The CIHF Spring Webinar and Roundtable will be held on Monday, April 11th (11:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.) with a welcome gathering on Sunday, April 10th (5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.).The topic of the Roundtable is “Workforce Challenges in Staffing and Engagement.” Leaders of many healthcare organizations, especially in the area of senior living, report workforce management to be one of their most pressing challenges. Almost twenty years ago, the National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform declared that “nursing homes around the country continue to experience a staffing crisis that can jeopardize quality of care and life for residents.” Similarly, various other senior living associations have noted the dramatic needs for both administrative and front-line staff. According to an Argentum report, “Getting to 2025: A Senior Living Roadmap,” the industry will need to hire an additional 1.2 million employees by 2025. While the pressures on recruitment and retention have only intensified over the past two decades, practitioners and researchers have also identified best practices and other strategies to improve the lives of caregivers and those cared for in various settings.
This Roundtable will bring in participants from diverse disciplines and roles to explore challenges to workforce staffing and engagement and consider ways to solve increasingly complex puzzles related to employee retention—with a particular focus on senior living. The first half of the roundtable will focus on recruitment, including broad labor trends and specific technologies that are changing the way that people work. Before lunch, students will join to provide their perspectives on the field of senior living and what they look for in an employer. During lunch, tables will share ideas for how to make the field more attractive to graduates and how best to retain them after hiring. After lunch, we will focus on culture, especially what the world of senior living and potentially other health and wellness organizations might be able to learn from elite hospitality companies or people in the field using their hospitality backgrounds and other ideas to improve recruitment and retention. We will also consider how facility design impacts culture and process efficiency. A discussion of possible synergies between relationship-driven and data-driven approaches to workplace culture will conclude the roundtable.