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Home Care Employee Retention Challenges May be Part of overall Job Transition Trends

Published on October 29, 2019 by Scott Zielski

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Recent US Employee Survey Showed 75% Of Employees Do Not Stay At Their Jobs For More Than Five Years.

The home care industry continues to struggle with retaining employees seeing turnover rates over 80% according to the study done by Home Health Care News.

This has created a major challenge for home care agencies and providers as they work to manage and retain their workforce’s. The home care industry may not be alone with this problem. A recent US study by iHire uncovered that overall US employer retention statistics with some surprising similarities to what we are seeing in the home care industry.

Their study found that 75% of employees in the U.S. do not stay at their jobs for more than five years. This study could be the first indications that job-hopping is becoming far more common in the overall US employment landscape. It also could be a sign of the new normal of today’s tight candidate-driven labor market.

Our booming economy of recent years has been attributed to one of the reasons for this employee job shift. A 50-year low unemployment rate of less than 3.5% is the lowest seen since 1969. There are more job openings than there are people to fill them with the home care industry typically filling jobs in the lower wage categories. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)  American workers who quit their jobs last year was over 40 million or 26.9% of the workforce. 

While less than twenty-five percent say they plan to remain in their current place of employment for more than 5 years.

Ways to Improve Caregiver Retention and Engagement

There are things home care agencies and providers can do to improve the retention of their caregiver workforce. It starts with creating an environment where people want to work. Making it a place they want to come and feel good about what they are doing. Combine this with providing higher engagement levels of your caregivers and using automaton to assist in that process.

According to the recent survey, giving your employees monetary incentives would increase the likelihood they would remain. Also adding better benefits package and work/life balance also increase the retention successes. While that may be no surprise also non-monetary items like providing current job tools, regular communication and making them feel like they are part of the team also go a long way toward retaining employees.

In the home care industry moving your team from non-connected systems, tools and antiquated paper chases to a platform that seamlessly engages them in the home care operations and drives best practices for caregiver workflow and engagement can go a long way to reducing caregiver turnover. Home care agencies using complete integrated home care software platforms like Smartcare Software are realizing higher engagement levels with their caregivers and staff resulting in higher retention levels.

Their spending less time managing the business and more time working with their employees and care teams. This is resulting in reduced turnover, lower costs and improved client/patient satisfaction. Technology can and should play a part in caregiver retention and engagement.