As CEO and president of home-based care company Integracare, Lee Grunberg was battling the same retention and staffing challenges that have plagued the industry since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Integracare was well below industry turnover levels, Grunberg felt he needed a more tangible way to measure caregiver satisfaction, which he could then use as the catalyst for adjustments that would improve their experiences.
He began working on a spreadsheet that would score each caregiver in a series of categories that he felt were crucial to predicting caregiver satisfaction, such as total shifts, length of shifts and travel logistics. He could then weigh those categories based on the needs, wants and availability of the caregiver and create a single score to measure satisfaction. Anything above 75 was strong. Anything below 50 needed to be reviewed and addressed.
A good first step, he thought — but immediately he found a new problem: updates. The data went stale after one hour, and he could only update it every two weeks.
So he turned to cloud-based home health care software provider AlayaCare and the company’s research and development department AlayaLabs to build an interactive scheduling tool that Grunberg and Integracare could use to predict each caregiver’s satisfaction in real-time. In doing so, he would be able to use that dashboard to make personalized adjustments for each caregiver, improve their satisfaction and increase retention.
“AlayaCare has always been focused on helping their clients improve the quality of care that they provide. And one of the elements that helps you provide better care is consistency of care through lower churn,” Grunberg says.
The result is a dashboard that all home health agencies can now use to improve scheduling and reduce turnover by predicting each caregiver’s satisfaction. Here’s how it works.
Curate employee retention and turnover metrics
While caregiver turnover data might actually come off as surprisingly stable, it is still 65.2%, which can disrupt patient care.
“There are a few reasons for the churn, and one is that it’s a tough job,” says Naomi Goldapple, head of AlayaLabs. “But the number one reason through research and interviews is their schedules. They are not being given enough hours to make this into a full-time job so that they can feed their families.”
The first step for agencies to combat churn and increase retention, therefore, is to know their own turnover metrics. They must have access to this data and check it regularly. AlayaCare’s employee churn dashboard provides context as to how an agency is performing in terms of churn and retention, providing owners, coordinates and HR teams information that is personalized to their agency.
Identify early warning signs of churn
With access to caregiver data, agencies can then begin charting caregivers in two buckets. The first of the two are the characteristics of the most successful workers — including the worker’s age, referral source and schooling — but the second area is what makes the caregiver score work. That second area is the early warning signs of churn, such as late clock-ins, low offer acceptance rates and punctuality.
“One of the hypotheses is that if caregivers are satisfied, then they’ll probably stick around,” Goldapple says. “So what contributes to churn, and what contributes to retention?”
The caregiver score works to answer that question. It logs and measures categories such as total shifts, consistency of shifts, travel time, and total clients for each caregiver.
“You mix all of this and out comes the cake, and the cake is the caregiver satisfaction score,” Grunberg says. “If we are above a certain number, we are more likely to retain that caregiver for longer. It’s using the next four weeks of caregiver data to continuously predict the caregiver’s future satisfaction.”
Analyze scores and adjust schedules
For Grunberg and other home-based care providers, the employee satisfaction data from AlayaCare is easily consumed via client-specific dashboards, which measure employee retention and business performance. The dashboard highlights how an agency is performing around its retention metrics, and flags those that are known to be indicators of at-risk caregivers.
As an example, younger employees tend to leave at a far higher turnover rate, so dashboards allow for reporting by age, with drill-down capabilities to see underlying data points, Goldapple says. The agency can then very easily adjust a given caregiver’s schedule to counter the trends and problem areas.
“If a caregiver has full availability but only part-time hours, that person’s score might be middle of the pack,” Grunberg says. “But if you can give them one more client in the afternoon, or get a client to extend two hours, that caregiver can be more satisfied and will stay with you longer.”
Armed with that information, an agency can then call the client’s family and see if the client will extend those hours in the hopes of retaining the caregiver.
“AlayaCare’s system has led to an overall improvement of care,” he says. “It has helped us maintain and improve on our industry-low turnover ratios.”
This article is sponsored by AlayaCare. To learn more about how to use technology to boost caregiver retention, visit alayacare.com/employee-retention.
