Aspire for More with Erin
Aspire for More with Erin
Leading with Safety in Mind a conversation with Steve Groth
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4 Key Business Drivers in Senior Living: Impact of Reducing Employee Injuries
This episode explores four critical business drivers in the senior living industry that can be significantly improved by minimizing employee injuries.
Steve Groth is the guest this week. He is an Insurance Broker from INSURICA and he has an interesting perspective on insurance, workman's comp and professional liability.
There are lots of mentoring lessons in this episode from real life experiences and data from the insurance industry.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Aspire for More with Erin podcast, where we're going to disrupt the insurance and assisted living, senior living, the thought process a little bit with Steve Groth, a commercial insurance broker, who said something that I thought was. Fascinating. He said that professional liability is a higher priority than workers compensation. Hi, Steve.
Steve (2):first of all, thanks for having me, Erin. I appreciate it. Yeah, when I talk to owners and executives, and we talk about the topic of employee injuries, And I say, what is the 1st thing that comes to mind? 9 times out of 10, they say, workers compensation, which is natural. That's where a lot of people's minds go. and, actually, within the world of insurance, when we're talking about protecting people, reducing our rates, getting better coverage. I actually believe. The professional liability part of your insurance program is a greater benefit from reducing work related injuries than the workers comp side. And here's why. If you talk to one of the handful of professional liability insurance companies, which of course I do for a living, and you ask what they really look for, what their priorities are when they're, setting a price for our clients. Number 1 is often the staffing model. Now, so let's talk about that as it relates to work related injury. and I want you to do me a favor in your mind. I want you to rank these 3 industries. Highest to lowest when it comes to frequency of lost time injuries. Manufacturing. Construction and assisted living. How do you rank them? 1, 2, 3, you'd be honest.
Erin:just off the top of my head, I think it would probably be construction 1. Just because it's dangerous, manufacturing 2 and senior living 3.
Steve (2):It's a senior living is actually 1 manufacturing is 2. Construction is 3. that's for lost time injuries. Now, you're right construction is dangerous. I have colleagues who specialize in construction. There are a lot of fatalities in that industry, sadly, but when it comes to the frequency of lost time injuries, assisted living is actually over 4 times. Higher the construction, that's according to the Bureau of labor statistics. They. They publish that data. It usually lags behind about two years. So that's from 2022. okay, hold that thought in your mind. Now, let's go back to what I was saying about professional liability. These insurance companies and every state, every jurisdiction you're in, it's going to vary how much you're paying for that. But every 1 of those insurance companies cares about your staffing model. Why? Because the better the staffing model, the less likelihood we are, we're going to have. Allegations of some kind of neglect, abuse, poor care, something, therefore less likelihood of a claim. So 1 of the 1 of the tools in our toolbox as risk managers. Is to keep our best employees safe, healthy, and on the job. So that's why I would say, going back to your initial comment. Professional liability is 1 of the, we can actually make a bigger impact on professional liability with work related injuries. That we can on workers compensation. And, Erin, what I would actually encourage you and I talk about today, and I made a sign, these are both topics of insurance, I would actually say, can you see it? Yes. Insurance overall, when it comes to work related injuries for employees, I believe is 5th. That includes both professional liability and workers comp. I believe there are 4 critical business drivers in senior living that can be positively impacted by reducing employee injuries. And to me, Aaron, these are timeless. These are going to be the cornerstone of our industry for the next 50 years, which is staffing, culture, quality of care and occupancy. yes, professional liability. I put a higher priority on the workers comp, but I actually put those 4 as higher benefits of reducing work related injuries. then I do an insurance at all. So insurance is 5th. Let's get that in our mind that insurance is 5th and we think about employee injuries. Let's talk about those big 4.
Erin:that's a lot to digest because. Yes, from catastrophic loss, right? Like people I see where construction and that's where I was going. I wasn't thinking about lost time. I was thinking about. Worse injuries, but lost time is. a bad injury too if you are a worker who's been hurt because and for the community because you don't have that person and for the person because they're not making the money that they can potentially make and their life is affected,
Steve:which
Erin:is, really important. I had as my time inside of a community. Lots of people who got work on hurt on the job and, one of them was really bad. And I think it affected him from being able to be a maintenance assistant for the rest of his professional career. just due to the range of motion for his arm, which was really disheartening for him, but also for us, because he was a vital if we want to talk about culture. And occupancy, he was a vital piece of the puzzle and making people feel comfortable fixing, remote controls, putting together, boxed bookshelves and making people feel. they belong inside of our community. It was a huge hit. For him and for us.
