By Monica Pasupathy

Discover effective strategies to boost employee retention in home care. Create a thriving workplace and enhance the quality of care.

This blog will discuss the strategies to Improve Employee Retention in Home Care agencies.

Overview

The Home Care professional caregiver turnover rate has always run higher than most other sectors of health care. However, this caregiver turnover rate jumped about twelve points from 2021 to 2022 -- 64.9% to 77.1%. While this isn’t an all-time high (an 82% turnover rate was recorded in 2018), employee turnover is costly. Home care agencies that fail to retain employees lose approximately $3,500 per worker. Most poignantly, a high turnover rate directly affects the patient’s quality of care and puts them at immediate risk of interrupted service.

The bottom line of a home care agency is directly affected by the home care employee’s satisfaction, dedication, and engagement. It is of the utmost importance that home care agencies address these issues through adjusting their recruitment strategy, pouring resources into new hires, and utilizing Home Care Software to optimize their agency from intake, all the way to billing and collections.

Strategies to Improve Employee Retention in Home Care

The following are some of the proven strategies to improve Employee Retention in Home Care to elevate and enhance the job satisfaction, commitment among the caregiving team to ensure Continuity of Care and Patient Satisfaction.

Creating a Sense of Purpose, From Recruitment Onwards

Retaining home care employees starts upon introduction, with a recruitment strategy that gives employees a sense of purpose. Home care employees are already dedicated to their craft – reiterating that the agency is as dedicated to their employees as they are to their patients can reignite that sense of purpose within home care employees. Communicating dedication to the employee is just the start.

A home care employee’s motivation to join an agency is partially formulated by their perception of that agency’s community. If a home care agency doesn’t foster a sense of teamwork within and between departments, a potential hire might pass over that agency for another that radiates a friendly work environment. The agency that creates a supportive environment will be more likely to retain employees longer, and the best way to recruit top-quality employees is through word-of-mouth. If an agency has a strong employee base that retains its sense of purpose, an agency will be more likely to attract top-quality candidates. This, however, is not the end-all be-all in tapping into a home care employee’s sense of purpose when recruiting.

Establishing a Supportive Community

A supportive agency community takes that sense of purpose and translates it into employee dedication. Employee dedication is the most salient tool any home care agency has when looking at their bottom line. Agencies who have a strong base of dedicated employees will spend less on training new employees, will maintain an unwavering client base, and will achieve an organizational advantage that allows them to further optimize their performance within a strong team. When both an agency and its employees have the same goals, and there is a community established which is focused on helping employees achieve those goals in a gratifying way, employee dedication can easily be established. This entails creating a community that is focused on providing a healthy schedule, healthy work-life balance, and healthy outlet of communication for each employee.

Communication is a key element when maintaining a healthy cycle of retaining top-quality home care employees. This communication must happen on a day-to-day basis between co-workers, managers, and senior management. Most importantly, communication must occur around the subjects of mental breaks, training, and feedback.

Robust Training for New Hires

Even for the most seasoned home care employee, starting at a new agency can be daunting for a multitude of reasons. One of the most obvious reasons is that every agency operates differently, even within the same industry. This is why having a robust training program is a must if home care agencies wish to retain employees.

Training must be implemented in such a way that the agency doesn’t spend too much time and money on training each employee, but the employee feels as if they have received a thorough run-through of their responsibilities and can handle them with confidence. Beyond employees feeling that they have a handle on their job, they must also know that they have open lines of communication when they feel they need assistance in any matter, whether that be a detail on the job or the need for a break from work.

Breaks and Mental Health

Even though home care employees are some of the most dedicated to their jobs within the medical industry, they do have some of the most difficult jobs in the industry and must be allowed regular breaks to take care of their mental health. Home care employees who have long days with few breaks will burn out quickly.

Caregivers especially are prone to burning out because caring for those who have difficulties caring for themselves can be arduous. Regularly scheduled breaks will allow home care employees to care for themselves and their families, decreasing stress in at least one area of life. Reducing burnout in home care employees increases the likelihood that home care agencies will retain their employees.

Listening to Employees

These strategies to retain home care employees – from recruitment to community, from training to mental health breaks – all depend on managers keeping an open line of communication. Employees must know that their voices are heard to feel dedicated to an agency.

This responsibility falls to managers to ask for feedback from the caregivers they oversee, and to communicate that feedback promptly to senior management. The process of collecting employee feedback, reporting this to senior management, and responding to this feedback in such a way that makes employees feel as if they have been listened to is what will create a thriving workplace community. Listening to employees will shape dedicated employees. This will serve as the core element in recruiting home care employees who want to remain with an agency long-term.

Embrace Technology

Leveraging technology and using Home Care Software that is easy to use, provides proactive alerts, helps the employees to provide quality care, and be compliant will create the work experience that every home care employee wants to remain in. Software that allows home care employees to flow from one task to the next in a detail-oriented job will save employees’ time. This will allow caregivers to provide themselves and the patients with a more satisfying personal care experience.

Optimizing employee utilization with effective schedule management is critical to reducing scheduling conflicts, employee overuse, and burnout. Both schedulers and caregivers will be able to spend less time on exceptions, authorizations, consistency, and patient/employee matching, and more time providing quality care. This will also improve employee and patient satisfaction.

Proactive alerts throughout the software will catch mistakes before they reach the billing department. From intake, to creating a plan of care, to scheduling, then to billing and collections, alerts and notifications can help ensure compliance, which optimizes the workflow of caregivers, schedulers, and billers throughout, and creates a more harmonious communication pattern between these departments.

Leveraging technology and the right Home Care Software will increase employee satisfaction, thereby improving the home care agency’s employee retention and productivity.

Conclusion

Staffing shortages will continue to be a challenge for home care agencies. Due to high caregiver turnover rates and the significant costs associated with losing employees, each agency will have to come up with a set of strategies that work best for them. Luckily, there are several strategies that can help create a more dedicated and engaged workforce, which will result in increased rates of employee retention.

A sense of purpose must be instilled in all employees, from recruitment onward. Regularly demonstrating dedication to employees and creating a supportive community within the agency will solidify this sense of purpose. An environment where goals and values are shared within and between departments is more likely to attract and retain top-quality candidates.

A robust training program for both new and seasoned employees is essential to making sure everyone feels confident in their roles. Maintaining open channels of communication and feedback will only aid home care employees in feeling as if they’ve selected an agency that cares about their needs, both in and out of work hours. Managers play a key role in both advocating for their caregivers and communicating to their employees that the agency hears and values their voices. Listening to employees and acting on their feedback will build dedication amongst teams, and will create an environment that employees will want to stay in for the long-haul.

Finally, leveraging the right Home Care Software can significantly improve employee satisfaction while also improving the agency’s bottom line. Streamlining workflow tasks, optimizing scheduling, and having access to proactive alerts reduces conflict and burnout, and ensures compliance. All of this improves workflow and communication between departments.

The home care industry is ever-evolving, and employee retention has become a top priority for agencies. Employee retention starts with meeting the needs of the employee, and ends in the agency’s long-term success. By implementing these strategies, home care agencies can attract and retain top-quality home care employees.

About CareVoyant:

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.