The reason this problem is so deeply troubling and puzzling is that there are not many jobs out there in the world where people have the opportunity to profoundly improve the lives of vulnerable people each and every day.
While I love the senior living industry, there are a few things about it that drive me crazy. One of the most puzzling and frustrating of these is the high turnover rate (above 50%) in most organizations, which, I think, is a reflection of low employee morale and suggests there is much work to be done in the arena of building culture.
The reason this problem is so deeply troubling and puzzling is that there are not many jobs out there in the world where people have the opportunity to profoundly improve the lives of vulnerable people each and every day.
I believe that in each of your buildings every single day, at least one staff member has a profoundly impactful interaction with a resident, prospect or family member. Occasionally they are huge . . . but mostly they are micro events. Because they are tiny little things, that too often they get overlooked or ignored. Yet they should be celebrated by the team each and every day.
Making It Better
I am deep in the process of submitting a proposals to do a break out session on creating a “culture of giving” to improve and reduce staff turnover. It is a process that takes relatively little effort and has proven in many settings to have a profound positive impact on team satisfaction and turnover. It was in this context that I came across the article cited below.
Hard Stuff
I have mopped floors, cleaned toilets and changed beds. It is necessary and important work. It is not all that much fun and, honestly, does not create great job satisfaction. It’s not so much that it is dirty and, at times disgusting, though it can be both. Fundamentally, the problem is that is repetitive and, therefore, boring.
I recently came across an article at INC titled: Want to Make Your Employees Happy? Ask Them to Do Something Hard and it dawned on me that because we already view so much of what happens in senior living communities as “hard” we are reluctant to ask more. In doing this we end up dooming our teams to mind-numbing, boring, repetitive tasks with little on-going satisfaction.
This one quote from the article really hit home:
While researching her book Rookie Smarts, Wiseman surveyed 1,000 people from a variety of industries and found a strong correlation between those who felt challenged at work and those who felt satisfied.
The Opportunity
When you think about it there are all kinds of frustrating, persistent challenges in every single senior living community: a resident who is never happy; another who is always sad; transportation bottlenecks; food service frustrations; systems failures. The natural tendency of managers, at any level, is to find solutions and fix problems (or order them fixed).
I would propose that a much better solution that will lead to higher job satisfaction and engagement is to give these difficult problems back to your team members, both department heads and line staff, looking to them for solutions. We know that the best leaders are not doers, rather they are coaches and cheerleaders that help their team score points.
What big challenges have you given your team?
Steve Moran
