52. Solving Staffing Challenges in Senior Living Communities with Technology

In this special episode of Raising Tech, Amanda Knapp, Marketing Coordinator at Parasol Alliance, sits down with Kati Jones, Director of Client Relationships for Parasol Alliance, to talk about the findings shared in their white paper, "Solving Staffing Challenges with Technology."

In the white paper, 5,600 Senior Living community end users were surveyed about the staffing challenges their communities were experiencing and the unique ways they used technology to overcome these staffing obstacles.  Parasol Alliance hopes to share these specialized technology approaches to help reduce staffing barriers your Senior Living community may be facing, which can improve your community's efficiency and enhance your residents’ care.

Parasol Alliance offers a wide variety of educational materials, including white papers, blogs, case studies, and a quarterly Thought Leadership Webinar Series. 

You can view all of Parasol Alliance's education materials here. 

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Amanda Knapp: Today. We have a very special episode for you. I'm Amanda Knapp and I am the marketing coordinator at Parasol Alliance. If you didn't already know, we offer many different educational materials, white papers, blogs, case studies. We also have a thought leadership webinar series where we spend an hour with four industry experts who share technology solutions for the senior living industry.

Recently, we published a white paper on how to solve staffing issues with technology. And we have Kati Jones today, our Director of Client Relationships,here to tell l us more about it. Thanks for being on the show today, Kati. 

Kati, what is the main purpose of this white paper? And what are the essential points to remember? 

Kati Jones: Staffing challenges have been an ongoing issue in the senior living industry. While staffing has improved post pandemic, staffing still remains a big challenge for most [00:01:00] aging services communities. For the staffing challenges white paper, we surveyed over 5, 600 end users from the senior living communities.

We have the pleasure of serving to better understand the staffing challenges They're experiencing and the unique methods they're using to tackle their own staffing obstacles by sharing this data and its technology solutions featured in the white paper. We hope to help senior living communities reduce or even eliminate staffing challenges at their communities. 

Amanda Knapp: What positions did you find were the most difficult to hire for and what were the recruiting challenges that the communities were facing?

Kati Jones: Of the communities we serve and surveyed, 44 percent reported they have the most difficulty hiring CNAs for their communities. And then trailing close behind that, 31 percent of the communities reported nurses were the most challenging hire for them. Over half of [00:02:00] these aging services providers stated recruiting as the biggest staffing challenge they have at their senior living community.

 47% of these communities stated finding qualified candidates was the biggest recruiting challenge for them and also not having enough people available to fill those positions was the second most common recruiting challenge reported.

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's some interesting data. What recruiting methods were the communities using? 

Kati Jones: So indeed was used by more than half of the communities with job fairs and applicant tracking systems being used by less than a quarter of the communities.

 Direct hiring was the preferred method use when it came to filling these positions. But some communities did use other supplemental hiring methods. Staffing agencies were used in a third of the communities and only 6 [00:03:00] percent of these communities stated they used employee referrals as a method for hiring, which is interesting because there are many communities who.

have referral based programs that they can use to hire. Of the communities using employee referrals as a hiring method, more than half were offering a referral bonus.

31 percent offered sign on bonuses and 13 percent offered loyalty bonuses. 

Amanda Knapp: Yeah, I was also shocked when I heard the only 6 percent of the communities stated that they were using employee referrals because I always felt like that was such a huge resource.

Can you dive more into the community's turnover rates and if they were using any sort of retention and engagement strategy? 

Kati Jones: Almost half of the community stated that they had a turnover rate between 60 and 70 percent, while almost 25 percent said that they have a turnover rate of more than [00:04:00] 81 percent.

So, As you can see, turnover is very high in these communities and some communities, um, do perform exit interviews when their staff members leave and they found that compensation was the number one reason for more than half of the staff leaving. Almost a 3rd of the communities reported using spirit days as a unique employee retention and engagement strategy.

But a majority of these communities did not have any sort of employee retention or engagement strategy. As far as the employee engagement tools they were using, almost all of the communities were using surveys to gain feedback from their staff. And only 12 percent of the communities are currently using a workforce management system.

Amanda Knapp: When you were conducting the surveys, did you find any unique [00:05:00] approaches that people were using to overcome the staffing obstacles? 

Kati Jones: The communities that had a retention rate of over 70 percent had a lot of similarities.

They all offered recruiting incentives, more than half offered sign on bonuses. All communities increased their wages by more than 2 percent across the board, 2 3rds of the communities were using an engagement tool and many were using an employee engagement app that was designed specifically for senior living. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's really interesting. We recently featured an employee engagement app on another Raising Tech podcast episode, and they mentioned that senior living communities using their app actually increase their retention by 31%. Can you talk specifically about how technology is helping with the recruiting and staffing solutions?

Kati Jones: Currently there is a recruiting app available that will automatically post on job boards and social [00:06:00] media when positions become available, it will also send automatic updates and reminders to keep the applicants engaged and even perform automatic background checks

for potential candidates. There is also an app available that offers behavioral assessments for potential candidates and a private database for employees to save the applicants information for future job openings. Another app available that's mentioned in the white paper is like an Uber for senior living communities.

In that, pre qualified candidates can pick up open shifts on a as needed basis. This comes in handy for call ins and reducing the amount of overtime for staff to help avoid staff burnout. 

Amanda Knapp: Are there any other ways that technology is helping with staff burnout?

Because I know that is huge in the industry right now. 

Kati Jones: Yeah, absolutely. There is a wellness monitoring [00:07:00] technology that uses biosensors to actually track a resident's daily health. These solutions include wearables and innovative, if you can believe it or not, toilet technology that detects irregularities and it alerts the senior living communities medical team when these changes and residents health have happened. So this actually catches infections before the resident.

Gets worse, and it saves time for the resident when it comes to recovery. A big one that we're hearing from every angle in senior living is robots.

So dining robots have been known to give staff more one on one time with residents. That actually improves employee engagement and helps with staff burnout because those robots are able to do the menial tasks. That way the staff can spend more time communicating with the residents and bonding with them.

And we know that [00:08:00] greater experiences with those residents have a better outlook for the entire senior living community. We also found that dining robots have allowed some senior living communities to cut about two full time positions. This is significant in helping reduce the strain that is caused by employed staff when You either can't fill open positions in the dining area or say you have someone that's out sick.

We also found research that cleaning robots like vacuum and floor scrubbing robots actually clean the baseboards can save up to 10 hours per day in housekeeping. And the good thing about that is you don't have to worry about robots calling in sick. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow. I wish I had a robot to clean my baseboards in my house.

Is there anything else we haven't discussed that you would like to add today? 

Kati Jones: Yeah. So many communities are faced with high turnover rates [00:09:00] and burnout staff and technology can really help alleviate These issues in every way, leaving the residents and staff happier and all together a better community. 

Amanda Knapp: I couldn't agree more.

Thanks for joining us today. 

Kati Jones: Thank you. Amanda. 

Amanda Knapp: You can check out our white paper for more information and learn about the different solutions that we mentioned today. To hear more top technology trends in senior living, you can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.

com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoyed Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. As always, thank you for listening.