Home Care U - The Positive-Psychology-Based Caregiver Onboarding Program Made By An Agency-Owner-Turned-Coach

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Hey, welcome to Home Care U, a podcast made by the team at Care Switch. Nobody went to school to learn how to run a home care agency, so we're bringing the education to you. Join our live audience by going to careswitch.com slash homecareu or listen on your own time wherever you get your podcasts. Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of Care Switch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U.

I think this will be a really good episode today. As always, today's guest is someone who I've known and admired for several years. I've both heard really good things about her before I became acquainted with her, and in my interactions have learned a lot from her and from what she's done and accomplished so far in her career. So today's guest is Sandy McCann, and we'll go into her background, why she's on today and what we'll learn from her. But before we do, let me just go through a couple housekeeping things first. So as you probably have seen, if you are joining us live today, Home Care U is both a live class and a podcast. If you want to join the live class, be here and interact with the presenters, ask your questions, things like that.

You can join it free by going to homecareu.careswitch.com and registering for the live classes. You can also listen to the replays wherever you get your podcast by looking up Home Care U. And again, that's U as in university. It's been a really great series so far. We're at just over six months of doing it. And the feedback is great. We've learned a lot. I've learned a lot as a host and learned a lot more about an industry that I thought I already knew a lot about. So looking forward to today's episode. So Sandy, first of all, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us. We really appreciate it. A delight and honor to be here and love what you're doing with the Home Care University. So great. Thank you. So I guess to start with here,

I mean, there's a lot to be said for what you've already done in home care. If you could maybe walk us through your background, your journey through different roles and organizations in home care, and also share some of the specific accomplishments you're proudest of in your career so far. So I got my entrepreneurial start actually right out of college and eventually established a very long career in financial services marketing. So I was not in home care at all. But by about midlife, I was really yearning for a more meaningful way to make a difference in the lives of others and the work that I did. And that search became a reality. There were kind of a confluence of several things that were happening, but that search became a reality when I founded Home Care of the Rockies, my own home care company. And this was a career I realized I had waited my whole life for. We were a premier brand in the Boulder County area, and we were really known for

our innovative approach to hiring and training. And that really became the standard of care for us. And then, you know, just all of the various things that we did around supporting our caregivers. So, and I'll talk a little bit more about the accomplishments, but, you know, early on when Home Care of the Rockies, you know, we honestly experienced rapid and consistent growth kind of early on. I mean, we had an incredible team that we put into place. I guess my business background, you know, I wanted to put an incredible team in place. The quality was high and the community began to trust us and our caregivers and to rely on us to deliver exceptional care. And that worked when we were a small team of 25 people. But the

caregiver hiring and training model that we used to start the company was not sustainable. We needed to build a process around caregiver recruiting and onboarding and training. And at the time, and this was back in 2016, 2015, 2016, there was no process out there that matched who we were at our core and what we wanted from our culture, which was to create an exceptional care experience for older adults, for our caregivers, and for our community. So we decided to make a commitment to build our own professional caregiver training program, and we called it the Home Care 100. It was 100 hours of live classroom and caregiver lab training. We had top-notch industry-leading instructors. It was learning and earning that were linked together to create a pathway for caregivers in their careers.

We became a registered apprentice with the U.S. Department of Labor, and then we even received grant funding through the Colorado Office of Economic Development, which is something that I'm really proud of. And I had no idea how to write a grant before, but it was a learning experience. And then we were voted Innovative Business of the Year through the Boulder County Chamber Celebration of Leadership in 2020. One day, the celebration was one day before the COVID shutdown. Oh, no. Yeah. But it was an incredible, it was literally like the last get together for the next couple of years. So through that, I think everybody that knows me knows that my real passion is the workforce, the workforce development and building a workforce where caregivers can have sustainable work that can be trained properly,

that feel like they're supported. Gotcha. Love that. Is there any more of like your story that you want to share kind of post that that's worth going into, or should we kind of jump on to the next things? Sorry, I don't't know who's attending but for those who do eventually attend um and you do know me i sold home care of the rockies in uh two years ago a little over two years ago um i am still part of the family tree team they're a wonderful wonderful um group of really smart people and I will be there for another 10 months and kind of what's next for me as I don't want to retire and can't see that in the foreseeable future. But I really want to use my experience to help other entrepreneurs. So I became an EOS implementer about three or four months ago. And I'm really spending much more time right now, just understanding the tools and learning the tools. I also serve on the Home Care Association

of America board. And that's been an incredible experience because you have every really just kind of the masterminds of the industry really working together to support, advocate, you know, for the greater good of our industry. Love that. Yeah. I mean, like I've kind of mentioned to you in past conversations before this, I think you have a unique blend of experience from different positions within the home care industry that's fairly hard to find. And I think that will be pretty relevant to the value that we'll get from today's class. Yeah, I guess just one other thing along those lines, I was a very, very active owner. And even though we, and we weren't a massive company, but we, you know, we were, we were definitely a force to be reckoned with in our area. And we built a great brand around that. So when you are an active owner, you do do everything. And so I think maybe that's what

you're alluding to is that I sort of had my hands on not only the marketing and the business development, but all the financials and really how we were going to thrive and grow and really continue to operate amidst all the challenges, especially when COVID came rolling in. For sure. Yeah. You were there for some of the most turbulent years, for sure. So to kind of frame things for people before we jump in. So at the end of the day, today's episode is about caregiver retention. But how we're going to talk about that is through the lens of some specific work Sandy has done to create a plan for a possible caregiver onboarding plan that would address many gaps that exist today for

most agencies in terms of how they are trying to onboard and keep caregivers. It will also likely be informed by her past experiences, the lens that she's looking through there. So all of that being said, you've recently been part of an applied positive psychology program. So tell us about that program, how you decided to do that, what that was, and then the project that became the caregiver onboarding plan that we're going to talk about. So when I let go of the day-to-day reins with Home Care of the Rockies and put it in the capable hands of Family Tree. Daniel and Alex, the co-owners, you know, just very, you know, gently, because it was very hard to let go of the day-to-day, but said, you know, hey, you know, we'll call you if we need you. And, you know, even though it's few and far between, you know, where they let me really have some time to explore some other things that some other of my passions.

I think some of you know, and Connor, you know, I'm very connected to Aaron Markham. And he was in the midst of his master's of applied positive psychology. And he said, hey, there's a certificate in applied positive psychology. And Sandy, you might be interested in that because I was ready to just really kind of dive in and work with the application of it. So I embarked on a certificate of applied positive psychology. And this is a program that,

it's the only applied positive psychology program that focuses strongly on the application as it does on the science itself. So as a former marketer with the financial services, excuse me, I'm all about, you have to have something that is backed by the data and backed by science in order for it to work. So, and it, you know, there has to be some application. The education program was like this really immersive experience in the science of human flourishing while at the same time, practicing turning our passion for helping individuals, whatever we were doing, there were, there were students from around the world. And although no, no home care agency founders, but really training

the, our, you know, what we practiced in and to help individuals and organizations and communities into our profession. It was a nine month program of learning key theories and skills for flourishing, which is the, really the term that they, based on 30 years of proven research. And then we learned how to apply the science into, you know, either as a coach or a teacher or consultant and move into advanced training programs, of which I then did a coaching program. It was a 240-hour program. It was designed around the model of flourishing that was founded by Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the Applied Positive Psychology program. And then our program was enhanced by Amelia Zivikoski,

whose work in mind-body medicine included an extra module called Vitality to Physical Health and a model of well-being. We met live via Zoom for nine months, and then we studied what's called the PERMA-V model. And I'm giving you a little background so you can then, when I show you my idea, again, this is really an idea that could work very well based on my experience, but it's honestly free for the taking. But this PERMA-V model, the P-E-R-M-A-V stands for positivity, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement, and vitality. So if you think about the wheel of life and how are you doing in each one of those and apply positive psychology as a science of

what's right with us instead of what's wrong with us. That is a little bit about the positive psychology piece of it. Do you want me to kind of then walk through my thinking behind the program? Yeah, let's do it. So one of the key foundations of the certificate program was a completion of a final project. So which was a culmination of using what we learned in the certificate program and then applying it out in the world in our own unique way. And because my passion has always been around caregiver workforce, the idea emerged to integrate flourishing tools during caregiver onboarding. And I developed a program for improving caregiver well-being and employee retention. The program

really focuses on using that time, that really critical time when a caregiver is just joining and supporting them with the confidence, well-being support so that they can have greater job satisfaction and really better control over their lives. Because if they have better control over their lives using that model, they're going to stick around longer. And the program itself has some natural, just really, they're just naturally fitting for our workforce that can dovetail very well into an existing training program. Okay, very cool. Before we launch into kind of walking through the program itself, I guess one more question, which is, you know, what do typical onboarding

programs look like? Or I mean, like, what's kind of the general set of gaps that we see in onboarding agencies? And how does this differ from that? So glad you asked that question. The words typical in onboarding, I'm not sure if it is either an oxymoron or just there's like it does not compute. Even our, you know, we had an onboarding program because we had a training program and our onboarding program and the training program were not different. So it was all in one.

And our training program was 100 hours of training. And it was over the course of, you know, a year to year and a half of paced learning. But this is what I'm really seeing now. And I guess, I don't know, I've been, everybody's been posting on LinkedIn about quiet quitting, loud quitting. Now there's a term called loud quitting. But really at the heart of it is that 77%, a really crazy number of employees are not engaged while at work. And we know that that really correlates because we know in our own statistic that 57% of caregivers leave in their first three months of employment. So we see from the Home Care Pulse report that attrition has now

climbed up again. It's always been high. I mean, I don't know about you, but when you tell people what the turnover is in your industry, their jaws drop. And we think that's normal. But really, I think what's most concerning is even though the median carrier turnover rate, you know, is like north of what, 68, 57 percent of those carriers leave in the first three months of employment. I don't this what a typical plans look like. Honestly, I don't think anybody's really doing it well. And if they are, jump on because you should be teaching this instead of me. And I would really like to see us because we spend so much time and money on recruiting and then doing the HR to get their backgrounds and making sure they have all their paperwork finalized and that they pass the drug screening and the background check comes in and we check all the boxes.

And then somehow we feel like we've done that. And I think we're in an especially difficult time right now because we've been forced to pay higher wages and we make the assumption that those higher wages will compute to a caregiver having more experience. And even if that's true, which I suspect that I'm really suspect of that because in our training program, we used to hire experienced caregivers. Everybody went from started at zero and we would have experienced caregivers in tears because they were doing a transfer wrong for 15 years and learning now for the first time how to do these skills the correct way. But even if we are providing that training and the skills, we're not providing the support and the well-being. What I am proposing is to, and really my goal is to help enable new caregiver employees

to feel like they're more connected, confident, supported, and inspired to succeed in their roles and help them thrive both professionally and personally. And I also believe that through that, if we can do that, we can contribute to and their overall life satisfaction. Carriers will feel more empowered, as I said before, stay in their jobs longer and ultimately reduce turnover. I think you're talking about some of the very most important things in this industry. I mean, we talk about turnover so much, about the causes behind it, the things that will solve it. But I think there's a lot of general consensus that, as you've said, the most important period in kind of the life cycle of a caregiver is those first 90 days. And the areas in which we're probably missing the most in terms of how we're trying to solve the problem is those things that tie back to what you've identified as the concept of flourishing.

So I'm excited to get into this. One kind of clarification for those who are listening. So this plan, as we talk about it, is kind of the outline for something more specific that could be created. And tell me if I should amend any of this explanation, Sandy. But essentially, so it is both like an outline of the different touch points and like topics and things that should be prioritized at different stages of the onboarding process. It does reference at different times, like learning modules on different topics. That level of specificity hasn't been created for this yet. But in my opinion, there's still a huge amount of value from looking at how you've put this together, what types of touch points you've laid out,

how you chose the topics that would then have more in-depth content that follows for this. Yeah. Really glad that you said that. Really all this sprung out by, yeah, we had to have a final project, but all this sprung out by, you know, my years of spending time really wrestling through this challenge of how do we support our workforce, which is as vital to us as our clients, as vital. How do we support this workforce so that they can embrace our vision and then want to get behind our vision? We do a lot of lip service, I think, to these, you know, data based and they're, you know, they're doing a lot of things that are that are checking the boxes. And what I really was inspired by this program, and honestly, didn't, if I was still an owner of Home Care of the Rockies, this would be the Home Care of the Rockies onboarding program. Really, I think what's really at the heart of this is caregivers,

our employees are human, and they're struggling with the same things everybody else is. And we expect when we, you know, when we hire them, we expect that, you know, they're going to have everything they have to do this really important work that is emotionally, physically, and spiritually demanding. These tools, these applied positive psychology tools are working in nearly all applications of business today. I don't think you have to go very far. I don't, at least, I don't have to go very far to see other companies in other industries using these tools in their own workforce. Love it. Let's dive into the program itself. So walk us through the program, specifically focusing on the purpose of each touchpoint and the purpose of each learning focus, which will make more

