Top 5 Tips on Retaining Care Staff
Please, take 5 minutes to genuinely write down reasons that carers should work for your care company. Don’t rush, don’t lie, don’t sugar coat it. If you were to strip everything back, why would I choose you over all the other care providers in your area?
If you haven’t got 10 strong, sincere reasons to join you, perhaps you need to look at other methods of attracting the right talent.
Attracting carers to work for you, interviewing them and offering a role is the easy part. But retaining them, this is a whole new ball game.
Imagine what you could do if you retained more care staff year on year? Your agency spend is reduced, you provide more continuity of care, your internal staff are more motivated and you grow your care business.
Easy, right?
Please read below my ‘Top 5 tips on retaining care staff’ that we’ve seen significantly help care providers in 2022 already - most notably, we’ve seen a care provider reduce agency cost by £36,000. You can do this too.
1. The recruitment journey
The recruitment journey isn’t a simple case of posting a role, expecting people to apply, call candidates and start a shift. The full journey from job advert, time to hire, first phone call, invite to interview, the interview itself, offer management, induction, shadow shift and training, needs to be a robust process where each and every step is monitored down to a tie.
2. Regular updates during the first few weeks and throughout
OK, so you’re new starter is working, that’s my job done, they’ll be fine. Wrong. You need to be calling each new starter as soon as their first shift is complete and be a constant source of support for them. Spend 60 seconds a day calling up new starters to make sure they’re happy with how things are going. 60 seconds for you, and months and years for them with your business.
3. Morale boosts
Keeping staff upbeat and motivated to work for your company can be a huge challenge. Why not start with incentives like refer a friend, meet the teams, monthly tea and coffee meetings, employee of the month, monthly newsletters, further training and development and salary increase after probation.
Not putting in place any reasons for your staff to stay with you is going to drain your staff. Don’t lose them by simply not adopting very simple morale strategies.
4. Exit interviews
As a rule of thumb, this should be happening with all leavers of your business. And why wouldn;t you want to do it? Get to the route of people leaving. Poor training, not enough shadow shifts, a toxic employee, whatever it may be, find out the problem and remove it from your company. You’ll instantly retain more staff.
5. Social media
Your staff are proud to work in care. So now, it’s down to you to showcase their achievements so the world can see. Back in my HR Manager days, I often asked why people enjoyed working for us and the common answer was, ‘The company is proud to have me.’ This was because we did weekly meet the teams and showcased staff on our social media channels. Staff who had recently had a baby, celebrated a birthday, taken a client out to an event or an activity, recently got engaged, we showcased this on social media and guess what, retained more and more staff.
Retention in staff will save you money, time and allow you to grow your care business.
If you implement and master the above 5 tips, you’ll soon see a huge improvement.
To speak to us about your care recruitment or social media queries, book a meeting or connect with me on Linkedin.