Steve (2):Yeah, and that's a, my cousin's a CNA. She works in a sniff. And she's the kind of person that every one of your listeners, if they could hire her, they would, she's in like a, an official mentoring capacity where she makes a little bit more money, but she was a mentor before she was ever paid like more. And, one of the things that just breaks my heart is when you talk to people like her about work related injuries, and actually she's had two serious ones in her career, again, not like a construction type injury that could lead to a fatality, but. You major surgery, lost time, impactful to her and to that community. she talks about her residents like their family, and then she talks about her work related injuries like they're a battle. it's just part of what you do for the people you love and you think, Why does it need to be this way? What, why can't we provide exceptional resident care and exceptional employee care and the two kind of go hand in hand because, and she's recovering from a torn meniscus or, maybe a rotator cuff surgery, whatever the injury may be, or using her as an example, it could be anyone. How effective are they providing care when they can't care for themselves? They need assistance at home. Just, doing the basic tasks that they have to do. we, we all have ADLs right? Yes. And, following a work related injury, sometimes the caregiver becomes the care recipient. And, so I think we can do a better job of prioritizing that and, and, you touched on it from a cultural standpoint. I mentioned the big 4. And why don't we start talking about culture? it was boy, 7 years ago. I was in a leadership role. I was in leadership role for about 4 years of my career and I learned. I think the 1st big lesson I learned right away was that if I care about my employees for 8 hours a day. I'm gonna be missing the mark. I need to care about these people 24 7 because human beings bring their entire self to work and they respond to leaders who care about them outside of work because why are we going to work? it's to provide a roof over our head, to provide for our kids, to provide for our spouse, to do the things we love, to do our hobbies and activities. So I learned very quickly that if we want to be good leaders, we need to care for 24 hours a day and work related injuries. the torn rotator cuff from the 1 assist resident transfer that went wrong. That doesn't stop at 330 PM when your shift would have ended. That's a 24 hour impact. And you, as the caregiver, so I think we need to think about it in terms of that personal impact.
Erin:Yeah, going back from a culture standpoint and going back to that example of these are just war wounds. I, when you are a, I care for these people, and I'm going to sacrifice everything and you have no boundaries, whether they be time boundaries, financial boundaries, or I'm just going to go in and do this all myself, which is probably 1 of the number 1 mindsets that caregivers have. That is when people get hurt because they need, they want to be the hero. They want to be the one who can fix all the problems and it takes No matter what cost, what a culture can do appropriately is to give people value and worth because you are valuable. is the resident and as long as you stay with the resident and offer comfort after you call for help, then you can do something because you can't do anything. If you hurt yourself at the same time that the person is hurt. But if I don't value myself. Or, anything, or I think that nothing's going to happen, then I'm going to give everything, which is then going to cause me hurt. I have seen more times than not. That people make decisions without even thinking about themselves and which is why I believe that boundaries, is in the top 3 of big problems inside senior living, which this is an excellent example of that. If we teach people their worth, they understand, your absence is going to cause greater harm to this community to you to this resident. You can provide comfort measures while you wait for help. Yes, don't let the anxiety of the room take over. What, is the right thing to do. Yeah.
