Raise public awareness of quality care

I was at a meeting this morning of a community group involved in programs and services for seniors. The first speaker on the agenda was the head of a state agency. The topic was mental health services to seniors. One of the group members asked about services for people living in nursing facilities who might be suffering from depression. The speaker’s response began, “Well, who wouldn’t be depressed living in a place like that.”

That comment – just a reflexive, throw-away line – struck me hard.

Many of us have dedicated our careers to providing quality care for seniors living in “places like that” – nursing facilities and assisted living facilities providing care to elders.

We’ve spent hours training our caregivers to be gentle, loving and compassionate.

We’ve listened to families share their angst at having to move mom or dad from the family home, but having no other choices.

We’ve sat at bedsides – during our time off – reading to a dying resident and sharing tears with families who are grieving the loss of a loved one.

When my own beloved mother-in-law died recently she had lived in the care community less than 2 months. Yet the young man who cared for her most days cried as hard as any member of the family when she died.

Not one of us felt that it was inevitable that she be depressed.

Not one of us ever referred to the care setting as “a place like that.”

And yet so many in the public still have that perception: that a nursing home – and often any care setting – is to be avoided like the plague. It’s the last choice for any person, and be prepared to be very depressed if that’s where you end up living out your days.

We’ve come a long way personalizing care; but we’ve got a long ways to go. We need to continue to show the people in our community – including those running agencies for the benefit of people like our residents and clients – what we do, up close.

We need to continue to shout about the incredible way seniors are cared for, and the options available to them that not only support daily living but also enhance the quality of life for residents.

I feel sad for the speaker this morning if her mother or father should ever need nursing care. But most of all, I see this as a call to action to those of us providing care to let the world around us know that it’s not a depressing place to be. That life, right to the end, can be rich and meaningful, and that it’s our mission to help make it so for the people in our care.

If you’re interested in learning how online training can help you build an extraordinary team, contact us at info@aquiretraining.com. Ask about our “6 months’ free” offer, designed to get you going now, even if the money’s tight.

Census and the economy

From the word on the street, if your census is strong consider yourself lucky.

It’s not enough that the economy and poor housing market is driving people to care for their own family members rather than seek care elsewhere. We’re also caring for a market sector that has other inherent issues, namely longevity. Not to be indelicate, but our residents are vulnerable. And, it seems, we lose them in groups.

My mother in law had excellent end of life care recently in a brand new assisted living community. She was the first person in the apartment, and the caregivers were incredibly kind and attentive. They only had a few residents – how few I don’t really know. What I do know is that on the day my mother-in-law died, two other residents also passed. I’m guessing that may have constituted as much as 25% of their occupancy, in one fell swoop.

In this situation, it’s the small details that count. For our family, the attention to detail was incredible. The staff not only were attentive and caring, they openly grieved with us at the loss of our mother. One of the employees even gave the eulogy at the memorial service – and it was absolutely pitch perfect.

Were we satisfied customer? Absolutely. We’ll tell everyone we can about the fabulous care provided to our family. We’ll tell you what a great company Leisure Care is, and how happy we are with the care provided by their team.

We’ve had other experiences with our family elders. We’ll tell you about those, too – and warn you away from some communities that didn’t meet our basic expectations, let alone exceed them.

Benjamin Pearce, author of the excellent book “Managing Senior Living Communities” and a member of our instructor team just developed a course on Customer Service for managers for CEU credit. Ben says, “Quality is simply the difference between what you expect and what you get. When you get more than you expect, you perceive that you’ve gotten something of value.”

If you feel you or your managers could use a little tuning up in this area, check out this course on our EasyCEU website.

With everything else working against us having a strong census today, customer service is one area we can control and improve.

Developing a training vision for success

Recently the aQuire team was hired as an advisor to a new family caregiver project being developed out of New York City. One of the developers of the project is a man who serves on the board for an East Coast University’s school of business. He tells the story of a recent meeting where the board’s agenda was to “vision the school in 10 years.” My new friend, Barry, begins by raising his hand and saying, “In 10 years we know that most students will take at least a portion of their classes online.”

Barry was met by total silence. After an awkward couple of minutes, one of the school’s administrators said, “Well, that’s an interesting perspective but not really how we prefer to teach.”

Barry responded, appropriately, “It’s not going to matter as much how ‘we prefer to teach’ as it matters how our students prefer to learn. And evidence today shows that most will prefer at least a portion of their training online.”

He is right, you know. It doesn’t really matter how we prefer to teach – it does matter how the people we’re trying to teach prefer to learn.

When it comes to employees and training, one thing is clear: traditional approaches to training are one of the least enjoyable ways our staff prefers to learn.