sense to listeners as we explain this. So I'm going to ask you to picture a 12-week calendar. You think about the caregiver onboarding day one and then from 12 weeks. This is a 12-week onboarding program that is really designed to support a new caregiver with collaborative, engaging, fun learning experience for the caregivers themselves. It's a blended learning program, so it's going to be a whole body approach, and it's going to create dynamic learning opportunities that help new team members prepare for the exceptional care as well as enhance their lives of the ones who participate. I envision because we need to see if this is working and because applied positive psychology

is based on science, I envision a program pilot where we test cohorts that onboard at Home Care of the Rockies and Family Tree. We onboard several caregivers every month. So I have a proposal where there'd be a cohort of caregivers that onboard. Let's start early in the year. That would be February hires. And then they would be in the program March 1 through May 31, for example.

And then you start a second cohort, caregivers who come in the second month, March. And then they are working their, you know, the onboarding program goes through, they go April 1 to June, the end of June. And then you've got a third cohort of April hires that start May 1st in the program through July 31st. The program pilot phase, each week caregivers will receive four cumulative touch points from their employer over several communication channels so that each caregiver receives a total of two and a half hours of learning and engagement every week. And this also would qualify for a lot of the requirements in training as well. And it combines high touch with high tech to create this supportive and enriching learning environment. Content would be developed based on integrating select flourishing tools, and they are available.

They're really available to anyone who's gone through the program and practices within an employer's existing home care training. So this could be added to and enhanced and encompass each of the modules or models of well-being that I walked through before. engagement relationships meaning vitality and the training content again would integrate flourishing tools with the caregiver training so if you think of that event diagram you've got the caregiver you've got and one circle you've got the the flourishing tools and you know again positivity engagement relationship meaning achievement and vitality, and then integrate that with your training tools for caregivers with, you know, ADLs and infection control and observing and documentation, for example, preventing falls, all of the various things that we are, that we teach on to really create that, you know, that enhanced learning. So an example of week one, for example, for focusing on positive emotions, there would be a touch point on Monday. And that touch point would be, it could be in the form of a welcome, it could be a webinar, you could have, you know, I'm envisioning this all could be online. And then Wednesday would be the second touch. And this is an opportunity for more of a kind of a deeper dive learning event.

And then touch three would be a phone call from a caregiver coach, just kind of checking in. And then touch four is an email that wraps up what was taught during the week. So you've got learning on Monday, learning on Wednesday, where you're getting to know your team. So you're learning, but you're also getting to know your team. And you've got that follow-up coach call on Thursday. And then on Friday, there's an auto, you set all this up automated. And on Friday, there's a follow-up email. Again, summarizing what the learning was and then maybe some takeaways so that at the end, the beginning of the week and at the end of the week, they've got a real cohesive

subject for the week. And then this would rinse and repeat every week. So week one and two would focus on positive emotions, week three and four on engagement. And again, integrating with their caregiving, all their skills. Week five and six on relationships. Week seven and eight on meaning. Nine and 10 on achievement. 11 and 12 on vitality. If I can kind of recap the touch point part,

I want to make sure that I've got this down accurately. And then I have one question with that. So high level here, essentially the four weekly touch points are like the first two are both learning focused. And then the third and fourth, well, the third would be a phone call from their supervisor, kind of like a wellness check-in sort of how are you doing type thing. And then the fourth one would be an email that ties it together. Is that all right? Yeah, that's exactly it. So if you think about a pie and that's cut into four pieces. So touch one is Monday, again, kind of a deep dive in one of the modules, and how that relates to your job as a caregiver. And then touch two is another live learning event that you're kind of, you know, you're all with the team.

And yes, and then touch three is a kind of a one-on-one call. I think you can employ, you know, once you get this up and running, you can even have other coaches who have been through the program. Okay. I think you answered what was going to be my next question, which is with the difference between those first two touch points, basically the first touch point would be like something that they can consume, like presumably by themselves, probably online or something. And then the second one would be like something that is more in person and or in a group setting. Yeah. And even if it, even if, again, this is an idea. So we could even have the touch one be all the previews. So it's reading content, reminders, and then touch

two could be that live event. Touch three, so that you can simplify it. Again, we're not trying to create more work. And I'm going to challenge everybody that I don't think we're not even scratching the surface on what employees need. So yeah, it's going to be work. It is going to be work and it's work to keep employees, but it's also work to have money just going out the door all the time on all the attrition. And I might be reaching here, but I don't think so. It sounds like a benefit of this that you haven't explicitly highlighted that I think is a key one is that it kind of takes into account the psychology of learning retention too and like what it takes to

get things to like sink in with people where like what you've described to me sounds like the first touch point is is kind of focused on like what what can be done to get people to start absorbing the information and then the last touch point is like what can be done to get people to start absorbing the information. And then the last touch point is like, what can be done to make sure that everything is cemented? And that kind of full cycle approach to learning is part of what is unique to this that isn't really being done very much. Is that at all safe to say and accurate? That is very accurate. The other thing too is that it takes, you know, in that parent of PET, parent effective training, the program, what do they say that it takes seven times to hear something for the first, to like hear something for the first time, crazy. And so when

you've said something four times, you still have three more times to go. And so this is really understanding that repetition. And also when adult learning is very different than the classroom learning, you know, in academia or college or high school is very, very different. So this is really focused on working professionals and integrating and repeating and just reinforcement. Got it. You talked about what like the weekly or bi-weekly learning focuses would be. This is all stuff that can be adapted or changed or whatever, But with what you've kind of envisioned, tell me about why you chose these specific learning focuses. Why are these ones important? How would they be beneficial to caregivers particularly? The model for flourishing for applied positive psychology is based on what is the, well, perma and then Amelia added the V. So it's, it's based on the science of positive emotions is based on, in essence, focusing on strengthening

your positive emotions, strengthening engagement, strengthening your relationships, strengthening the meaning part of your life, strengthening achievement, and then strengthening vitality. And the learnings with the curriculum that we were given, which then can be transferred. So I have full access and anybody who's been through the program to use these tools because the vision is to really allow all, you know, as many people to flourish as possible. And so these tools, so positive emotions, there are, oh gosh, probably a dozen or so that we could select from that would be appropriate. They're activities or they're proven. There's something called the judger path, for example.

And it's something that you teach and it's a map and you teach someone how not to go judge themselves when something bad happens. It is focused on really moving towards how to get out of that judger path cycle so that you, because we all know when a caregiver gets stressed out, they can really fall apart. What we want to do is to give them some tools that they can put into their lives. And they're like, oh my God, I learned this and I can apply it. Again, the whole idea is if we can enhance their life, they're going to feel more connected to us. I love that. Thank you. It sounds like there really are kind of two outcomes that I think we're hoping for with sharing all this on this podcast here.

So the first one, I think, is like is the hope that someone, especially someone who has the resources and experience to take this and build out the rest of it, you know, can hear this, be inspired, take it and run with it. You know, so Linda Leakley, Vicky Demirazu, if you guys are on this or hear this, you know what to do. But I think second to that, there's the question of, you know, what can individual agencies that may not have the resources to do anything like that, learn from this and still apply some of the principles here successfully to help them and their caregivers. So like that being said, you know, seeing as like the curriculum itself isn't developed yet, what aspects or principles of this program can agencies apply today? Let's just say you stripped away the positive psychology

and just use the 12 week touch point. You know, let's just say week one, I mean, I had it, we had a 12-week onboarding program. And again, it was very integrated with the training program, but we had a 12-week program that we tracked and it really made a difference for, you know, for our caregiver employees. But if you just took the touchpoints and had, you know, in a 12 week, and again, you can, you set it up and using technology. So let's just say week one, you design something week one through 12. And you have something that you want to focus on. And maybe week one, maybe it's a skills base, or it's something that you want to do to teach a caregiver, like, you know, how to clock in properly or how to do EVV properly or boundaries, you know, boundaries. You could literally make a list of several dozen things that you would like caregivers to, you know know to really learn and i would say with ai oh my gosh developing content right

now i have a strange relationship with ai because i come from a writer i know i come from a writer background and so i've been challenging ai and i'm i'm getting it a little better because it's getting to know me. But you can actually task AI with writing a welcome email. And, you know, so if touch one, let's just say, you know, let's say touch one is the welcome email for the first. And then it's a text reminder that, hey, Wednesday, we're going to have a live learning event. And then touch two on Wednesday is that live event. It's Zoom learning. We all know now COVID taught us all how to use Zoom. So we have a Zoom learning. And then touch three, we already have in place recruiters and we can write scripts. And again, using AI, we have got that call. And then touch four, again, we can use AI and we just have to enhance it to summarize everything that we,

that the caregiver learned. So even if you stripped away the positive psychology piece of it, you'd still have something that is a thousand times more than what most people are doing. And then you measure, you know, one of the things that, you know, one with positive psychology and with my background in data marketing is that, you know, you track results. And, you know, at the end of the 12-week program for each of those three cohorts, you track. So let's just say you don't even want to go all in, you try three cohorts, you track the data to help determine, you know, what impact did the tools that you taught them, what did it have on improving employee retention? And then if you do use something that is applied positive psychology base, you know, what is their, what's their subjective well-being and life satisfaction

of caregiver participants before and then after the program? This would give you the biggest differentiator of any home care agency out there. And that's what people are looking for right now. I think there's so much sameness. It's really hard for agencies to really differentiate themselves. But nobody's doing this. So interesting. So the first part of it is that you would measure kind of the before and after picture of like things like you mentioned life satisfactions. This would be like a survey on you know kind of their general level of well-being happiness things like that and yeah and those are available tools that you can find online yeah and then i assume you would also measure like

the 90-day retention for each of these cohorts and against the control of what you normally envy yeah because everybody's measuring retention or just even use the industry. But yes, if you really want to be pure, you would, you, you know, you know what your own retention is. Interesting. Okay. I really like that aspect of making sure that you are measuring the results here in different dimensions too, so that you can see if, if there is an impact and what the impact is. I guess last question before we go to a couple of questions from those who have joined us live today, do you have any additional tips or just like things to keep in mind for agencies who want to apply a program like this successfully? I was in it for 10 years. I was in the weeds. I was overwhelmed. I, you know, it was everything

all the time and I get it. I get it. It's really hard to kind of step back and you're like so busy and how are you going to implement this already? And I guess I'm going to just say, you know, do it anyway and find, you know, find the time. When we started the Home Care 100, you know, we were incredibly busy already. We didn't have the time, but we made a commitment that we couldn't. Honestly, my sister, you know, and I worked together. We had, you know, a number of key employees, but it was, we could not keep up with the amount of mistakes that were happening and still run at the quality that we were running. And this was back in 2015, 2016, when the fight for 15 minimum wage was screaming at us. And there just wasn't a program that could get the caregivers to come to the training and, you know, teach them everything that we needed to know. And we said, you know, this problem is going to exist. You

know, the older adult population is growing six times faster than the population as a whole. We could hire every single caregiver today and there wouldn't be enough. And that problem still is the same problem right now. And we said, look, we could walk away from it, but it's still going to be here. I mean, I can, I can close my eyes and, you know, provide, I don't know, crappy care, which wasn't part of my, in my DNA, or I can put a stake in the ground. And we, you know, we just did it. It was a thousand times more expensive and it was harder and more gut-wrenching than I ever thought, but it was the greatest achievement of my career. I will tell you that it was our differentiator. It helped us grow. Once we got the program up and running, and this is a big

training program, but I would even say, you know, something like this would really, I think, set you apart. But once we got it up and running, our hours, we grew from one year to the next by 40%. And I'm going to say attributed to the training program, because our sales team, our marketing team had a differentiator. And so now they were able to go into hospitals because they had something that they were really, really teaching individuals. With the focus right now on mental health and anxiety and, you know, all the things that are, I mean, just the population is dealing with and our caregiving, you know, group are there, you know, a mirror of the population in the country, they're dealing with the same things. So if you can tell a referral partner that these are the

things that you're teaching, these are the things that you're doing to support your employee. Yeah. Stop marketing. Just start telling people what you're doing i love that and i would say i mean i don't want to use like what we would typically say and say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure because this isn't really like it's hard to compare this to just an ounce like this is a lot of work but i would say like a pound of prevention is worth 10 pounds of cure whatever the equivalent is here like well to me it's to me, it's just flipping the money. I mean, if you're running a business, you know what's on your P&L. And you can spend $500 per hire on someone who's, you know what, 57% of them are going

