Like many home care agencies, Home Helpers saw substantial growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, the company is focused on sustaining that growth, specifically through honing in on the retention of its caregivers.
“That’s been a big focus for us, especially looking at the first 90 days,” Home Helpers President and CEO Emma Dickison told Home Health Care News. “From a retention standpoint, we’ve learned that people leave companies because of managers, generally. There are other things that play into that like needing to make a good, living wage and needing to have a career path. We’re also focused on culture, communication and continuity, so people feel like they belong.”
The Cincinnati-based Home Helpers is a home care franchise that provides personal care, nutrition and companionship services, among others. It serves over 1,000 communities in the U.S.
It did experience a lull in its growth activity at the start of the pandemic, but Dickison credits the company’s “Cared-4” program as one of the reasons why it was able to kick start growth despite labor shortages.
Cared-4 is Home Helpers’ customizable service package that clients can bundle with their traditional home care services. It was implemented in 2021 and was an example of Home Helpers finding ways to make living independently easier for its clients, Dickison said.
The program added companionship services, wellness calls, 24-hour monitoring and nutrition services to Home Helpers’ patient plans.
“That solved some of the caregiver labor shortage [issues], because these services were add-ons that did not require any additional labor,” Dickison said.
While growth was obviously a welcomed development, continuing and sustaining that growth is the next challenge.
“We saw a dip early on and we’ve seen continued growth ever since,” Dickison said. “Obviously we’ve seen increases to bill rate and client hours, so we’re just very focused on innovative service offerings, leveraging technology, continued education and supporting the family caregiver.”
While recruitment will always be important, Dickison said the retention piece has been Home Helpers’ main focus.
One certainty that was hard to ignore over the last two years was that the working environment wasn’t always the easiest to handle for in-home care workers.
“We’re sending people into a home, they’re not coming into an office setting every day where they have coworkers and can go to lunch. That doesn’t exist for them,” she said. “If that doesn’t exist, what are other things we can do to create a sense of belonging? We try to do that through culture and having regular meetings. We want there to be opportunities for our caregivers to be recognized and be able to say, ‘We value you. Here’s a career path for you to be with us long term.’”
Still, burnout was a major issue over the last two years.
However, Dickison said because of the culture that had been built at Home Helpers, a number of caregivers eventually came back to the staff and were re-hired in different roles. Often, they were even promoted to roles higher up as a form of appreciation.
“You have to speak hard to culture, but not just speak it, you have to live it,” Dickison said.
Challenges, opportunities ahead
Over the next year, Home Helpers will be focused on those labor challenges, but also on leveraging technology and advocating for home care around the country.
What keeps Dickison up at night is the ongoing labor shortage, but she sees an opportunity to address that need.
“I think there is support for greater access to home care today – through legislation and through policymakers – than we’ve ever seen,” she said. “Right now, I’m focused on making sure that we continue to educate policymakers, continue to talk about immigration reform and continue to find talent elsewhere that can come into the home and provide care.”
Dickison is also the president of the Home Care Association of America (HCAOA).
“I think it’s going to take a lot of us working together, in ways that we’ve never seen before, to really put together a cohesive plan for access in the home,” she said. “I’m really excited about the idea of leveraging technology and being able to create efficiencies in how we deliver care in the home, specifically through care support and some automation.”
On the front end of care, automation could never replace the human touch in home care, Dickison said. On the back end, there are plenty of opportunities to make improvements.
If the industry could find some way to be more like the movie industry, Dickison believes it would make a huge difference in how care is delivered.
“In the movie theater industry, every Monday morning they can tell you what their box office was for the week,” she said. “We don’t have that, and if we did, what a difference maker that would be. One of the things HCAOA is focused on is data, analytics and integration. Being able to have that information in a more timely fashion so agencies can make better decisions.”
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