As home health providers contend with persistent staffing shortages, some leaders have moved beyond traditional recruitment tactics to address labor challenges.
Providing near-peer coaching, structured onboarding and upskilling opportunities keeps employees engaged and reduces early turnover, experts said on a recent Home Health Care News webinar.
Coaching and cohort building for new clinicians improve engagement and lower attrition, according to Mike LaRosa, the director of workforce development at Bayada Home Healthcare.
The bulk of caregiver and clinician attrition occurs early in the onboarding process, Bayada’s leadership noticed.
“What we’re finding is that clinical coaching with near-peer coaches — folks who share lived experience with them, they may share identity markers with them, they’ve lived to the same experience that they have as new clinicians — have been tremendously effective at inoculating against some of that early-stage attrition that we tend to see,” LaRosa said.
The program does not need heavy architecturing or require high upfront costs, and Bayada’s caregivers and clinicians “love it,” he added.
Coaching has other psychological benefits, adds Sarah Deitz, vice president of human resources at Interim Healthcare.
“It builds confidence and it builds connection,” she said. “It’s a great benefit.”
A range of investments
Beyond near-peer coaching, providers are also adding career coaching, financial support and academic counseling as ways to invest in their caregivers.
“We are establishing that trust and that mutual connection and mutual commitment,” LaRosa said.
LaRosa noted one example of an employee, who he called Angela. She started out as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) at Bayada in 2023. At the time, Angela was providing about 90 client service hours a month for low acuity adults in her state, LaRosa noted. She decided to further develop her skills after feeling rewarded with the work she was doing.
Bayada connected Angela to an Advanced Nursing program, which provided her resources related to nursing school admission, financial tuition support, career coaching and academic advising. The program was supported through some public and private investments, public agency grants, private foundation grants and some Bayada investments, LaRosa said.
Through that program, Angela became an LPN who tripled her income, averaged 170 service hours a month and provided two-and-a-half times the monthly community care.
“That’s the kind of success story that we’re really, really proud of,” he said.
Keeping up with changing times
The leaders Home Health Care News spoke with noted how introducing coaching is just one way home health providers keep up with changing workforce demands. The executives emphasized that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for addressing caregiver retention. But one powerful way to keep staff aboard is to provide them with tailored investments related to their lived experiences, needs and career growth.
“We are pivoting at different times,” said Christina Chartrand, senior vice president of training and services at Senior Helpers. “I remember many years ago where you know you lost a caregiver, you just put an ad out and you get another caregiver, and how easy it is. It’s very different now.”
Beyond competitive pay, how home health providers train caregivers must align with strategic recruiting, onboarding and retention goals, Chartrand said.
Retention philosophy is naturally going to chafe against what is and isn’t possible, Sarah Dietz, the vice president of Human Resources at Interim Healthcare, told Home Health Care News. She highlighted areas including pay, core benefits, 401K and 401K match, coaching, coach-up care and rewards points programs.
“It’s both impossible and irresponsible for us in this industry to invest in everything to be above benchmark,” Dietz said.
Because paying for all of that is impossible, operators must understand the unique needs of their people and “what’s important in their areas” to evolve with the changing demands of cultures, she added.
“We have to stay relevant. We have to evolve alongside the workforce we have and alongside our payers,” said Dietz, “We have to remain intentional, and most importantly, we have to remain deeply, deeply human in how we support the people delivering this care.”