MODERATOR: How has your work-force changed since the pandemic and what strategies are you using specifically to address workforce challenges?

NAZIR: Just referring more towards our frontline primary care team and the staff we work with in the nursing home and other settings, their needs and demands are changing, as they should. Particularly since the pandemic, everybody’s demanding more flexibility. I think how we are responding to that is trying to think about the vision statement or the mission statement of the work we do for our company. It must include staff well-being as the key thing. I think it even has a place before we say anything about the patient care. To me, a good, meaningful vision statement must be that we believe in the best possible world for our frontline staff so that they can provide the best possible care. I think everybody needs to sincerely believe in that. And then you need to have a very clear strategy, and for me, that strategy is purpose. Most of the people who want to work in the front line do it because of a purpose and a mission. I think with all the regulatory structures and all the other burdens we put on people, that purpose apparently gets lost somewhere. I go to a nursing home and I see my nurses and my nurse practitioners work, and so many times, they’re just being a servant to a regulatory checklist. That is not why they became a provider or a physician or a nurse. They wanted to have an impact. What we are trying to look at and trying to do some good inquiry from our frontline is: What does purpose mean to them? How can we make them believe there’s a purpose? And one thing we have figured out is that they need to be better team members, they need to know that the nurse practitioner that is coming in is their colleague, their team member, and they work together. And then they need to know their outcomes. They need to have data right at their fingertips to know what kind of impact they’ve had, how many hospitalizations they have prevented, how many dollars they have saved the health care system because that is as important also. We are looking at many ways of creating more teamwork, more meaningful dashboards that are not 30, 60, 90 days old but as old as yesterday, so they can take action, learn from those things, and provide better care the very next day. We’re doing some interesting experiments that are working well in that regard.

HAYNES: Redesign, I think, is where we all are in both our existing programs and the way we relate to the community and certainly the role of the team members. During COVID, a lot of people enjoyed being at home. In the direct care world that we’re in and the service world, we don’t have a lot of jobs that folks can do remotely, yet at the same time, we’re called to try to make our positions afford people more time off. We’ve looked hard at redesigning and listening to the people – what works for you? We’ve shortened some shifts to four hours; we’ve lengthened some shifts to 12 and 16. It’s listening and trying to find the best way for them to contribute. And as Dr. Nazir said and Mary Lynn would echo, in the mission-driven world, we have such meaningful work, and we have an opportunity to listen and redesign that work. We also have enacted our Nazareth Homes Foundation to fund employee scholarships. We’re looking at ways to help people stay at work and upskilling is, of course, a new buzzword. Looking at the people who have made a commitment to be present and to be here and to give – how can we expand their giving; how can we create a better life for them at work and also build the organization? We’ve developed apprentice programs that we are participating in through a grant with the Department of Labor with strategies and steps on how to build skills, increase competency in the workplace, and also provide some wraparound services. You know, for us, we’re a workforce of women, and these women are very burdened. They’re raising their family, maybe another, and many of them are working other places, too. To try to help them only work at one place is something that we’ve been very devoted to. How can we improve their work life? We’re all in it together. Listening to people that make that commitment to our ministry and mission and the people we serve, that’s who we want to be in business with. What helps people helps business, and that is something we are leaning into.

SPALDING: To sum it up in one word, it’s intentionality. What I mean by that is that splitting the two departments created the opportunity for intentionality. When we focus on retention, we’ve done something called an EAR meeting – and EAR stands for “employee at risk” – because each one of our employees has a different story, and the reality is that they may have a different need. To Mary’s point, some people may want to advance their career, others are just getting by. We need to be sensitive as an organization to make sure that we understand that, and we react to that appropriately. These EAR meetings happen with regular frequency and look at each individual. We’ve mirrored it on the clinical side. We had something that we would have clinically at-risk. That was an individual that was older that was at risk for falls or something like that. This is the same type of thing, using that same principle for our team members. What we have seen is that our biggest risk area is in the first 90 days of employment. We have launched a huge CNA initiative training program, and we offer that across the state. For a lot of those individuals, this is their first entry into health care. And with the populations that we serve, at times … create very difficult work. For those with no past health care experience challenging situations can be frightening. We focus on that first 90 days of employment to get people onboarded, to have them have a sense of community and a sense of team through these employee-at-risk surveys. Back to the use of technology, we want data real-time. We want it fast; we want to be able to use it. We push surveys out to all our staff, and they can respond. And they’re going to get less than a 24-hour response to whatever their issue is. If there weren’t enough medical supplies in the medical supply closet last night, their leader is going to know, and they’re going to replenish it when they come back to work the next night.It all flows through intentionality. The second thing I would say is caring and compassion. If we want care and compassion from our staff for our elders, which is what many, many elders do want, we’ve got to be caring and compassionate to them. We have something called the Heart to Heart Fund through which an individual can submit a specific acute need, and we can fund that up to $1,000 for that individual almost instantaneously. Sometimes people live beyond their means, and if they need a car repair, they can get some sort of response quickly. It does go through a committee, we do have a process for it, but it lets them know we care about them. The other neat thing about that is that our employees contribute to that fund. So that means that they care about their team members. They may not need those funds at a particular point in time, but one of their team members might.

MODERATOR: How are you strategizing around engagement and keeping your employees engaged in their work?