Steve (2):No, that's that is huge. I, that reminds me of, I completely agree with everything you said 1 of my former colleagues. so I've been in commercial insurance for about 20 years. And my first three years I worked in every industry. I'd go from a trucking company to a construction company, to a nursing. I just, I didn't know much about senior living and it wasn't until I went and worked for a company that specialized in healthcare and senior living that I was actually trained in the day of the life of a caregiver and a colleague of mine. She was a phenomenal trainer. she was a registered nurse for 20 years before she got into risk management. She would, when she would do any kind of let's say gait belt training, for example, ambulation assistance, whatever it is, fall assist, whatever the training was, she would ask them the question, has anybody been on an airplane recently? And then she would ask when they talk about the mask, what do they say? They say, put your mask on first so you can help others. Why are we being heroes if we are injured? And she was a nurse, so she carried a lot of credibility. She said, if we're injured, how can we provide care? And so we need to shift that mindset to the personal value of that person and the enormous impact they have on lives when they're healthy and on the job. And, it's just powerful. And, and Aaron, we've, we've got the data. I mentioned the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats for assisted living. So they lumped together assisted living and then CCRCs. Then they have skilled nursing separate. so assisted living and CCRCs every year have about four and a half lost time injuries for every 100 FTs. it's just staggering. I mentioned construction manufacturing, they have 1 and then skilled nursing is like over double that by the way. skilled nursing is. They're dealing with the same challenge even worse. And, so it's something we need to talk about because we can look at the numbers and then realize, wait, these numbers are lives and those lives impact residents. And also, if you're looking at your own data, it's 1 of the starting points that I recommend for everyone is. Take a look at where you're at. Do your own kind of self assessment and we're talking about the you mentioned your maintenance director. I mentioned my cousin people who whether their mentors are not officially their value in training and mentoring and coaching others and just being a joy to work with. It goes on beyond whatever they're paid. Take a look at your injuries and then split out those that impacted your, call them your rock stars or whatever you will. Just think, what was the impact of this? We lost this person for seven weeks. What was the impact? we can put numbers to it. we can really quantify the impact. and the other thing too is when you've had a work related injury, employees. When it comes to the culture, they see how the organization responds. when I was in a leadership role, I, I was working with one of my consultants. I was managing consultants who did safety and health consulting across 7 states. And this consultant was working with a client that operated 17 assisted living communities. And once a year, they got the entire leadership team together and from the president and CEO included everyone and everyone in an executive level. And they include, they had such respect for my consultant who was on my team. They like, considered her part of their team. And so she had the ability to say things that they trusted what she was able to say there, and she can be very candid with them. So part of what they were doing is they were looking at all their workers comp trends and all their injury trends over the past, 5 years. And one of the things they were doing is they were looking at their most recent large injuries that were expensive, led to lost time, and they went through, 6 or 7 of the most recent ones. And the VP of human resources was going through and sharing what was learned. And what was the corrective action taken and it got awkward in the room after she, as she was reading these, because almost every corrective action was. In some way, shape, or form blaming the important and my consultant again, she could say things pretty directly. And she did. She said, may I ask a question? I said, yes, she said, are you hiring them stupid? Are you training them that way? Everybody laughed, except for the president and CEO. The president CEO said, Point taken. Thank you. she was not laughing. She said, this is unacceptable. She said, we had team members who were injured, who missed time from work, could not provide care. It impacted their lives outside of work. It cost us a lot of money. As an organization. She, she got it. She was listing the damage. and she said, and other employees observe us as we respond to these injuries and our answer is to point the finger of blame. She said, this is unacceptable. And so 1 of the key parts of their risk management plan was to get down to the community level. And get an understanding of how they were responding to injuries. they did a lot of training at the executive level director level. And then they were overseeing it, and they were not. Accepting just blame shifting. What can we do? Is it a training issue? Is it a quality assurance issue? Is it? Is it a staffing issue? Was where they short staff that day? What? What was it that we as leaders could do because what are other times where an employee took a shortcut and it was the 1st time they ever did it and there's nothing we could have done as leaders to stop it. Yes, that happens, but most times if we're being really critical in our own self assessment. As leaders, there's something that can be done, to prevent that from happening in the future. I believe the way, work related injuries are terrible when they happen, but the response to them is a tremendous opportunity to strengthen your culture, because it sends the message out to employees that you're valued, and if something ever happens to you, we're going to take it seriously.
