Nursing home operators could strengthen their workforces by taking lessons from the way colleges and universities strategically recruit football players and other athletes.
That’s an idea put forward by Nicole Kaufman, chief transformation officer at Genesis HealthCare, at the recent Skilled Nursing News RETHINK conference in Chicago. Kennett Square, Pennsylvania-based Genesis is one of the largest post-acute care providers in the United States, with a portfolio of nearly 180 skilled nursing centers and senior living communities across 17 states.
Approaching recruiting like a college football program is not just a metaphor, at least for one global restaurant chain. Genesis leaders met with leaders from that restaurant chain and learned about a franchise owner who literally hired a former college football coach to hone a recruiting strategy, Kaufman said.
“They wanted to test the theory that if you understand who your players are, what you’re lacking in a specific area that you [can] specifically go and recruit for, you will have better success [at] creating synergistic teamwork and relationships, just like you do as you’re trying to move the football inches on game day,” she said.
Genesis has taken this approach to heart, according to Kaufman. This means looking beyond the basic skillset required for a particular role, and instead considering more specifically what a skilled nursing center needs in a new recruit to round out its team and meet the particular demands of its patient population, considering factors such as acuity and demographics.
“If you need someone with good bedside manner … you might source for a medical director differently,” Kaufman said. “You might go after a unit manager that has a very certain type of cadence when they’re delivering information to the patients on their unit.”
This approach aligns with Genesis’ larger strategy of empowering leaders at the local level to make decisions that are informed by the specific conditions in their markets. And it also dovetails with other changes, such as rolling out a “Leadership Learning Journey.”
“Usually, it’s the top executives that get access to things like professional coaches, executive coaching, mentorship; we believe that should absolutely be available to our administrators, our DONs, our sales professionals, our business office managers,” Kaufman said. “And when you invest in them in that way, you see not just their ability to perform better, but that’s when you start having them tell their friends, and you start taking control of your reputation.”
Upskilling is also an important focus with new clinical hires, as Genesis now is leveraging technology in new ways to track the clinical competencies of new workers, whether those competencies are improving over time, and how that relates to survey readiness and declines in tags.
And the provider also is utilizing the Gemini AI feature of Google Suite to gain efficiency, particularly for administrators, DONs and the national team, Kaufman explained. After someone has been off work for a period of time, the AI provides a summary of emails that are highest priority for response.
“We find that our administrators are stuck having to review documents and spreadsheets, answer emails – we want them rounding,” Kaufman said. “We want for them to be able to make a decision about what’s happened over the last week and have that drive what they’re looking at when they’re rounding and talking to the teams on the floor.”
Efforts such as these appear to be paying off. While administrator and DON turnover was on the rise in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Genesis now has a “stable line” for retention in those positions.
“So, that’s a wonderful metric that indicates whether or not we are removing burden, providing resources, upskilling, enhancing competency and making sure that our leaders can do their job,” Kaufman said.
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