By Stephen Tweed

You’ve all heard me say it.  “What gets measured gets managed, what gets rewarded gets repeated.”

How are you measuring your agency’s performance with regard to caregiver recruiting and retention?  In working with hundreds of home care agencies over the past ten years with our Caregiver Quality Assurance program, one if the things we have observed is how little most agency leaders know about their recruiting and retention data.

We ask HR professionals and company owners about what’s working and what’s not. They give us some general answers. The follow up questions is, “How do you know? What does your data show?”

We get sheepish looks and shrugs. Too many agencies just don’t have enough data to know how well their recruiting and retention systems are working.

Without the Data, you’re just Another Person with an Opinion  

I love this meme someone created of  W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality improvement.  Is what you are doing in recruiting and retention based on information, knowledge, and wisdom by analyzing the data and mixing it with experience? Or is it opinion and intuition based on broad observations?

My friend, Valerie Cade, is a professional speaker, author, and expert on workplace bullying who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  Val was President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers in 2002 when I was President of the National Speakers Association her in the US.  We worked together very closely on the Chapter Leadership Institute for our local chapter leaders across both countries. Because I often lead a session on chapter finances, Val named me “Dataman”.  The talented and creative person she is, she even made a purple “Dataman” cape.

So, I put on my Dataman cape to talk with you about tracking data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Set up your Caregiver Quality Scorecard

If you want to use data about recruiting and retention to make better decisions and refine your systems, you need a way to track and display the date. The best way to do that is with a scorecard.  Much like a scorecard in baseball, it’s the opportunity to write down your box scores for each inning played. In our case, we track performance weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Every inning, you enter the results for each of your critical measures of success. Then you use the formula’s in the scorecard to help you with the analysis. You’ll be able to see things like:

• Your turnover ratio – the number of caregivers who left as a percentage of total caregivers  
• Conversion ratio – the number of people actually hired as a percentage of total applicants
• Net New Hires – the number of candidates hired each period minus the number who terminated

Another important feature of an effective scorecard is what I call “side-by-side display.”  This means that you show the data side by side for each period – week, bi-week, month – for the course of a year. That helps you see trends in the data.  That’s what’s really important … watching the trends.  Are your numbers going in the right direction? Are they stagnant? Are they getting worse?

For example, if you look at the turnover ratio for the industry over the past seven years, you can see clearly that the problem has been steadily getting worse.

Get Your CQ Scorecard from your CQ Mastermind Group

If you would like to get on board with tracking your data using the Caregiver Quality Scorecard, I invite you to become a member of a Caregiver Quality Mastermind Group. These are groups of non-competing home care companies who come together on a monthly basis by video conference to share ideas, solve problems, and support one another.  These groups kicked off in January, and the very first formal meeting will be today – Wednesday, February 22, 2017.  There’s still time to register and join a group.

The Caregiver Quality Mastermind Group for franchise companies will kick off at 2:00 pm eastern time.

The Caregiver Quality Mastermind Group for independent companies will kick off at 4:00 pm eastern time.

Click on the link below to register and we’ll get your membership completed in time to attend today’s live video meeting.