Erin:I agree with that. And I think I've been on both sides of that coin. Where I didn't where maybe I just wrote down whatever needed to be written down and then, as I became more aware of this kind of value in culture thing. It was okay, they need to know they're valued. they need to know what to expect. They need to know, I even had to tell 1. 1 associate. do not go to your own doctor, you go to the 1 that we tell you to go to and this don't go and do all this. You go to them. You do exactly what they say and then we will take it step by step. Afterwards. Did she do what I asked her to do? She did, yeah. and that's a whole nother story, but it's. It is not ignoring and blaming, to me, blame, we know that blame is a discharge of pain and blame is also totally giving your power away. as a leader, we think that. It's shifting the attention off of you, but onto somebody else when ultimately you just described. No, it's not. It's clearly letting people know where you are, but it's also people feel bad when they get hurt and blame is a trauma trigger. And if you want to blame somebody who's hurting, you're going to get a response that you're not prepared for. So you need to be very careful. Number 1. Exactly.
Steve:Absolutely.
Erin:Number 2, making them feel, less than in a moment of complete vulnerability is hard. When my maintenance director fell off the ladder, he hit his head pretty hard and he was very, his vulnerability was high and his vulnerability. I his vulnerability being low made his defense mechanisms and his pride response go through the roof. And I was. And I was used to that. I knew how to work through it with him, but it was evident that something wasn't right with him. And I said to him, get in the truck, and everybody saw, you treat everybody the same way when they get hurt. And obviously this one was really bad. Get in the truck, say whatever you need to say to me, but we are going. We are going. Break me in the truck, call me names, but we're going, call your wife, have her meet me there. You know what I mean? And something's not right. And then he ended up going to the ER, but when you blame somebody who already feels in a very vulnerable way, you're going to get a negative reaction. But if they feel the worth and the value and the concern and the everything else, they're going to work with you. And do the right and that's the culture and that grows into staffing and then that rolls into quality of care because you are giving them the road map on how to care for the residents when they're in pain because you are caring for them. When
Steve (2):correct, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, let's shift the negative to the positive as well because, when it comes to culture. I mentioned how this is a tremendous opportunity. Let's say. Through the investigation, it's determined that the employee, they were trained, but they didn't really get it. maybe they just they so therefore. something that I used to do in my career, this goes back 10 years when I was doing really the hands on safety and health consulting with my clients. I would sit in on a train. I love sitting in on training because it was such an eye opener to me as to the message that people are receiving and how they're receiving it. And the number of times I sat in on training, the person doing the training will go. All right, we got safety training today. you all know this is a gatebell, let's just jump right in. there's a sign in sheet, make sure you do the sign in sheet, we need the sign in sheet. Okay, can we time out? What's important here? Is it me learning so I can care for people and care for myself or is it the
Erin:sign in sheet? let's get that straight.
Steve (2):By the way, I person, you need to document training. I like documenting training with a quiz because then it can be. Make it an incredibly easy quiz, but then you can send the message truthfully that, hey, we want to make sure that you got something out of this and we're going to correct the quiz. And if there's anything you got wrong on it, then we'll discuss it with you. 1 on 1. the right answer. But the other thing is, when it comes to filling out paperwork. Something that I found to be very effective in starting employee safety training. Is just hand out a blank piece of paper. And say, okay, I want everybody to write down how your life will be impacted. If you can't use your dominant arm for 2 months, write it down. Write down how your life, your family, just daily tasks, getting groceries, driving, showering, all the things our residents need help with. Now you need help. Okay, write it. Now, again, everybody will be like, okay, who do I hand this into? And the response is nobody. That's for you. We wanted you to reflect on how an employee injury that impacts your dominant arm will, it'll leave with you. It's a 24 hour injury. Now let's talk about what we want to talk about. Now we want to talk about ladder safety with our maintenance department. Once we personalize, I think it's just so powerful. And then if you want to do that on steroids, you always, you can't always do this, but as leaders, I think, your people pretty well. If somebody has had a personal experience and it, maybe it's not even a work related injury. Maybe they were out in Colorado. Like I was thinking they could ski that slope and they couldn't.
Steve:And,
Steve (2):I speak a lot from experience and, and I tore my shoulder. guess what? Here's how my life was impacted for the next three months. If you have somebody who has a good story to share and it's going to get people to think about why this topic matters to them, what a powerful way. And then as a leader, you can step back and put somebody forward to carry that message for you. And you get people's attention more when you start actually getting into the content of the training.
Erin:Those are excellent ideas. And I will tell you, I. Know that now I did not know that. Inside the community, you're not necessarily trained on how to be a great facilitator. You're not trained until you go in, knowing you go into a meeting, having been beat up that day with whatever is going on for the day. And then you just go in and then you just start doing it. But where leadership is going, especially when we talk about culture and quality of care and staffing is. The administrator, the executive director needs to use communication as an influencing tool and the more that you get people to start thinking about themselves, the more influence you have. Hey, there be all of a sudden now, they're completely aware. They're completely aware because now they're before they're just sitting in there looking at you. do I have to do this, just as much as you're saying, you have to do this. They're saying you have to do this because I'm going to do whatever I want to do anyways, or I'm only going to do what I can do based on, whatever we have at the moment. But now all of a sudden you've got them thinking. Oh, I have more control over than I thought I would. It's all about the decision.
Steve (2):Yeah. Yeah.
Erin:Suggestion
Steve (2):it. Yeah. And it's about knowing your people too, and what motivates them. a lot of times the best caregivers are motivated. by far the top priority is the resident. then you leverage that. then you share personal stories from people who maybe it's a resident who is nearing the end of life and this employee missed some time and. You know what they weren't there with the resident who they've been caring for years near the end of their life. You can touch people because the really good caregivers are not immune from employee injuries because and sometimes they're the ones who do too much. I, and this kind of touches on quality of care. Because, and again, it's something we can measure, there's an ocean 300 log in every community. At least there should be let's help and you can go through and look and. And they're going to be, it's called recordable injuries. That's going to be basically above and beyond first aid. Lost time injuries, and then anything involving job restriction modification where they can come to work, but they can't do their full job. Okay. 2, 3 of those lost time in the modified duty jobs. Those are disrupting to the quality of care. The caregiver resident bond has been broken. Maybe it's only for a week. Maybe it's for 6 weeks. Maybe that employee is. You know what? They're never going to come back to work. We don't know and, my job. So I started the 1st 8 years of my career. I was doing, employee health and safety consulting. And, by the way, a lot of the ideas that I share are just stolen. They're just stolen from communities that haven't figured out. Like really? I go, that's a great idea. I'm going to tell everybody else. but, I, my job became a career about 10 years ago. I was probably eight or nine years into my career. It's when my grandmother was on hospice care and, it was about a three hour drive to get to my grandmother's house. I saw her three times. I was able to see her three times despite the travel. And the first time I got there to see her, I walked in and the first words out of her mouth were, you have to meet Julie. She didn't say, Hey, Steve, she said, you have to meet Julie and, my family, we were just so grateful. We had a phenomenal experience with this hospice agency and specifically with her primary hospice nurse. And, my grandmother, 92 years old. Not the kind of person you just earn her trust overnight. And on my 1st, the 1st time I was driving home 3 hours, I don't think I had the radio on once. I was just thinking about a lot, but I actually, I'm doing employee safety consulting and I was working with home health care clients at the time. I saw the injury data and I thought, oh, my goodness, Julie gets hurt. What that's going to be really hard. What if she is transferring another patient and has a back strain or. Whatever it is. But what if care for my grandmother is disrupted because of an employee injury? And, I'm telling you, Aaron, in that moment, like my job became a career. Prior to that, it was about paying for rent and concert tickets and whatever. After that, I realized, Oh, I, what I do for a living actually impacts a lot of lives. And, phenomenal experience, but, yeah, you at the community level at the regional level at the corporate level can track this data to see how is our quality of care being disrupted because of employee injuries. If you're within compliance, and I hope we all are, you can see that data and see how care is being impacted and how loved ones and their families are being affected by somebody who got hurt on the job.
Erin:Yeah, I think the summary of. The episode, when we talk about culture, staffing and quality of care, those 3 things affect occupancy period. Occupancy will increase when people walk in and feel culture. See, yes, associates and can see or hear through family, friends referral about the quality of care that you have, or you're recovering from a bad survey, which certainly can be 1 of the best times to move into a community. But it all comes down to being proactive instead of reactive and, this may be controversial, but when I see senior living being is a reactive industry, everything is, we do all these interventions before after the incident happens and we start thinking about all these things. And what you are telling us. What you your message, especially in the presentation I watched it, Tala, Texas, this is still living association and this and what I am so striving to do is the only way to get out of the weeds is to get in the weeds.