to leave you in the first three months. Or you can earmark some of that, those funds that you're already spending and focus on a holistic, meaningful onboarding program that honestly will selfishly help you, but really your workforce and your clients are going to benefit. If someone listening to this wants to see what you've put together and like build off of that, how should they reach out to contact you? Text me. Yeah. 303-875-7979 to send me a text. That's the easiest way. Cause I use my phone for

everything and yeah, more than happy to have a conversation one-on-one. Okay. Sounds good. Appreciate that. We have one question I really want to get to here. So someone's asking, I love the idea of touch points, but how do we entice the person to participate in them on an ongoing basis? I think there are variants of that question that everyone is kind of asking, and I'd be curious to hear your take on it as well. Oh my gosh, I love this question because we went before we started our training program, you know, it was pulling teeth to try to get caregivers to participate. We used to have in-services and God, we used to literally have to

like give away a lottery ticket or something, a winning lottery ticket in order for them to show up. And we communicated that this is part of our process. This is who we are. And we used it in recruiting and we would not, our recruiter, our recruiters would not hire somebody or take someone to the next level unless they acknowledged that they could, they had this time off and they could participate because we covered shifts. I mean, it was, we, we paid carers to do the training. You also, also you have to pay caregivers by law when, you know, they are participating in training and this is training, but we, we made it part of our onboarding that for, you know, X amount of time. And if someone said, yeah, well, I'm not interested, well, then that's not part of who we were. And they're not going to be successful with us. And, you know, we had to say no to people who wanted to come to work for us. And I knew they were,

you know, a skilled carrier. And but, you know, as I said early on, we needed something that was really that matched who we were at our core and what we stood for. And so that's why you can't really pull anything off the shelf. You got to take some time to, you know, design something that's going to work for you and your brand and then integrate that. So I think once you communicate to, and I think it goes back to, you know, sharing with your, with everybody, this is who we are. This is what we stand for. And we have, you know, we want to support you. And so this is part of it. And again, I, I'm assuming that everyone is paying the caregiver to attend training. Cause to me, that is a no brainer. And that was actually going to be one of the next things I was going to ask, just because I think

that's important to mention here, is that, you know, this is paid training. This is typically you're always mandated to be paid. And, you know, even if it's not or weren't, it should be. So I agree there. Yeah. And really, what we talking about is touch too, because, you know, touch too would be that online learning, you know, we don't have to pay them to read an email, but we, you know, we do need to pay them when we, when they do come to, you know, to training. And again, I, it's just, you said it right off the start. This is who we are. Employees want something to believe in.

They really do. And they want to be part of something that means and stands for something. And you just have to put it out there. You'll be surprised at the shift. We had zero, zero trouble with enrollment once we made that shift. Interesting. Okay. That's a good segue into the last question from our attendees that we'll ask here before we close out for today, because we're almost at the top of our time. So someone's asking, so with the mandate that caregivers had to participate in the program, do you have any idea of percent fallout? So directly tied to not wanting to adopt the program. Once you establish what your expectations are and who you are and where you're going as an organization and why providing support for them is so important.

And once you establish that and you, you know, you get the caregiver commitment and then you stick to it. Yes. Can they miss one or two and watch the recording? Yes. I'm not sure if I can answer it, you know, blanket, because it really depends on, you know, there's so many factors that it depends on. But I think overall, my belief is, you know, this is part of who you are. It's not just an onboarding program that, oh my gosh, this looks really cool. I think I'll try this. You got to believe in it yourself and embrace it and be a part of it. Because your employees, they just follow you. If you're not excited and if you don't believe that they're going to attend,

they're going to feel that. I think that's a good place to end for today. Thanks again. I really agree with that. And I think that's a wise perspective to consider for this and lots of potential aspects of running an agency. So thank you for that. We are think that's a wise perspective to consider for this and lots of potential aspects of running an agency. So thank you for that. We are at the top of our time. We're going to close out here. Thanks again to everyone who has attended. Just as a few reminders, we will send out the replay that will be available in podcast form, wherever you get your podcast as HomeCareU. You can also register for future live sessions if you heard this through the podcast first

at homecareu.careswitch.com. Sandy, thanks again. This has been kind of an unusual episode and a really good one. And I think there's a lot of good stuff to take from this. So thanks again and everyone have a great rest of your day. Thank you. That's a wrap.

This podcast was made by the team at CareSwitch, the first AI-powered management software for home care agencies. If you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with AI so that you and your team can focus on giving great care, check us out at careswitch.com.