Benchmarks, KPIs and labor management data are crucial for operators to improve HR related challenges for hiring and retaining great employees. Paul Jarvis, Head of Sales and Marketing at Procare HR, shares his perspective on how senior living can increase talent acquisition and retention.

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This episode was recorded at the NIC Fall Conference.

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Produced by Solinity Marketing

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Intro

Welcome to season seven of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, NIC MAP Vision, Procare HR, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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00:33 - 00:44

Lucas McCurdy

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the senior living podcast with Josh and Lucas. This is going to be a great episode. We're here in D.C. –  Fall NIC –  we got Paul Jarvis of Procare on the program. Welcome, Paul.

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00:44 - 00:46

Paul Jarvis

Thank you. Great to be here guys.

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00:46 - 01:19

Lucas McCurdy

So good to see you. And you know this is always a big topic. Every operator out there is always trying to find a way to streamline process, streamline systems. Most of all, save some money. Right. We're looking for ways to help that NOI to help that bottom line. And technology is clearly a major component or solution in the marketplace for senior housing. And today we're going to be talking about that. I mean, Josh, as an operator, am I right? Am I speaking your language? Are you interested in saving some money?

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01:19 - 02:23

Josh Crisp

100%, but also understanding, you know, where we need to be aligning strategies, right. And so much of that is understanding what's happening in the industry, how the labor market is changing. And it's hard. I don't care if you're a large operator or a small operator. We're all trying to find the same information. And so, so glad to have you on the show today.

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01:42 - 02:05

Josh Crisp

You know, our partners, strategically aligned. And, gosh, what you guys are doing. It was benchmarking data relating to labor. And the industry is such a valuable and important thing. But, you know, so many of our listeners may not even understand what you guys do, what it's like to work with you guys, what's the purpose and and how you can benefit from operations and hoping you'll unpack that just a little for us, it'll be a teaser today because we could spend hours talking about that. So maybe, start off with strategically when we're talking about aligning to work with someone like pro care, what is the purpose? What does it look like? What does it feel like when you onboard someone

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02:23 - 05:10

Paul Jarvis

First off, happy to be here with you guys. Love being a nick. So Brooke is a great organization. We are a comprehensive HR services for senior living. So what does that really mean? I'll start with the comprehensive HR part. The whole thesis of the company is that senior living is a people driven industry.

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And if you make the right investments in the right strategy when it comes to your people, you can see better outcomes on all of the important things that we strive for resident family satisfaction, quality of care, financial performance and HR is more than just kind of, am I getting paid on time or are my benefits correct? Do we have worker's comp insurance? So there's all those pieces like that. So Procare, what we do is we partner with operators to say, okay, let's go from H.R. being kind of compliance, ticking the box, very tactical to what does the right H.R strategy for your organization look like? Are you growing? What markets are you in? What are the local or state requirements that you're striving to meet?

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And so there's kind of three layers to what we provide. The first is that HR services which is again the more transactional things it's payroll worker's comp benefits insurance as well as having a team of almost 100 employees, 70% of them come from the industry, including, executive director, schedulers, HR specialists, legal specialists. So every question that you might have, we have that. Then we've built out some additional services to the main place, which are kind of the main transactional sides of HR, which are hiring new folks. So talent acquisition and then scheduling. So kind of you think of it as like bringing on team members and deploying those team members in the most efficient manner possible. And in both of those cases, we've built really efficient, high touch services which work closely with operators to provide, frankly, like really cost efficient, high, high output productivity.

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So you get the right people schedule at the right time for, frankly, the right amount of money versus doing it yourself. And then underneath all of this is the data piece. So we support 20, 25,000 employees across senior living, which means we just have a wealth of information on labor in this industry. And so what we're starting to do is say, let's not just use that for our own education, let's use it for our clients' education, for the industry's benefit. Let's start building some benchmarks, some definitions around what is best in class, look at certain KPIs, and share that with people. So it's not just, hey, if you work with us, you get this information. But from my experience, everybody wants to know, am I doing a good job? And it's kind of hard when your head's down in your own little world of, is this good? Is this bad? I don't really know. So we're trying to be more of a resource and more of a partner there as

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05:10 - 06:04

Josh Crisp

Our listeners and Lucas Nye are probably the luckiest people because the benchmarks that you guys collect all these data points on, you know, if we as an individual operator are just waiting and trying to learn from and respond to what happens to us, in our little circle, whatever we're operating, you know, it's it's very limited, input.

