Every senior living leader wants a dynamic, effective team, but it can be difficult to determine exactly how to recruit, keep, and level-up high performers. In our latest SHIFT webinar, Lindsey Daugherty, head of community at Sage, spoke with three senior living leadership experts about their proven strategies for performance power and retention. The panelists spoke about how to overcome hiring challenges, support team growth, and leverage technology to monitor growth and build better teams. The panelists included Century Park Associates’ Esmerelda Lee, Blake Management Group’s Scott Hames, and Dominion Senior Living’s Chris Pepper.

This webinar was hosted as a part of SHIFT, a Sage series about how senior living operators can shift into a tech-forward mindset. Check out some highlights below or watch the full panel here.

What are the biggest challenges for senior living leaders today?

Esmerelda Lee: Recruiting and retaining leadership, especially scalable and agile talent, in an ever-evolving landscape. We talk about servant leadership. But how do you define that? Because you can have great compensation, you can have flexible work schedules, you can make it all work. But if you have a leader that's not going to be invested in their team and bring their team along through the journey, especially at the community level, we've seen turnover and difficulty in retaining and recruitment.

What are some strategies you’ve used to hire excellent team members?

Scott Hames: It starts with the initial inquiry and again when they come in to complete an application or the interview process. Are we welcoming to them? Do we let the team members know, “Hey, we've got a potential teammate coming in?” We want you to greet them and stand up and say, “Hey, Susie, we've been expecting you.”

We've [also] had to seriously look at how we schedule. We were kind of old school in a way where we would have specific schedules, which fit resident needs versus kind of team member and employee needs. Looking at flexibility and hybrid schedules certainly has helped. Scheduling, balance, and remote work comes up a lot in the interviews.

How do you utilize mentorship or educational programs to grow and support your team?

Chris Pepper: We use Pathways, which gives our team an opportunity to take on more, learn more, become a better, well-rounded team member for us, but they get paid more for that over the course of 90 days, 6 months, or a year. We're big on growing from within, but I might have 10 folks that want to be an administrator. They all can't have the position at the same time, but I can put them in the right direction and set them up for success.

Esmerelda Lee: We have a very structured training program. Everybody has a trainer or a mentor that helps them along the way. And our training program for every role takes around 3 weeks to get through, but you train with your trainer. That really helps and creates that peer-to-peer connection so when people get in the weeds, they don’t have to call their regional or support people, but their peer mentors.

What are some other best practices you’ve used to boost and upskill your team?

Chris Pepper: We have team meetings every day, every shift. And we talk about what's going on. But there's an opportunity during that time to share something encouraging, motivating, or a devotion, if it's spiritual, and that's been huge for us. This is definitely the Dominion difference, I would say. We're known for opening that door to our team and allowing them to share things.

Esmerelda Lee: Our teams at the community level identify people that want to grow and move along in their career. But we also have defined criteria because, at the end of the day, everybody wants to grow, but do people want to put in the work and make the investment to grow? We have employee resource groups, we have supervisory training that our talent team has put together that we host for teams across the company, and then we also have small group think tanks. So if you want to invest in yourself, you start with those items, and then we have books that we provide and they can read along with us. We use the grow coaching tool and then we also partner with an outside group that coaches people as well.

How do you know what’s working and how do you track success?

Scott Hames: We have a platform that measures team member progress from start to finish. From the initial onboarding and training, they’ll get surveys saying, “How was your first day?” Then you get an additional text with a list of questions. We do that on day 15, day 30, 60, 90. You get a note on your birthday and your one-year work anniversary. It’s allowed us to triage issues prior to them becoming a forest fire. ‍

Esmerelda Lee: Turn over is the lowest it's ever been in our company's history. We're very people oriented. Our regional teams are in communities. We use activated insights for annual surveys. But we have action plans. We are always talking about performance and performance as a continuous conversation with our teams, and then we are in our communities pretty often. We keep a pulse on the turnover. We keep a pulse on what our associates say, and our associates have an open line of communication in terms of calling the support center. People do have a voice and have easy access to us, but we have a culture. And I think that transparency and that culture is something that is so important.

How else can senior living leaders step up for their teams?

Scott Hames: Mental health is a lot more at the forefront now than it was 5 or 10 years ago. I try to coach and train my team to understand. Are there red flags? Do you need to reach out to somebody before they reach out to you and truly understand that they just may need a couple of days off to reset? But on top of that, what can you do to go in and kind of lighten that load? So they know that, when they get back, they're not gonna have a desk full of emails and follow-up calls that they have to make.

Chris Pepper: We have an app that’s like an online bulletin board. When we have new move-ins, our schedule’s on there, communication happens in all areas. There's chat rooms and discussions. We can highlight team members. That has been a really big improvement for communication.

Esmerelda Lee: Be transparent as a company, be transparent as a leader. But at the end of the day, when it comes to performance, we are leading adults, and I think we've got to be transparent and authentic about where people are in the journey. We owe it to them. And I think being a good steward of someone's career or career path is being transparent as to what you expect and where they're at. It's the key to how we drive performance and how we retain key players in our company or our industry.

Sage is committed to transforming the senior living industry with the relevant data and tools they need to optimize their communities. Watch the full webinar here and stay tuned for future SHIFT sessions.