By Stephen Tweed

As a CEO in home care, what are your big burning issues?

What are the challenges that keep you awake at night?

What would you like to learn more about so you can serve more clients and scale your business?

At the Home Care CEO Forum we regularly survey our members to find out what topics they would like to explore in our Home Care Mastermind Town Hall, and our monthly Mastermind Meetings.  At the beginning of 2022, we surveyed the members of our five Home Care CEO Mastermind Groups,  We asked them to rank a series of topics in each of the five phases of flow.  These phases of flow represent the core functions of an effective home care company.

The Five Phases of Flow

These phases are:

1. Attraction – what we do to make the phone ring 
2. Conversion – what we do to convert inquiries into admissions
3. Staffing – what we do to find and keep caregivers and office staff
4. Caregiving – what we do to match caregivers to clients and make sure all open shifts are covered
5. Collection – what we do to keep cash flowing.

In our 2022 mastermind member survey, we identified some key topics or areas of concern in each of these five areas.  There were a total of 79 topic areas among the five phases of flow.  We aske each member to rate the importance of each topic on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all important, and 5 being extremely important.

The Top Ten Topics for Top Tier Home Care CEOs

Here are the top ten topics and the rating for each:

1. Improving 90-day Retention – 4.73
2. Growing the Bottom Line – 4.68
3. Developing Office Staff for Caregiver Retention – 4.50
4. Soft Skills of the Best Caregivers – 4.48
5. Recruiting in the Community – 4.44
6. Recruiting and Retention Metrics – 4.44
7. Retaining Economically Fragile Caregivers – 4.4
8. Using Caregiver Quality to Create Competitive Advantage in the Marketplace – 4.39
9. Reducing Scheduler Burnout – 4.36
10. Employee Engagement for Caregivers – 4.35

From a sneak preview of data from the 2022 Home Care Pulse Benchmarking Study, we know that turnover in 2021 was 64%, very close to the 65.2% in 2020.  As a matter of fact, turnover has been flat over the past five years, hovering in the mid 60’s.  We also learned that 57% of turnover happens in the first 90 days.  This is a more precise number that we had received several years ago when Home Care Pulse indicated that as much as 80% of turnover happens in the first 90 days.

Improving 90-Day Retention

We have done significant research over the past two years to learn more about the factors that affect our ability to find and keep caregivers.  One of the areas we have explore deeply is 90-day retention.  For example, we have uncovered the three big causes of 90-day turnover: 

1. Bad Hire – too many companies are not doing an effective job of selection, and those bad hires usually turnover in the first few weeks.
2. Paycheck Balance – Most caregivers fall into a category we call “Economically Fragile.” They have specific financial needs to meet their monthly expenses, and if their take-home pay doesn’t meet those needs, they look for work elsewhere.
3. Lack of Engagement – New hires are often left out there alone without anyone to talk with and to encourage them.  If they don’t feel connected to their supervisor or their company, they often drift away. Our 2019 Best Caregiver Study showed that caregivers will stay with a company when they are doing meaningful work, when they feel valued and appreciated by their clients, when they feel valued and appreciated by their supervisor, and when they feel fairly paid.

We have worked with our mastermind groups to develop specific 90-day retention plans that have shown measurable results.

Discuss These Hot Topics with Your Peers

Over the next few months, we will be discussing these topics in-depth during our monthly mastermind meetings.  We’ll also devote discussion time to these topics during our in-person mastermind gatherings.  May in Mastermind Month at the Home Care CEO Forum, and four of our five groups are meeting face to face.

• Top 5% Group – Boston MA visiting a member company
• Top 10% Group – Chicago IL visiting a member of the Top 5% Group
• Strategic Growth Purple and Strategic Growth Green – Louisville KY visiting Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby Museum.

If you would like to be part of a close-knit group of home care CEOs who meet regularly to share ideas, solve problems, and support one another, you may want to explore becoming a member of a Home Care CEO Mastermind Group.