ORLANDO, FL — Building culture and retaining talent in a senior living organization begins with trust, according to a corporate consultant who spoke Sunday during the National Center for Assisted Living’s NCAL Day.
Trust needs to be the foundation of all interactions to build culture and retain great employees, according to Kathy Parry of Corporate Energy Expert. Trust, she said, is at the core of caregiving, and that trust must carry over to senior living community teams and leaders.
Parry cited studies from the National Institutes of Health that showed that companies will see elevated trust from employees, which leads to an increase in job satisfaction, by implementing a plan of competency in five areas: transparency, communication, empathy, civility and consistency.
The speaker pointed to a Harvard Business Review study showing that in high-trust organizations, 74% of employees reported less stress, 40% reported less burnout and fewer call-off days, 29% reported a happier satisfaction with their lives. Also, productivity and engagement more than doubled compared with low-trust organizations.
Although issues surrounding staff retention aren’t easily resolved, building trust within an organization is a key component to increasing someone’s contributions in the workplace, which filters to best practices in caring for residents, Parry said.
“When you unlock trust, you retain more team members, you spread the joy of working in senior care, you retain workers,” she said. “It doesn’t take long to crack this code on trust. We just have to put it up there as a priority to build trust in our teams.”
Winning combination to unlocking trust
Being transparent, Parry said, means explaining to workers, residents and families why certain decisions are being made at the company, to avoid people gossiping, guessing and trying to “fill in the blanks” with their own versions of the story.
Only 7% of communication involves words, she said. The rest of communication, she added, is actions — 55% of the way people perceive communication is through actions, and 30% is by the tone of that communication.
Organizations also need to model empathy to encourage others’ perspectives, Parry said, adding the doing so fosters emotional awareness.
Incivility should not exist in any organization, she said, adding that civility is cultivated through humanization, respect, intentionality, restraint, responsibility, sharing and kindness.
The most important part of unlocking trust in an organization, however, is consistency, Parry said.
“When we are consistent in our actions, in the words we speak, that’s the No. 1 thing that builds trust,” she said. “Reputations are built on consistent actions.”
The American Health Care Association / NCAL announced Saturday night that it was canceling Delivering Solutions 24, its 2024 convention, due to the impending Hurricane Milton. But NCAL Day, the assisted living-focused event that typically precedes the larger gathering, went on as planned on Sunday, with NCAL putting attendance at more than 200 providers.
