This article is sponsored by Viventium. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Navin Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Viventium, to talk about their new research study, the 2024 Caregiver Onboarding Experience Report. He provides an overview of the report and its objectives and delves into the key findings, including the most surprising results. He also shares his perspective on what’s to come for Viventium and its clients moving forward as the home-based care industry evolves.
Home Health Care News: What life and career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Navin Gupta: My journey to Viventium, the leading human capital management solution built for the health services industry, is a blend of life and career experiences threaded by the theme of connection through technology.
Although health care has long been a part of my DNA—my family in India runs a pharmaceutical distribution business that is more than half a century old—my professional career began at Siemens. While not a health care company, those early years in technology and being part of the evolution in telecommunication showed me personally the power of technology to do good at scale. It sparked this curiosity to drive efficiency, innovation, and productivity in the various domains I got to participate in.
The next chapter of my career began when I was asked to join Philips Healthcare, and I was so excited to bring my expertise to this field. My team and I advanced the applications of alarm monitoring and event management within critical care settings, showcasing how technology can meaningfully remove noise from systems, help prioritize care, and ultimately drive significant improvement in caregiver quality of lives and patient outcomes.
In my current role at Viventium, I leverage over two decades of experience in scaling and nurturing SaaS platforms along with my enduring focus on technological connectivity to support our mission in improving the lives of one million caregivers through better payroll and HR solutions.
What attracted you to Viventium? What can the industry expect from Viventium over the next few years?
Viventium’s presence in the health services world expands more and more each year as agencies, facilities, and communities adopt our HR software built carefully and specifically for them. Viventium provides post-acute care organizations with a payroll and HR software suite that guides administrators through the entire employee lifecycle. As of 2024, Viventium touches half a million lives within the segments we participate. I saw Viventium’s trajectory and jumped at the opportunity to join due to the clearly defined goals, ideology, and culture. You can expect to continue seeing our logo all over the country as we release even more proprietary products and expand upon our existing offerings to ease the administrative burdens of owners and human resources administrators in the health services industry.
In addition to our products, we support the industry through our expertise and guidance of industry compliance, as well as innovative research findings. Our 2024 Caregiver Onboarding Experience Report was just our most recent entry in a history of thought leadership, and we plan to continue pushing the envelope on innovation for agencies, facilities, and communities across the country.
As you mentioned, Viventium recently released a new research study, the 2024 Caregiver Onboarding Experience Report. This report is making a splash in the home care and post-acute world. Can you provide a bit of background on it? Why conduct that research?
It’s very exciting to see our Caregiver Onboarding Experience Report circulating throughout the industry. We have been receiving endorsements from many industry leaders such as William A. Dombi, Esq., President and CEO of NAHC, Chris Fisher, Director of Quality and Clinical Affairs at PHCA, and, of course, many home care agencies, nursing facilities, and senior living communities. The research was conducted via a survey of 175 administrators and 220 caregivers working in the health services industry across the United States to dive deeper into the well-known retention issue that plagues our industry. Our report provides a unique look into how caregivers and administrators feel about various topics pertaining to onboarding, training, payroll, and more. We found that retention can be massively impacted by the onboarding process, and we give readers simple blueprints to implement strategies that can make an immediate difference on their organization’s retention rate.
What are the key findings from the 2024 Caregiver Onboarding Experience Report?
Our research illuminates a crucial pathway towards addressing the persistent challenge of staffing shortages and low retention rates in post-acute care. We truly believe the solution begins with onboarding, and when onboarding is done right, everybody wins.
The main findings from our report are that:
1) Better onboarding of caregivers drives greater job satisfaction, improved performance, and a more positive perception of the employee experience. Caregivers at agencies and facilities with a good onboarding reputation (leaders) are more likely to feel they have opportunities to advance in their careers compared to organizations who do not have great onboarding (laggards). Additionally, caregivers at leader organizations report a more positive feeling of work-life balance by nearly 3 times of laggards.
2) Caregivers and administrators differ widely on their views of the quality of onboarding standards within the industry today. 68% of administrators said their onboarding was “industry-leading” or “ahead” of the competition, while 21% of caregivers described their onboarding experiences as “excellent.”
3) By rethinking the ins and outs of onboarding and automating much of the process, administrators can focus on a more personal and personable approach which leads to reduced turnover for organizations. Employees are 3.4 times more likely to strongly agree their onboarding experience was exceptional when managers take an active role in onboarding.
What is something that surprised you in your research findings?
Only 41% of caregivers said they received a warm welcome during onboarding. While at first this may sound like a small detail, I would argue otherwise. In fact, this is one of the actionable insights agencies and facilities should pay close attention to. The goal is to provide a comfortable and pleasant work environment, which will result in reduced turnover.
You just hosted a webinar with an impressive panel to discuss the research findings and other aspects of onboarding and retention. What was the main highlight of the event?
It was an amazing panel! I encourage all readers to visit our website and view the recorded webinar. It was a pleasure having such an impressive group of post-acute care leadership, including William A. Dombi Esq., President and CEO of NAHC, Chris Fisher, Director of Quality and Clinical Affairs at PHCA, Amy Guberman, Director of Education at NAHC, Todd Austin, President and COO of Home Care Pulse, Hindy Spiegel, CFO of Medical Facilities of America, and our very own Terra Vicario, CMO and expert of our research findings.
The highlight was the overall blend of expertise and insights from our panelists who brought their own unique industry experiences. We had leadership in industry associations, facilities, education, and research all weighing in on the data points of our study, providing advice and discussing other solutions to the industry retention problem. Attendees walked away with an understanding of the data, as well as insights on improving onboarding to reduce retention and smoothen operations from a range of unique viewpoints.
Finish this sentence: “In the home-based care industry, 2024 will be defined by…”
…uniting to find solutions for administrators to improve efficiency of operations, thereby delivering a more pleasant work environment for caregivers and enabling them to provide the best care to our most vulnerable.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Payroll compliance is a team effort — as is understanding how to benefit from the new legislation in the evolving home-based care space. To learn more about how Viventium can help, visit Viventium.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
