Cambridge Home Health Care’s Nancy Diller-Shively is as inspired by her employees as they are by her.
During a home visit recently, one of her home health aides saved a child who was choking, a move Diller-Shively was quick to recognize.
“I immediately opened my drawer, took out a notepad and put together a personal letter saying, ‘I heard what you did,’” says Diller-Shively, owner, president and CEO of the $24 million company.
With 1,400 employees serving 23 Ohio branches, Diller-Shively says keeping in touch with them through personal notes creates a connection.
“It’s important that the bigger we get, that they still feel, ‘There’s somebody at the corporate office who knows I’m doing a good job out here,’” she says.
Smart Business spoke with Diller-Shively about how she manages the hiring challenges provided by the health care industry and creates that personal connection.
What is your biggest hiring challenge, and how do you manage it?
Lack of qualified staff. Our business would probably be $50 million a year in revenue if we had the staff for all the work that’s out there. There’s a shortage of nurses nationally, it’s not unique to our state.
Because of that, you have to think outside of the box of ways that you could do things differently. If a nurse has three companies she can choose to work at, we’ve got to come up with things that will make her want to come and work with us.
Just because we do certain [employee award programs,] we don’t just stop with that. We constantly brainstorm about what else we can do because if you stop, somebody else is going to get a jump on you.
How do you attract and retain quality employees?
Our reputation is the biggest factor. We spend a lot of time researching, planning and putting into action things we can do that will make us different from our competitors.
Probably 75 percent of our staff is nonskilled employees. They’re not registered nurses and physical therapists, they’re our home health aides. It’s difficult for the home health aides to be promoted so we came up with a program we call our senior care specialist program.
That gives them an opportunity, when they go above and beyond, to work toward that promotion. That has really been an incredible retention program. It is something that we recognize on a quarterly basis. We bring all the senior care specialists together every quarter for a luncheon, honor them and give them some education.
We do a lot of storyboarding and spend a lot of time trying to think of new ways to do a little bit extra so we can retain our staff. We get together with the management team once a year and we also bring in the field staff to get ideas about what they think we can do that would make us better. We’ve come away from those meetings with a lot of ideas that we have implemented.
You can sit behind a desk all day long and direct people and manage individuals but it’s important that you get together with the staff that’s out there providing the service to our patients, and — like they say — from the horse’s mouth, get their ideas. That’s what really has made us light-years ahead of our competition.
How do you maintain communication with employees who are scattered across the state?
From a management perspective, we have our team meetings, and that’s every four to six weeks. We utilize our voicemail. We have a newsletter. We have our paycheck stuffers to share information on a weekly basis. The individual branches will hold meetings from time to time.
That’s one of the difficult things as you grow a company. Communication can become a problem but with the technology of voicemail, faxing and e-mail, that’s made it a little bit better.
How do you create the ‘supportive, respectful working environment’ that you talk about in your mission statement?
It starts with understanding what all the staff members do on a day-to-day basis as an employee of Cambridge and not forgetting about that. We have our office personnel go out every quarter and visit one of our patients.
Not only is it a good communication source for us to talk with our patients from an office perspective versus a field staff employee who’s out there on a daily basis, but it shows our office staff what our field staff is actually doing when they’re out at a patient’s home every day. When you’re looking at paperwork and processing the billing or processing the payroll, you sort of lose touch with the fact that our business is caring for human beings.
Then I require that they send me an informal note letting me know how their visit went.
At first, there was some reluctance because the office personnel felt uncomfortable. They’re not trained to care for individuals — they’re not necessarily health care professionals — but I have lots of notes that say, ‘Thank you for making me go out and see Mrs. Smith. She told me that if it wasn’t for our home health aide or nurse, she wouldn’t have had any visitors all week.’
So it’s a very rewarding process for everybody involved, including me. I love getting the notes and reading about the business that takes place. Every now and then, I’ll get a note from a patient that’ll say, ‘Thank you for (sending) your office staff. It was so nice to meet the person that I talk with on the phone.’
That creates the awareness of the different positions within the company and what goes on, so we can have mutual respect for one another.
Every quarter, I’ll leave a voicemail to all the branches saying, ‘Just a reminder, don’t forget to do your quarterly patient visit.’ I’ll give them the option of either going on their own or, in some instances, if they’re uncomfortable, I’ll suggest that they go with our nurse.
You hate to force somebody to do something that might not have originally been in their job description but I haven’t had one say that they don’t enjoy doing it. It’s important to understand what everybody does because in the end, we have to connect to make it all work.
HOW TO REACH: Cambridge Home Health Care, (800) 772-2929 or www.cambridgehomehealth.com