Steve:Yes,
Erin:start looking at what I can proactively do and that is getting prepared for our meetings and using communication as an influence tool. You gave. Asking those questions at the beginning of each. Meeting safety meeting is important that made me feel I felt my heart go, and that can make anyone's heart do the same thing to make you think about it from a different perspective, when people feel valued, they act. Think and do things differently. Absolutely. And the more that we can proactively. Put these strategies in place, then, like you said, insurance becomes. It's a holistic approach that affects everything and now your insurance becomes You know, not as expensive, right? Am I right? Yeah.
Steve (2):Oh, I would say the employer is it ever going to get less expensive, you know? I would look at it this way. too. Yeah. I got a big stack of files on my desk, things I'm working on. And I was an insurance underwriter for four years. So that's what I did before becoming an insurance broker, because I wanted to understand all this, the behind the scenes of how people can control their price. Insurance, the people who price it have a stack of files on their desk. Where is your community? Where is your company? Are you top of the stack, middle of the stack, bottom of the stack? we think about insurance in terms of shopping, which is competition between insurance companies, but if we also think about it, wait a second, I am in competition with my industry peers and some of them have better staffing models, better culture. they can, and they can put it into writing. That gets them higher on that stack. So I would say, yes, we can take more control of the insurance process and outperform market pricing. the market is doing what it's doing. We only have so much impact. We, the key is to outperform and that's where you're in competition with your industry. So think about if our industry is having 4. 6 lost time injuries. I can tell you a couple of my clients are way below that. And guess what? They are using it. I've helped them with this in marketing material. They should. They have data showing. Here's the industry. Here's us when it comes to lost time injuries. You can confidently say to a potential resident in their family. We provide care for our employees, therefore they can provide care for you. And you are much less likely to lose your caregiver from an employee injury that are competitors. you're in competition with 1 another and, I love what you said, by the way, about all of this going back to occupancy because. when I was doing safety and health consulting, I knew almost instantly when I walked into a community. If they had a good safety program or not, because you could see it and feel it, some of these places you walk in and people are just, they're walking different. they're happy, they're warm, they're, then you can go into other places and people are walking, they got their hand on their hip and, oh. It looks like people are tired. They're exhausted and you've probably got a bunch of workers comp claims that haven't become claims yet, but they will. And, you know, I can actually share, 2 personal anecdotes. They're both just related. so in a span of about a year, my family helped 2 loved ones move into assisted living. I've got one of those family members on my family picture back there, but, so my two aunts and then my parents in totally different parts of the country helped, loved ones make that decision. And as they were touring different communities, they, they both said the same thing pretty much when it came to their decision. They didn't talk about amenities and. The beauty of the building and the dietary and for those who work in those roles. I'm not saying what you do isn't important. It is. But what they were talking about was the people. And I a flashback to 10 years ago, I was working with a client and the head of marketing said to me, she said, my people are my best sales force. And I thought, oh, that sounds nice. I, it didn't really resonate with me. it does now because when I talk to my family. About the decision to choose the communities. They did when they talked about the staff, they talked about they're friendly, welcoming, warm, they seem happy. Okay, I don't know about you, Aaron. Can you be friendly, happy, welcoming, and warm when you have chronic back pain?
