Miriam Allred (00:00)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab, a podcast where I interview home care leaders across the industry and ask them tough questions about the strategies, operations, and decisions behind their success. In the lab today, I'm joined by Jessica Schultz, the Director of Franchise People Strategy at Right at Home Corporate, and also Paul Blom, the owner and CEO of Right at Home Twin Cities in Minnesota. Thank you both for joining me today.
Paul Blom (00:27)
Absolutely.
Jessica Schultz (00:28)
Thanks for having us.
Miriam Allred (00:30)
So Right at Home is a top home care franchise system and you all have been up to some exciting initiatives lately. One in particular about recruitment and retention, which is always a hot topic. So that's what I want to cover today. Jessica, you've been involved at the corporate level in kind of a strategic capacity on the planning and executing a large scale project like this. And Paul, you are one of the top performing franchisees that participated in the project. So.
Today I want to talk about the program and I want to highlight how you all picked apart and analyze the full caregiver life cycle from recruitment and retention. And then I want to also share real recruitment and retention tactics, tools, and best practices that are working for your top performing offices. So first, let's start with some introductions and then we'll get after it. Jessica, let's go ahead and start with you and then Paul. Share some of your career highlights. What led you to home care and then highlight your current role and responsibilities.
Jessica Schultz (01:33)
Awesome. Thank you so much again. So yeah, I've spent majority of my career in healthcare primarily, most recently of the last six years in the home care industry. So I've been working in human resources for about 20 years now. I have a master's degree in human resources management. I always knew that I wanted to work for an industry that ultimately helped people live healthier and happier.
And even though my background is human resources, I can take that knowledge really to any industry. I pride myself in working for those that are on the front lines, who really have the heart to care. And there's just really always gonna be a special place in my heart for caregivers because of the experience that my grandmother had, just being able to stay at home as long as she could was truly a blessing for my family. And I love that I get to indirectly help those that help others. So.
My role at Right at Home, I'm the director of franchise people strategy. And it's critical to really helping franchise offices hire, support, and really engage caregivers, along with office staff, to help them choose home care and really stay at Right at Home long term and developing those meaningful relationships. So my team, we work on various projects and initiatives throughout the year and focusing on improving really the caregiver experience.
Miriam Allred (02:54)
Thank you, Jessica. Excited to learn more from you today. Paul, why don't you jump in?
Paul Blom (02:58)
Alright, well I'll try to give you the short and condensed version of really a career that started in my youth.
When I was a teenager, I started mowing lawns in my neighborhood and most of them were for elderly folks. Gladys Fitzgerald was my favorite, my long-term client. She was born in 1900, so she turned 85 and then 86 in 19, you whatever. So I just thought that was kind of cool. But she had arthritis and whatnot and I would mow her lawn and she would insist that I can't mow the whole lawn because it was an oversized lot and I had to come in and have
a Pepsi in between and she would tell me stories about the depression and stuff and I just thought the world of her and when I was graduating from high school her family decided that they needed to put her in a nursing home because I was going to be moving away to go to college and she very quickly declined in the nursing home and that was very impactful for me as I watched her decline and so you know kind of fast forward on through life you know went off to college went off to graduate school I worked in the IT industry worked in temporary
staffing. My husband of 33 years, his mom is a retired nurse and she moved to Minnesota and left her Wisconsin nursing license behind and she started doing the caregiving for a small company here in town that was kind of a predecessor to this whole industry of non-medical home care. And she kept saying to us, you know, you guys should do this. Like this is right up your alley. We were living in an older neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota and we were the, we
with the boys, right? We were the neighborhood boys and all of our elderly neighbors would come to us when they needed something, often with a plate of cookies to entice us into helping them get to their hair appointment or whatever. So anyway, we started thinking about it, started talking about it, started planning for it and I was working in the IT industry, Y2K came and went and of course we all know what happened to the IT industry at that point and I started looking online which was pretty, you know, 25 years ago. Online was not what it is today. And I ran across franchiseopportunities.com website and found Home Instead and Right at Home. And I just fell in love with Alan Hager's concept and his passion. And so we bought Right at Home franchise number three 24 years ago. And I think we're going to like it.
Miriam Allred (04:56)
What a great story. And step back Paul, you're wearing an awesome caregiver shirt. For those that watch this on YouTube or see the video of this, look at this great shirt that Paul's got on. I love that so much. What a great story. I hadn't actually heard that all the way through. So thank you for sharing that. And we've got a lot to learn from you today as well. You have seen a thing or two in the last 24 years. And before we got on, you were just saying how some things have never changed.
And so many things have changed. So that's going to also be one of the themes of this conversation today is there's areas of recruitment and retention that are universal, that are timeless, that haven't changed. But then there's a lot, obviously, that has changed. So I'm excited to hear both of your... including the facial hair. But at least you have those great locks to make up for it. Awesome hair. Okay, so let's talk about the program, Jessica. You are...
Jessica, you are the mastermind, the brains behind this project. And so I want to hear you just explain what led to this project. What were you hearing system wide from owners about recruitment and retention that was working well, that wasn't working well? And then how did you kind of ideate this project and help it come to life?
Jessica Schultz (06:19)
Yeah, so we've always had various resources available for our owners if they needed something like, a sample job posting or an interview guide. But what we didn't have that we quickly realized that we needed kind of a step by step procedure on really the how, how to implement those processes within that caregiver journey. So after talking to offices our team quickly realized that they just needed some more guidance on, for example, how to administer an orientation.
make it engaging rather than just someone at the front of the room reading slides and going through those motions, right? So what we really looked at was, you know, also how long should it take to have someone start an orientation after the interview process or how long should that orientation be to really make a huge impact? So we are always looking for ways to improve the caregiver experience. So what better way to do that than to find out what our best offices were doing.
within those journeys and really take the initiative to create a best practice and then essentially share out those best practices to all the offices so that these great things can be duplicated and obviously spread. So that's really where it started. We did keep hearing from offices that we needed to get back to the basics of caregiving. So I think a lot of our offices were getting caught up in their day-to-day tasks. They didn't really have the time.
to review what was going well and what wasn't going well. So we started to hear things like getting back to the basics, we thought we could create some really best practices as a great help to really create that experience that caregivers deserve. So the primary goal of the project was to really just give offices something tangible, easy to follow so that they could really help caregivers get that better experience.
Miriam Allred (08:04)
So let's talk about the first steps. Was the first step, you know, obviously like the concept and then it was going out and finding these top performing owners. And then next probably came the like, let's draft out basically the life cycle of the caregiver and get into it. How first and foremost, you know, maybe you know who your top offices are, but what, what was your approach to going out and finding them from like the recruitment and retention lens?
Jessica Schultz (08:19)
Yes.
Yeah, so we actually started with the data. We started capturing the data first. So we looked at offices who had really great retention scores like Paul, really great caregiver OSAT scores, which was their overall satisfaction, as well as ENPS scores, where we measure caregiver loyalty and if they're going to recommend Right at Home as a great place to work. So when we looked at these scores, we then narrowed it down by offices who had higher revenue.
And then we, as we started narrowing down the list, we were able to break down the data so we could finalize who are those top 10 offices and what, you know, what are they doing today that is giving them these high scores? And that's kind of how it started.
Miriam Allred (09:09)
Okay, Paul, let's hear from you. Jessica just kind of mentioned some of these recruitment and retention, like KPIs, if you will. Have those always been a focus for you or have they been more of a focus for you in recent years?
Paul Blom (09:23)
You know, so for Bob and I, from the very beginning, it was really important to us that the caregivers realize that we look at them as equals and that...
they know that we're only as good as the people that we hire. So I can go out and do all kinds of marketing and I can win all kinds of awards for different things and I can build revenue. But if my caregivers aren't really well taken care of and they're not really well connected to us, it's setting that culture that says you are not them. It's not us and them.
been super important to us because the reality from the beginning, I knew that if I was going to take really good care of older adults in their home, I needed to have good retention because the worst thing you can do for someone, especially someone who's got dementia, know, advanced Parkinson's disease, is to have constant turnover of caregivers, right? Every time you have to turn over a caregiver and introduce a new caregiver to a client situation, you whittle away at the client's trust.
