metric known as net promoter score, or NPS.
“We had 50,000 residents complete a paper survey and return it with all aspects of their experience — dining, their apartment, activities, everything — so we got great data on where residents are happy, where they would recommend us, where we have opportunities for improvement with our services,” she said.
The top things negatively affecting scores, Baier said, usually are related to staffing, dining or a feeling that management doesn’t care about the resident.
“We provide fine dining, but the residents have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same restaurant, in many cases every day of the week, and that gets to be a little bit boring, so that can be an issue,” she said. “Sometimes the residents just haven’t found friends or companionship within the community, and those residents tend to have higher dissatisfaction,” she added.
Communities need to be sure they resolve issues in a timely manner, Baier said. That includes issues involving family members.
“We sent the same survey to families as well,” she said. “Interestingly enough, we found that our residents are actually happier than any of our families, and I think that gets to the fact that they have better relationships with the people in the communities.”