Erin:No,
Steve (2):when you have a partial tear in your knee or your shoulder That just hasn't been reported yet. sure. I'm sure. I'm sure some people can. soldier through it, but occupancy is a little bit difficult to quantify, staffing and quality of care. Like I said, we can quantify those, but you and I both know that occupancy is absolutely real. It is impacted. We have a better culture when you have safe, healthy, happy employees. So, also, I was going to touch on something. So I actually, and you can feel free to share this with anyone. I got all these props today. I've got a self assessment tool that goes through a 3 step process. The 1st is just because a lot of people ask for what step 1. if we want to take a look at our safety program, what do we call you? I say, why don't you just do your own self assessment? I would tell anybody to do this step 1. so the 1st thing is to get your leadership team together and just do like a qualitative assessment. Of, on the topic of, do we know our top causes of injuries? Do we know which community or communities. Are have had the biggest challenge, which are the most successful. go through some different questions, talk about the workers comp experience mod, which is. An actual score that every company gets on a one to five scale. How knowledgeable are we? How much do we prioritize the second step in the self assessment? I would encourage everyone to take that empathetic approach and ask yourself, okay, what about me in my life? And those dependent on me, how would I and how would they be impacted? If I couldn't lift over 5 pounds for 3 months, which happened to somebody I know, by the way, When her daughter was like 16 months old when her doctor had to say, you can't pick up your daughter for 3 months and exact words to me where you don't get those moments back. so I would encourage leaders to do that same self assessment of. Let me personalize this and then the last step. Is where I would encourage you to look at your 300 logs. And look at last time injuries. and, by the way, again, if anybody wants to, I'm sure you can contact Aaron and she can send you this, but then also look at, okay, let's say, in the past year, we had 3 last time injuries. Or 5 last time injuries, whatever it may be, how many of those were your people who go above and beyond. And then really consider what kind of an impact did that have on. New hires, our current staff, our culture. What kind of an impact was it? So that self assessment to me is step 1 to determine, where are we? And by the way, if your numbers. Are significantly better than the industry, that's where you then go the marketing direction. How can we market this? And those who are average and everybody can improve, but then maybe you need to put together an action plan and say, we need to work on this.
Erin:And the action plan is not necessarily separate from any other action plan, because when you just over communicate and you train and you're proactive. And you influence through good communication, everything else falls into place. And so old Aaron would have been like, oh, my God, another action plan. But as much as a dot connector, as I am, like, I realize now, like, when you do things from a place of just wanting to add value. And how 1 step leads to the next, this just adds in. It is the way that you start your meetings with these questions that he's saying. Firmly believe if you opened up every all training or all safety meeting or any other meeting with thought provoking questions. You will have them ready to receive your information and it will change. Yes.
Steve (2):Aaron, I, and I want to end on 1 last story. I, I hope people watching don't view. This is some new burden that they need to take on. I see it as another opportunity, another tool in your toolbox to address these core drivers to address staffing occupancy culture. and because and. here's the story I was, this goes back a while I was working with 2 communities in a small town. And they were always competing for labor. And I'm just going to refer to them as one star and five star, because one of them was unbelievable. they did everything exceptionally well. And the other, let's just say they had work to do. So I was visiting. One star one day or excuse me, five star and the lady who did all of their ambulation and any kind of resident care training. she was the primary trainer. She said, we're really concerned. She said, 1 star on the other side of town. She didn't call him on sound, but she said, our local rival. Is raising pay for CNAs and we can't match it. She said, we're worried about losing a lot of people and they did. And then, the next time I was there, which is about three months later, she came running up to me and said, I was so excited to see you. I said, why she said, because. We ended up losing a lot of our people and then we got most of them back. So really, so do you raise your pay? She said, no. She said, HR didn't interview with every one of them saying, we're so glad you're back. What were some of the things that made you choose to come back here? She said, one of the most common answers was over there. They don't care about our safety here. we know you do. She was just, she was beaming. She couldn't, she could not wait to tell me that because she was their primary trainer. And so she knew the value of what she did went beyond. Oh, let me grab my side again, Aaron. She got this.
Erin:She got
Steve (2):it. And it was real to her and she saw the impact. So don't see this as a burden view. This is something to get excited about and say, Hey, this is something else that we can look at. If we haven't looked at it closely recently. See, can we improve our culture? Can we improve our staffing? Can we improve all these really important things? And then, yes, insurance does get easier. Both workers count and live.
Erin:Absolutely. Master class today. Thank you. I appreciate that. really take those questions at the beginning of a meeting. Are very important. And, if you take anything away, it's asking those questions and getting people ready to receive the information that you have and the way that you present things is very important. If it's not important to you, and you feel like you have to do this, then they're going to think the same way. this is an excellent conversation. That is valuable for anybody who listens. So thank you so much for sharing that.
Steve:Thank you for having me.
Erin:Absolutely. And if you're listening, you should share this with 1 other, community leader or regional director, because this message is really important. if you found this to be important, share it with other people, because we can make a difference, just sharing the episode makes a difference. and as always for my listeners aspire for more for you.