Your home care agency is only as good as the employees who represent it. It is crucial to invest time and effort into hiring the best employees right from the start. Along with background checks and solid work history, it is essential to consider attitude and character traits. Look for empathy, compassion, patience, self-awareness, and a positive attitude. Below are a few tips to help with recruiting and retaining caregivers and reducing employee turnover.

Provide Adequate Caregiver Orientation & Training

People learn and retain information in a variety of ways. With that in mind, when planning caregiver orientation and other training for new staff, be sure to employ various teaching methods. Also, ensure your training is adequate and relevant to what your employees need to perform their actual duties. The use of handouts, visual aids, power-point presentations, and other teaching methods can add variety and generate more interest.

Establish Clear Caregiver Responsibilities

Sometimes caregivers quickly leave their jobs due to feeling woefully unprepared to handle all that may be expected of them. It is essential to go over their expected responsibilities and provide personalized instruction relevant to specific clients. Providing hands-on training, demonstrations, and allowing time for supervised practice sessions for caregivers using specialized equipment on the job will go a long way in establishing your caregiver’s responsibilities right from the start.

Additional Training and Educational Opportunities

Providing employees with advanced or ongoing training helps to improve employee satisfaction rates and skill levels. Consider providing a C.N.A. course for prospective employees.

When working in a home care environment, your home care staff will likely encounter a need for many different skills, and their ability to know what to do in such a situation could even save a life.

Inevitably, your home care staff will encounter clients experiencing cognitive decline, dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease. These situations call for a specialized skill set and advanced care abilities. In these cases, it may be necessary to provide your team with practical ways to approach care for these clients.

Providing ongoing abuse and neglect training, practicing fall prevention and safety strategies, and providing other useful workshops and webinars can help to set your agency apart as well.

Make Training Fun

Consistent, ongoing training is essential to ensuring both the skill of your caregivers and the retention of qualified staff. When conducting training sessions, ensure that your company’s training events are fun, engaging, and informative.

Today, more and more seniors are choosing to age-in-place, raising the demand for skilled, in-home care providers. It’s true that effectively recruiting and retaining caregivers requires time and hard work. But it is absolutely worth the effort and investment!

If your home care company is in need of robust home care marketing tools, be sure to consult with Home Care Marketing Pros today!

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