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And we have limited data. But I love this idea of the benchmark report. Our listeners are going to kind of get teasers of that. Obviously, because we connect our listeners to our partners that they can dive as deep as they want. Geek out on that. But, Paul, what are some of the the high level things that you are starting to to track or have been tracking for a long time that you're like, hey man, this is if you don't have a strategy for this, this is a benchmark you need to be watching and keep Our pulses on.

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06:04 - 07:59

Paul Jarvis

So we've built this really interesting service around scheduling. So scheduling in our industry is kind of where the rubber meets the road in the sense of being efficient at scheduling. Doing a good job of that can make a huge financial impact. But frequently scheduling is not somebody's full time job. Nobody goes to school to learn how to be a scheduler. It's a hard job and it needs to be done 365 days a year, 24 hours. And so a place where we're really using those benchmarks is in our schedules. And so the way it works, essentially is we bring in data from the payroll system and the scheduling system. We type that together into an analytics dashboard that we built.

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And then we use data from across all of our clients to say, okay, what is a good target for the simple stuff like over time, how much PTO to be using, but then some more kind of interesting secret sauce things around bleeding drivers of labor cost. So I'll give a little teaser of some stuff around. How far into the future are you building your schedules? Right? Are you building in two days in the future? Two weeks in the future? Our best operators are doing it two weeks in the future so that they have more of a buffer for unexpected call outs, people getting sick, life happens more as well. Stuff like what percentage of employees have not used all their full time hours before you start drawing on your alternative labor pools like the overtime agency, things like that.

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And so what we're able to do, and we do this all the time for people who are interested in working with us or just want to learn more. So we say, hey, send us a little bit of data, we'll run it against our benchmarks, and we can come back to you with, we're pretty confident that with our service and our coaching and our expertise, we can get you to these targets. And here's what that might mean financially for you. And it's a pretty impactful number, usually between 3 to 10% of total labor cost. Because scheduling is kind of like, you're chopping the tree, but you never get there, right? Or you're never going to get it perfectly. But with discipline and data and focus and really building a craft around it, you can get pretty close.

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07:59 - 08:42

Josh Crisp

I'd like to dive a little deeper in scheduling because obviously it was one of the focal points you wanted to talk about. I think it's huge and incredibly critical and important. So there's, I feel like a new scheduling software provider coming out almost weekly, you know, and it's hard to know as an operator and have the time, even if you got a pretty big shot of like, what?

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What should we be looking for in a scheduling software or in a scheduling program? And what's the cost and what are all the things that you ask? So from your standpoint, how do you approach that? I mean, how do you approach, like guiding a client to the right resourcing tool? And how do you guys approach just the thought process?

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08:42 - 10:12

Paul Jarvis

I'm a tech guy. You know, I started my career in data. I built a data analytics company that I sold to Procare, which is how I joined the organization. I'm a firm believer that dashboards alone are not enough. Right? You need dashboards, plus decisions, plus. And so that's where I think, frankly, it's not really about the software. You could have the most magical software. Obviously it should be easy to use. It should be comfortable. But it's really the follow up. What do you actually do with the information? If the software is so bad that you can't enter any information in it? Okay. You know, that's bad enough. But I would say to operators like it doesn't really matter what piece of technology you pick.

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We're pretty proud of the scheduling software. We actually, white label some software that's developed elsewhere. That's very good. But really, the secret sauce that we have is expertise. It's having former schedulers on staff, having folks who used to be heroes of large organizations really, really understand this and work closely with our clients to help them get better. You know, I was thinking about this earlier today. One of my coworkers here said she got up super early in the morning, early in the morning, and got on the peloton. I was like, yeah, that's good for you. And in some ways, our business is kind of like a peloton, the scheduling business, because it's really not about whether you can buy the best exercise bike in the world.

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It's about coaching. It's about the content. It's about the structure that they provide to help you. You know, you still have to push the bike and turn the pedals, but it's the coaching and the expertise that they can find that really makes the difference. And so I would say that's what you should be thinking about is what are you going to do with the software? What are you going to do with the data? How are you actually going to improve from this?

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10:12 - 11:06

Josh Crisp

I think that's really insightful because I know I've been my own worst enemy and probably the victim of going after the shiniest new thing that's out there. And maybe your team is not really ready and hasn't thought through the strategy of how are we going to implement it? How are we? Are we going to even use this shiny tool that we have? Maybe we don't even we're not even equipped to get the most out of it, you know? So from a strategic standpoint, what kind of things should operators be putting in place or what should operators be looking to in a partnership, even with things that you guys provide at pro care, to kind of build out the whole strategy when we're approaching scheduling because, hey, yeah, we can go buy the pro care software, but, you know, how are we going to implement that? Is that something that's completely reliant on your team, or is there some sort of infrastructure that we need to put in place to make a winning team happen?

