Spa services, discounts to local businesses and access to ride-share services are just some of the unique employee benefits that companies across home care have made available to caregivers over the years.
Amid a persistently challenging labor market, home care companies are still constantly working on configuring the best possible employee benefits package for caregivers. Companies like Right at Home San Gabriel Valley, Devoted Guardians and Family Tree Private Care have emerged as standouts when it comes to crafting impressive benefits packages.
At Devoted Guardians — a home-based care company that operates in the Phoenix metropolitan area — the caregiver benefits package includes health care insurance to those who qualify as full-time employees, 401(k) and bonuses based on reaching certain milestones.
The company also offers dental, vision, disability insurance, life insurance, accident insurance and cancer insurance.
Plus, Devoted Guardians implemented a star system for its caregivers. The company’s star system has categories of points that caregivers are able to accumulate weekly. For example, caregivers can earn points for how many hours they’re working weekly or how well they’re adhering to a plan of care.
“We have an automated AI recognition system, which is combing through our EHR software and pulling all of these data points out and assigning a value, and then communicating that out to our caregivers weekly,” Aaron Sinykin, founder and CEO of Devoted Guardians, told Home Health Care News. “Those points roll up to a star rating, and that has a financial benefit.”
Devoted Guardians’ star system came as a result of trying to find a benefit that would appeal to a wide-ranging demographic of caregivers.
“When I started to develop our star system, I was really trying to figure out what would be the one or two benefits that everyone would love, and that would motivate them,” Sinykin said. “I just could not figure it out. I have such a spectrum in our workforce of ages and demographics, and there’s no singular benefit that’s going to mean something to everyone. It really hit home with me that I needed a platform where I can give a monetary benefit and allow our employees to apply that to whatever benefit was meaningful to them.”
Right at Home San Gabriel Valley has a caregiver benefits package that includes 40 hours of sick pay, performance-based recognition bonuses, health care insurance, dental, vision and chiropractic care.
The company also offers retirement benefits, paid training, flexible work schedules and much more.
Right at Home San Gabriel Valley Owner Renee Concialdi believes that flexibility around work schedules, in particular, is an offering that caregivers appreciate.
A recent Care.com study found that one in five employees left their companies because their employer didn’t offer family care benefits. A lack of child care benefits was one of the top reasons people sought employment elsewhere.
“When we hire someone and they tell us, ‘I can only work these hours because I have child care needs,’ we hire them and customize their hours based on their family situation,” Concialdi told HHCN.
Right at Home San Gabriel Valley also helps caregivers navigate state child care benefits, according to Concialdi.
“We have an HR team who are experts in helping them find the state benefits that will be geared toward what they need, whether it’s transportation, childcare, or maybe a Medi-Cal supplement or policy for their health care,” she said. “We’ve even helped when they need to fill out state forms. When they have needs that don’t even fit our employment, they can come in and we will try to help guide them through the various systems.”
Family Tree Private Care — a company that offers concierge-level caregiving, private nursing and care management services in Texas and Colorado — offers a minimum essential coverage health care plan, an employee assistance program, dental, life insurance coverage and a 401(k).
The company’s employee assistance program offers access to child and elder care services.
In addition to family care services, the employee assistance program includes counseling and legal will drafting services.
Still, formulating a comprehensive benefits package doesn’t always translate into immediate results. Family Tree Private Care’s employee assistance program wasn’t immediately popular with caregivers, despite its many offerings, according to Ana M. Diaz, vice president of human resources at Family Tree Private Care.
“I thought that after COVID, and the industry we’re in, the benefit would be utilized, especially since it was employer paid and free,” she told HHCN. “The biggest lesson was that care providers didn’t really understand what the program was, and so they didn’t see it as a benefit.”
One of the ways that Family Tree Private Care got caregivers to see the advantages of the program was by stepping in and finding multiple ways to apply services.
“If a care provider has been with a client for three or four years and that client passes away, let’s make sure we set them up with the employee assistance program and get them grief counseling,” Diaz said. “Nobody thinks of it that way. They thought of it more along the lines of, ‘If my father passes away, I’ll use it for grief counseling.’ We just needed to go beyond what they realized the program could be used for.”
Managing logistics
Aside from the possibility that caregivers might not immediately take advantage of a benefit, offering a great benefits package isn’t always easy for small businesses.
“We’re still a small business, and we don’t command the heavy discounts that the large corporations have, so we don’t get the best pricing and that’s really sad,” Concialdi said. “I know our franchisors are working on this for us, but we have to really work hard and we use our internal system network of other owners in our local area to bounce off each other.”
Despite these challenges, home care companies are often seeing positive returns for having strong benefits packages in place.
For instance, Right at Home San Gabriel Valley turnover rate is at just 48%, well below the industry average. .
Devoted Guardians has also seen a number of gains since enhancing its benefits package.
“We were able to land in the top one 100 category for Home Care Pulse, driven highly by our caregiver scores,” Sinykin said. “We’re seeing our annual retention improved from the lowest point in the 30s and 40s into the 60s and 70s now. We’re feeling it just in the overall growth of our agency, we’re seeing double-digit growth year-over-year.”
What’s more, Family Tree Private Care has been able to gauge how good its employee benefits are compared to other companies.
“We acquire a lot of home care agencies, and every time we compare benefits to other home care companies, ours are roughly 20% to 30% cheaper, with better deductibles and network providers and coverage,” Diaz said. “When we acquire companies, it’s usually always a benefit for the employees, because they end up saving money.”
Companies featured in this article:
