By Stephen Tweed
Caregiver retention is a critical issue for today’s home care company. Research conducted by Leading Home Care and Caregiver Quality Assurance® shows that it costs about $1,576 every time an employee turns over, whether they quit or are terminated. The annual turnover rate in the home care industry was 52.6% in 2012, so if you had 100 caregivers and 52 of them turned over, it would cost you $81,952.00.
That’s a lot of money. And that doesn’t count the cost of unhappy clients who really want the same caregiver every day.
Client satisfaction is a huge factor in reducing turnover in your company, so measuring and managing satisfaction is important. How do you know how satisfied your caregivers are? Ask them!
At Caregiver Quality Assurance®, we are seeing a real need for companies to pay more attention to caregivers, engage them in conversation, and show them appreciation and recognition. The process begins by asking caregivers what they feel and think about your company.
It’s hard to do it alone
We’ve found that most home care company owners have a hard time doing their own caregiver surveys. It’s often easier to ask an expert. So we are asking our expert, Aaron Marcum at Home Care Pulse to give us some insights into the factors that are important to caregivers and the kinds of questions we should be asking.
Aaron and his team at Home Care Pulse have mastered the process of conducting telephone surveys of caregivers to accurately measure their level of satisfaction. By asking a series of carefully crafted questions then comparing the data among caregivers and comparing to industry benchmarks, you can get a more clear picture of their satisfaction.
What questions should you ask?
There are really three categories of questions that give you a picture of caregiver satisfaction:
Orientation and Training
- What has been your experience with new employee orientation?
- What has been your experience with ongoing training?
Company Culture
- How accessible is my supervisor?
- How accessible is senior management?
- How much do you feel valued and appreciated?
- How clearly defined are your job expectations?
- What is the overall morale in the company?
Overall Job Satisfaction
- What is the caregiver’s overall level of satisfaction?
- Would the caregiver recommend this company to another employee?
- Would the caregiver recommend this company’s services to a client?
While these are the categories of questions, a critical skill is crafting the questions, asking the questions, and documenting the results. You then need to tabulate the results, analyze the results, and decide what action you want to take to increase your level of caregiver satisfaction.
It’s very clear. The old saying is very true:
