Aaron Marcum
Costs of turnover extend beyond advertising the open position, screening, interviewing, and hiring.
According to the Home Care Benchmarking Study over the years, the median rate of caregiver turnover has been on the rise from 39.4% in 2009 to an alarming 65.7% in 2017. The odds are that two-thirds of your caregivers will leave your home care business in the next year. Most home care business owners feel they work hard to retain their employees. Despite these efforts, the escalating issue of caregiver turnover has become the top threat to home care agencies.
This month Erik Madsen, our COO, will be presenting on this subject during our CORE Webinar. We’ll also share articles and posts throughout March looking deeper into this issue and provide solutions many home care agencies have found in reducing turnover.
Far-Reaching Costs to Your Business
Costs of turnover extend beyond advertising the open position, screening, interviewing, and hiring, although these costs can be formidable. Consider costs associated with the following factors:
- Recruiting and Training Costs. Figures from the Center for American Progress show us the average cost of replacing an employee is 16% of their annual pay. Click here to access a calculator tool we built using home care industry data to see how these costs add up for your agency.
- Loss of Work Quality. More time spent finding caregivers means less time available for training existing caregivers. Also, experienced caregivers more are likely to leave and more difficult to replace when turnover is high. High turnover reduces your ability to perform the most important function of your business: caring for your clients.
- Lowered productivity. New employees tend to work slower and require more help from experienced employees and managers. Onboarding and training are necessary for any line of work but spending too much time on it may pull your best and most experienced employees away from their regular work.
- Damaged Morale. When too many employees leave, other employees start to ask why. The resulting drop in morale impacts work culture and even affects the level of care that your clients receive.
- Future Staffing Challenges. According to the most recent Home Care Benchmark Study, the top method of recruiting caregivers is word-of-mouth referrals through other caregivers. Fewer caregivers staying in your business translates to fewer referrals, affecting both the size and quality of your candidate pool.
What You Can Do
Fortunately, there are multiple avenues available to you to address the issue of caregiver turnover. We’ve compiled resources to help you understand the causes of this problem and what you can do to minimize them.
- Understand the reasons for the increase in caregiver turnover and consider how they are affecting your business. The 2017 Home Care Benchmarking Study provides information and data on retention throughout the industry and filters the data by geographic location, revenue ranges of the agencies in question, and their years in business. Exploring this resource will help you understand which factors have the greatest impact on your own business.
- Implement a caregiver recognition program to help your employees feel rewarded for their work. A solid resource to get started on this topic is this webinar replay by our COO, Erik Madsen. During the webinar, Erik discusses solid strategies for implementing a caregiver recognition program and provides perspective and examples that will help you apply these strategies yourself.
- Use our Quality Management Program to understand the needs of your clients and caregivers, and address problems before they become problems. Our Quality Management Program allows us to interview a portion of your clients and caregivers. We then provide you with direct feedback on where you can improve and arm you with the resources to do it.
Caregiver turnover is an issue facing every agency, but it is not a problem without a solution. Visit our website to learn about more solutions built to improve your caregiver retention and continue to grow your business. Request an overview of our Quality Management Program with a member of our Business Development Team to learn how these strategies can help your agency begin reducing turnover.
Co-Contributor: Connor Kunz