Imagine if you were required to attend a training session on your day off – or in the middle of the night. For many of our employees that’s exactly what we’re asking them to do to simply attend regularly scheduled inservices. It’s not only a poor choice for many, it’s an ineffective way to ensure that every person, every shift, enterprise-wide is equally trained to deliver quality service – the bedrock of an organization’s survival.

Today, we need to deliver training dynamically, with new information delivered to every single employee in the most efficient, effective way possible. We need to consider, as well, how our employees want to learn, and adapt our training to technology that is rapidly becoming the standard rather than the exception.

We need to grasp the vision for the future as we develop our programs today, or be left behind in a rapidly changing, complex economy.


[Interested in starting an online training program for your company? Contact an aQuire representative today to learn how you can get up to 6 months free when you start your program now.]

NEW customer service training courses now available

One thing all business development specialists agree upon during this current economy: this is not the time to scrimp on customer service. While businesses need to focus carefully on cutting expenses where they can, for a company to survive, customer service needs to be bolstered, not cut.

With this in mind, aQuire Training Solutions’ course development team has been busy creating a series of new courses on basic – and advanced – customer service skills. These courses are designed for caregivers and other staff working in the senior care environment: home care agencies, assisted living communities, nursing facilities and more. These courses, written by the newest member of the aQuire course development team, Melissa Dylan, take a light-hearted approach to a very serious subject: making the client the absolute focus of our work, every single day. Topics covered in the series include:

Courtesy. More than just being polite or nice to people, courtesy involves a set of unwritten rules or interacting with clients and guests on the job. It is the basis for good customer service.

Being there. Being available for clients is the first step in good customer service. This means promptly answering the phone, greeting guests the moment they walk in the door and setting aside less important tasks to help people. It means remembering – always – “people come first.”

Listening. Listening sounds easy enough, but it takes special skills to learn to be an active listener: to focus on the client, avoid distractions, use appropriate body language and provide feedback so the client knows you been listening.

Being reliable. Being courteous, polite and responsive isn’t the whole task. A key to great customer service is being reliable – to do what you say you’re going to do. To give customers what they ask for the first time, without needing reminders.

Being positive. Being positive means finding reasons why things will work, instead of reasons why it won’t. It means consistently positive behavior, positive responses to client requests (even when you can’t fulfill a request personally) and going the extra step for customers.

Melissa’s approach to training includes a humorous approach, lots of stories, and frequent opportunities for individuals to test their knowledge. The online delivery used by all aQuire courses means that caregivers can learn at their own pace, and at a time and place convenient for them.

If you’d like a free sneak preview of one of these courses, click here.

Then imagine your team, fired up and energized to provide the best customer service possible. And imagine your company – enjoying top-of-the-market success!

National Healthcare lesson: keep it simple

Full disclosure right up front: I’m in favor of a national healthcare solution. I don’t know exactly what that should look like, but I do believe that our current approach to healthcare is something less than a cohesive system, or a long-term sustainable approach. I think it’s appalling that, while we spend a higher percentage of our gross domestic product on healthcare than any other country, we still lag behind 36 other countries in the world, according to the World Health Organization. While many of us know first hand the cost of providing health care benefits to employees, those of us working in senior care also know how challenging and frequently dysfunctional our “system” for long term care is.

But here’s my frustration: despite knowing that our current healthcare system needs a major change, I have no idea if the President’s plan will be the fix we need. The pundits are firmly divided along ideological lines; the press worries about costs involved, and paints a less-than-rosy picture of the current proposed plan.

Howard Gleckman, past senior correspondent at Business Week and currently a senior researcher at the Urban Institute recently authored a book titled “Caring for our Parents”. In his book, Gleckman shares stories of everyday Americans, struggling with caregiving issues. He points that, in the current demographics, if you are not today a caregiver, you or someone close to you will be very soon. According to Gleckman’s estimates, over 70 percent of our parents will need some kind of long term care assistance during their lifetimes.

The stress of caregiving and the fractured, unsupported nature of long term care in this country, make the experience much more challenging that it needs to be. As many of us are very aware, governmental programs often pay for the most expensive alternative for care, rather than the least expensive, most preferred options.

Gleckman’s book is an excellent look at topics related to long-term care needs and public policy, as well as personal experience.

Here’s my own business take-home lesson from the current debate about healthcare problems and plans: Solutions to problems, globally or personally, need to be simple and clear. We need to help families understand our small piece of the big health or long-term care picture with clear, simple language. We need to advocate for a simple system that meets the needs of the people we serve, in our own small segment of the big picture.

Perhaps as we continue to work toward change, a small, simple step at a time, we’ll achieve something great on a larger scale, too.

Training iPhone style

So how’s your training going?

That’s a question that Bersin and Associates, a company with over 25 years experience in corporate solutions, training and e-learning asked of the largest companies in America.