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11:06 - 12:19

Paul Jarvis

You can only do a couple of significant priorities at a time. So I think the first step for an organization is just understanding what are the priorities for our group. Right. And sometimes I'll talk to people and they say, oh, you know, how would you solve my retention problems? Okay, well, you could have talked about a couple different ways.

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Are your wages competitive in your market? Are you scheduling shifts at a time that don't work for the people that you have today? Do you have enough employees, period, or people being asked to work too much? And that's why they're turning over, you know, are they doing construction on the highway that leads to your property and everybody's can you just double? So like, there's a lot of ways that you can look at these things. So I would say it's important as an organization to decide what your priorities are. And make sure that you're not asking your employees to do everything all at once. If they get the sense that leadership is distracted, how can you expect them to be committed to significant priorities and to actually seeing those changes?

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So for stuff like scheduling, it's a great example where it takes a commitment from everyone, again, to kind of doing the basics on a regular, on a day to day schedule to see the results. and I think just having a clear focus from the organization, whether it's, hey, we want to get agency to zero or we want to make sure that we're staying on top of this over a longer period of time. It comes from the top, and then you need everybody's buy-in at the community level.

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12:20 - 12:42 

Josh Crisp

So how are we doing as an industry? That would be my question to you because, I mean, you get to see all behind the dashboards. You get to see behind the facade that we all come here bragging on what all we're doing. Well, but how are we doing as an industry and all those data points you're collecting and what's the opportunity there? Because, you know, we can all sit and talk about the challenges. Those are glaring. But what are the opportunities that you see?

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12:43 - 13:41

Paul Jarvis

I think that there's a lot of ways that people can consider H.R to be kind of a pain in the neck. When you think of it, it's compliance, it's paperwork. It's those things. I think when you start asking more questions around how do we use it to drive? Those three things we talked about at the beginning: quality of care, resident family satisfaction, and financial outcomes. You could think about how do I align our hiring process to actually recruit employees who share our culture, rather than just the first person who's willing to take the job? How do we think about building a schedule that works financially and for employees, right? That fits into their lifestyle, their schedule, how much they want to work for them, as well as just thinking about the leadership from the top down. Are you building handbooks? Are you doing coaching, or are you training your executive directors to create an environment where people want to work? There's a lot of different ways that I think when you start to reconceptualize HR as being additive and strategic rather than transactional and a pain in the neck, there's a huge opportunity because again, at the end of the day, this is a people driven business.

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13:41 - 15:09

Josh Crisp

Yeah. Just what you are sort of unpacking there from a leadership perspective. You know, one of the not so good statistics is what seems to be this lowering, number of length of stay of our administrators, which are often, you know, I kind of call them the culture champions of your communities, but, you know, it's I would imagine, that, you know, a lot of the leaders that we need to attract to our industry, that we need to keep in our industry.

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What you just described is as far as equipping your leaders to lead and drive culture is probably one of the things that, if we aren't doing that, is adding to that burnout rate and that turnover rate. So I really believe no matter how much we talk about strategy at the at the neck level, where it's all the who's who in the industry is here, if we don't have effective strategies that meet where the shoe leather meets the road, and that's at the community where the residents and the team members, are deploying all these strategies.

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We have a huge gap. Yeah. So, you know, I love having partnerships with you guys, and I love being able to share this information. You are able to share this information with the industry because it helps us all be better. And that's been Lucas. One of our goals since day one is to figure out how we compile the best of the best content through leadership to inform, educate and influence our industry? What a valuable partner we've had here.

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15:09  - 15:23

Lucas McCurdy

Absolutely. And our listeners know that we cannot bring all this content to you without great partners like Procare. So, Paul, thank you for bringing the good information to us today. and throughout the year and for spending time with us today.

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15:23 - 15:25

Paul Jarvis

Thank you. I appreciate it guys. Great to see all y'all.

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15:25 - 15:37

Lucas McCurdy

Go to btgvoice.com. Connect with our partners and all of our content there. Connect with us on LinkedIn and let's hear what you have to say about these topics. And thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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15:37 - 15:48

Outro

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at BTG voice.com.

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