Deciding to place a beloved family member in a senior care facility is challenging. It's a decision no family member wants to make, but they trust you and your staff to offer them the best care possible when they do.

However, if employee communication in your long-term care facility falls short, it can be a chaotic and frustrating experience for your senior care staff, residents, and their families. This can lead to families moving their loved ones to a different facility and employees leaving their roles to find work elsewhere — and in a worker shortage, it's unlikely you can spare staff right now.

Effective communication is the foundation for any successful relationship, and your assisted living facility is no different.

If your favorite vegan ice cream flavor has been out of stock at your local supermarket for the last few months, you may be the victim of a labor shortage.

Current labor shortages are affecting supply chain issues from picking crops, manufacturing, and transportation to stocking shelves, and there’s no end in sight. Thus, that persistent empty shelf is where your ice cream should be.

As a business owner who employs frontline workers, this reality is a heavy weight to carry. Your profits hinge on hiring and retaining enough workers to keep business cruising, customers happy, and cash flowing.

When your ‘help wanted’ ad gets nothing but crickets, and you receive resignation letters regularly, it’s hard to remain hopeful. But, rather than focus on the frontline employees you don’t have, it’s better to focus on keeping the ones you do.

At the start of the pandemic, organizations scrambled to get online, set up curbside shopping, and restructure how to get work done and stay in business. It was like everyone was in fight or flight mode.

Those who fought (mostly) survived – and this fight to stay alive, forced companies to find new ways to do business. 

Many of these changes ended up being for the better. Namely, how the world views frontline employees. Before the pandemic, frontline workers were often considered expendable and easily replaced. But now, businesses know better. 

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to highlight poor employee communication. Especially in industries where workers need to physically show up for work.

Frontline and hourly workers make up 80% of our global workforce, and for industries like restaurant, retail, and manufacturing, they represent the largest percentage of the workforce. 

Communicating effectively with a large team of desk-less workers has its challenges. But the pandemic did an excellent job of highlighting just how critical frontline workers are to a company's success. And the mass job walkouts have taught us that frontline employees are no longer interested in being treated like second-class workers. 

The work world has experienced drastic changes over the last few years. The pandemic has influenced how businesses operate, from hybrid schedules to company policies, practices, and procedures. 

Dubbed The Great Resignation, 2021 was officially the year of quitting. Thanks to severe job dissatisfaction, workers in retail, hospitality, accommodation, and food services were among the top employees to lead the walkout.

And while 2022 has turned a corner with unemployment currently hovering around 3.9% — down from 2021 — all business who have frontline and deskless workers are struggling to retain existing employees and fill open positions.

Every industry has its own unique challenges in communicating with its various constituents - prospects, customers and their employees.  

Senior living communities are certainly no different.  And, their communication challenges are unique and heightened in two ways:

1. Like most industries that have a large number of frontline employees who don’t have company issued email, they struggle with how to effectively communicate with those employees; and
2. they have an added layer of complexity because they need to communicate (in real time in a lot of instances) with their “customers”, who in a lot of cases are both their residents AND the family members of those residents, and they are not tied to a desk/email during the day.

To say that we have enjoyed working with these companies is an understatement - we have LOVED working with them and seeing all of the different ways in which they’re using the goHappy platform to solve for those challenges.  Below are a few examples of those just in case it can be helpful to anyone else out there who has similar challenges - we hope it can get your wheels turning!  In all of these instances, they are using goHappy to send text messages directly through our software to their frontline employees, residents and family members.

Studies show frontline employees feel undervalued and disconnected from their leaders, causing a lack in commitment, engagement and contributions to the workplace. However, companies that invest in engaging frontline team members have seen positive results like higher revenues, productivity and lower turnover. HBR Analytic Services reported that 87% of nearly 500 business executives said they will be more successful when frontline workers are empowered to make important decisions in the moment.

A federal court has lifted a stay on the Biden administration’s rule that forces business owners with 100 or more employees to require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing.