Expressions of appreciation and respect can go a long way in addressing senior living’s direct care workforce crisis, according to a panel of direct workers and employers who addressed what makes employees want to stay — or go.
A Friday webinar from the Maryland Regional Direct Services Collaborative focused on best practices for respecting and appreciating certified nursing assistants, personal care aides, certified medication technicians and home health aides. The webinar was part of a series focusing on improving job quality for direct care and services professionals and is a follow up to a 2023 report on Baltimore’s direct care workers.
Nate Hamme, president and executive director of the Ceca Foundation, a nonprofit serving senior living and healthcare providers through caregiver recognition programs, said that the most important part of employee recognition is listening to people. He added that there is a science to recognition backed by research into what motivates people and implementing programs around that.
“Recognition is something that is worth investing in, worth thinning through,” Hamme said. “Our philosophy is we want to make recognition accessible to people, make it easy to do, but make it meaningful as well.”
Although employee appreciation and recognition programs in the form of staff parties, holiday cards and service awards are nice, Hamme said, what most people crave is caregiver recognition, which includes building culture, sharing stories and what’s at the bottom of the heart and not the bottom line.
“Stop focusing on people’s stomachs and start focusing on their heads and their hearts,” he said.
Recognition programs, Hamme added, should focus on IMPACT: inclusive, mission-aligned, public, authentic, consistent and timely.
“When you build programs that focus on those things — accessible recognition based on the research — you get incredible impacts on employee retention, which gives incredible impacts on the quality of care provided to people,” Hamme said. “When you get people recognized, they not only stick around but they do a great job of caring for people because you’re showing that you care about them.”
As the director of caregiving services for Family & Nursing Care, Elnaz Safavieh oversees onboarding, training retention and caregiver rewards for her network of 1,500 private-duty home care workers. She said the company strives to implement programs and practices to make caregivers feel valued and engaged from their first day, including annual caregiver surveys and monthly meet and greets to allow caregivers to connect with each other.
Those efforts pay off in the company’s recruitment efforts: a majority of applicants are referrals from its own caregivers, she said.
“Excellence and caregiver satisfaction is what we strive to achieve and why we work so hard to implement programs and practices to make caregivers feel valued and engaged from the day they join our orientation throughout their entire nursing care experience,” Safavieh said.
