Avamere Living understood the struggles of communicating with 4,000 staff who worked in 32 locations of the post-acute and rehabilitation centers scattered across the country.
“The number one thing that we struggled with as a communications team was not being able to push information out [because] at least 50 percent of our employees do not have company emails,” explains Spencer Trefzger, Director of Marketing at Avamere Living. “The only way…to get information in front of them was to send it to our facilities and hope they printed it out and posted it on a bulletin board and someone saw it.”
Data showed that building internal communication strategies, improving impact measurement and evaluation and introducing new digital communication channels were top priorities for organizations. Too often, internal technologies aren’t equipped to achieve these goals or lack analytics to measure their effectiveness, leaving organizations like Avamere Living desperate for solutions.
“We tried a lot of ways [to communicate information],” Trefzger says. “But we were really running into a wall as far as finding a solution.”
The skilled nursing company started using Shift, a joint solution with Google ChromeOS that leverages TVs to improve employee communications and engagement.
Overcoming communication challenges
Whiteboards, bulletin boards and text messages are outdated forms of communications that make it hard to share information with staff and using them can have ripple effects throughout an organization.
Outdated communication makes it harder to attract and retain Millennial and Gen Z workers. On the flip side, effective communication is linked to improved employee retention, which is especially important in healthcare where issues like high stress and staff shortages are linked with national turnover rates of 22.5 percent among nurses.
At Avamere Living, a decentralized approach to disseminating information made it difficult to effectively manage communications between the home office and each facility. By adding Shift screens to the staff areas in every location, Avamere Living was able to easily control screen content from a remote location to share updates across all locations. The centralized, cloud-based dashboard allowed the corporate team to seamlessly share information with staff, leading to increased engagement in the workplace.
In addition to broadcasting messages from the corporate office to television screens mounted in staff areas, Trefzger notes that the corporate marketing team has location-based templates to allow employees to share information unique to their facility.
“With a company this size, you are bound to have users of all technical abilities,” he says. “The dashboard and the templates are so easy for them to use.”
Improving employee engagement
In healthcare, employee engagement is associated with higher patient satisfaction, increased patient safety and improved quality of care. Moreover, highly engaged employees were up to 59 percent less likely to leave their workplace. Despite the benefits, a Gallup poll found that 87 percent of employees aren’t engaged at work.
“We often hear that healthcare employees are especially burnt out and turnover rates are high,” says Shift Co-Founder, Matt Gibbs. “Our partners are constantly trying to find the best way to keep their employees informed and engaged with their [workplace], with each other and with the brand.”
Tools like employee recognition, new employee bios, peer-to-peer shoutouts and newsletters offered through Shift helped Avamere employees feel more connected to each other and appreciated in their roles. In fact, the marketing team reported 10 times higher employee engagement since implementing the Shift and ChromeOS-powered solution.
Communicating for success
Effective communication not only improves engagement, it also improves productivity and customer service, which leads to a 23% increase in profitability.
Avamere Living used Shift to deliver training courses to employees. The corporate team launched a competition to see which facility would have 100 percent of their employees complete required annual compliance training.
“All [employees] had to do was scan the QR code and it took them straight to their login to do the training,” Trefzger explains. “The gamification of trainings was so successful, which was awesome.”
Sharing information about compliance training via Shift not only led to noticeable increases in participation and engagement among Avamere Living employees, the ChromeOS joint solution has earned rave reviews from all levels of staff in the facilities and on the corporate team.
“It’s been a really successful investment decision that we made as a company,” says Trefzger. “Across the board, our company has given us almost nothing but positive feedback.”
Shift provides the technology along with the customer support to help healthcare organizations connect with their employees and improve operations. Contact Shift for a consult to learn more.