you whittle away at the client's quality of care because they're constantly having to get to know somebody new. so we knew from the very beginning that retention was critical to us providing the kind of service that we wanted to provide. So that's always been something. I can't say that I've always known how to measure it.
but you can measure it by watching your longevity and realizing that, holy cow, we were just talking the other day about how many caregivers just in the last year or two have retired, I mean, literally have just aged themselves out because they've been with us for so long.
when we do training sessions, we have an in-person training coming up Tuesday night, and we'll go around the room of everybody that showed up for that training session, and they'll introduce themselves and how long they've been with. And it's amazing to me when we're going around the room and caregivers are saying, I think it's been 17 years. I think it's been 12 years, right? And it's just, and then you get a newer caregiver who's like, gosh, I've only been here for three, you know? And yeah, it's pretty cool.
Miriam Allred (11:22)
I love what you said about the us versus them trap. There's the leadership team and the office team that is usually pretty tight-knit in a literal office, and then there's this remote workforce that is not in the office, They're just out in the field, so it's really easy to fall into this trap of the us team versus the them team.
Miriam Allred (11:58)
Let's just get into kind of the weeds already. How do you break down that wall? How do you help the caregivers out in the field feel like they are a part of the us team?
Paul Blom (12:07)
Yeah, it's definitely a challenge and when I think about when so we've been
For the Minnesota, we have the top workplaces through our Minneapolis Start Review newspaper. They have an outside organization that does surveys of your staff, right? And so we're competing with construction companies, we're competing with banks, we're competing with real estate companies. know, anybody can be nominated and participate in this. The questions are all the same. So how do you compete when you're an organization that has six people in an office?
and a hundred people out in the field who never come to the office once they've interviewed and oriented, right?
But you, and so to compete with that, it's hard, right? But we've never been less than number seven on the top 300 list. And that's because of culture, right? So what do we do to create a culture that says you are part of this, right? So it starts from the beginning, right? You're super honest with how the process works, right? We're not gonna sugarcoat anything. You're not gonna start next week with 40 hours, right?
to interview on the exact day that I did an intake with a client that needs you for 40 hours, right? It's gonna be a building block process. So being super honest about that. Making sure that the caregiver knows from the beginning, it's okay to say no, right? Just because I call you and describe this client situation to you doesn't mean you have to accept it, right? And it's also okay once you've started with a client to say this is not a good fit.
So we make sure that it's okay and we make sure that we express from the get-go that we're on the same page and that this has to be good for you just as much as it has to be good for the client.
We do one-on-one interviews. We never do group interviews. We don't have interview day, right? Our recruiting company, we right now use Carework. And so they do all of the upfront conversations. And that's been a process too, helping the recruiters understand, right? That don't tell people you're going to get 40 hours a week right off the bat. So they take them to the point of setting up an interview with Bob. My husband Bob still interviews.
every caregiver, one on one, they have to schedule an interview and they have to show up for the interview, right? If they have a reason and they call in advance and change the interview, they get one time to do that. But if they don't show up and they call the next day and say, gosh, whatever, you know, can I reschedule? The answer is no, right? Because if you can't show up for the interview and you can't call us, then what are you gonna do when you're assigned to a client?
So, you know, so it's that kind of stuff, but people will say, you know, and again, it starts with the office staff, right? Our most, I think, I haven't added it up recently, but I think our office combined, if you add up everybody's tenure in our office, it's about 140 years of tenure with Right at Home. And we very much focus on being the servants.
Why do we have people in an office? We have people in an office to support the people who are taking care of the clients who are paying us.
Right? And so, like I always say to like, there's this cycle and I've proven it over and over again. Most home care agencies are surveyed by Home Care Pulse or Activated Insights. And the last several years since they started doing the top 100, we've always been in the top 50 of the top 100 for overall client and caregiver satisfaction. And the reason is you take really good care of your caregivers, right?
take really good care of your caregivers, they take really good care of their clients. The caregivers stay with you a long time, the client gets to keep the caregiver for a long time. So the satisfaction circle just continues to evolve around itself.