The answer was just a little surprising. Bersin found that organizations in the U.S. will spend around $817 million on their learning management systems (LMS) in 2009, a growth of about 115% in just the past 5 years. Especially in a challenging economy, this continuing growth is significant. According to 1,300 surveyed HR professionals, the “LMS is one of the most important software systems in a company’s HR infrastructure, ranking behind only their payroll and HRMS system.” (Report)

While these major companies have found that they depend on their learning management systems to help them deliver quality, consistent training throughout their entire workforce, one area most are looking for is increased collaboration and information sharing.

One solution aligns perfectly with a new program we’ve been developing right here at aQuire: a system that allows all training professionals to “upload and share any form of information or training with colleagues.” The telecommunications company currently implementing this found exactly what we’re creating: a way to have new content developed “rapidly and continuously,” while the community of users monitors the quality and provides feedback to “self-police.”

It seems to be the best of both worlds. You can gain the content our team of experts has developed to train your team, but you can also share some of the extensive in-house training programs you’ve developed with our community of learners.

This sharing of ideas, knowledge, skills and information isn’t new in our shop; lots of computer programs are now being developed as “shareware” open to the public. The iPhone app store is probably the most popular current example of this: many hundreds of free applications allow iPhone users to find their car, map their routes, check the dictionary, follow weather globally, locate a great restaurant, view movie trailers, and even check to see if a picture is level.

It’s time to start open collaboration and sharing with learning, too, especially within client groups or related organizations.

So when someone asks you, “How’s your training going?” you can answer honestly, “There’s always something new and interesting happening with our training program.”

Want to get in on the fun? Contact an aQuire Account Representative today for details.

Tips to increase creativity and insight

I’ve long believed that creativity is one of the most important strengths of successful team members. From caregivers who creatively problem-solve challenging client situations to managers whose creativity builds loyalty and leadership, it’s a strength I value.

So it was with great interest that I read the article written by Robert Lee Hotz and published in the Wall Street Journal on June 19, 2009, titled “A wandering mind heads straight toward insight” (reprinted in the Dana Foundation’s Brain in the News, July 2009).

It’s really nothing new after all; rather a scientific basis for those moments many of us have experienced when an idea hits us when we’re least expecting it. The great idea that strikes us in the shower is a perfect example of this phenomenon when we suddenly get the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, or simply a new, interesting idea.

It seems that while we think our brain is wandering aimless from thought to thought, subject to subject, it’s actually a time of intense brain activity – more activity than when we’re focusing on solving a problem methodically, in fact. The result is what seems to us to be flashes of insight that feel absolutely correct.

Among ways to nurture these moments of insight and creativity – vital, I believe, for successful business growth – are these:

Be positive. Apparently, individuals who are in a positive mood experience more flashes of insight than those who are negative. This can be challenging during tough times when it’s particularly easy to focus on the negatives and let our concerns gnaw at the fringes of our thoughts almost continually. Try consciously listing things you are grateful for – a proven technique to lift spirits and create a more positive mood.

Turn off the noise. I don’t know about you, but one of my first moves in the car is to turn on the radio. Yet when I walk somewhere, I find that the meandering of my own thoughts a creative, rewarding activity. Often, I arrive at my destination with ideas for the entire day and solutions to some of my most vexing problems. For so many people, iPods and cell phones mean that noise is always on. Turning off the background noise is one great way to let our brains come up with these creative bursts of insight and ideas.

Dream a little. According to the article, one researcher in the field suggests that “the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected association more effectively than methodical reasoning.” If you’re one those people who is highly focused during the work day, take time around the fringes of the day – on your way to work or on your way home, perhaps – to allow your mind some unfocused wandering.

Talk a hike. Physical activity also seems to create or focus brain activity. Feeling stale? Talk a brisk walk. I remember reading about tech companies during the dot-com frenzy providing ping-pong tables for programmers; the focused physical activity seemed to allow the brain to recharge and become increasingly more creative. One of my best managers and I used to walk while we talked about problems with staff or residents. We’d end our walk-and-talk sessions feeling righteously fit and, almost every time, arrive at creative solutions to difficult problems. Frequently we’d come up with new ideas to implement company-wide that helped build our brand and achieve our goals.

In an article titled “Happy Days: the pursuit of what matters in troubled times,” Daniel Goleman of the New York Times tells of a Tibetan lama called “the happiest man in the world.” Goleman asks, “So how did he get that way? Apparently, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.” This meditative practice apparently leads to the stimulation of part of the brain that leads to positive moods, as well as creative thought. Concludes Goleman, “So while the Calvinist strain in American culture may look askance at someone sitting quietly in meditation, this kind of ‘doing nothing’ seems to do something remarkable after all.”

I think perhaps whether your goal is to be happy, or creatively intuitive in your business development the answer is the same. Find the techniques that nurture this outcome, and then practice until you’ve got it.