Episode 107: Driving Engagement Through Research

Intro: [00:00:05] Welcome to Senior Living Visionaries, a podcast for senior living leaders who are looking to stay ahead of the curve in the industry. On this show, we feature leaders and innovators in senior living who are pushing the boundaries and creating new effective services and solutions. And now let’s settle in as host Jennifer Drago connects us with today’s guests.

Jennifer Drago: [00:00:32] Hi. Welcome to Senior Living Visionaries. We’re broadcasting live from the Phoenix Business RadioX studio. And as we do always, we’re showcasing the leaders and innovators in the field who are shaping the future of senior living. I’m your host, Jennifer Drago. I’m a strategy consultant and I’m CEO of Peak to Profit.

Today, our guest is Christine Fares Walley from Holleran Consulting. And I’m so excited that Chris is with us today. She joined Holleran Consulting in May 2021 as president, and she brings her extensive experience in healthcare, marketing, sales, communications and operations to Holleran. She’s responsible for the operations, sales and marketing at Holleran. And she’s focused on bringing strong relationships with clients, assuring that Holleran is always providing relevant tools to achieve their survey goals. And we’re going to talk a lot about the tools that they have available today.

Prior to joining Holleran, Chris was sales and marketing consultant for Tandem Senior Living Advisors, which is a parent company of Holleran. And she created sales and marketing strategies that led to significant increases in sales and move ins. And another thing that I really respect about Chris’s background is that she was the director of marketing sales and communications for the Trinity Health PACE programs in Michigan, where she was responsible for guiding 13 PACE programs in all stages of development.

And I love the PACE model. We might have to have you on and have a whole another discussion around PACE because I know you love it as well. So Chris, thanks so much for being with us today. And why don’t you tell us in your own words about what Holleran does?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:02:13] Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Jennifer. This is such a great opportunity. I look forward to our time together. So Holleran is actually 32 plus years old. And it was started way back when by Michelle Holleran, who is still with the company today. And the original focus was really just on establishing a baseline of satisfaction for employees and for residents in senior living.

And, of course, that went well for a while, but about eight years ago or so, they realized, the team realized that this is more about engagement. We really want them to reach those higher levels of self-actualization. So after a very long history of surveys, they pivoted from satisfaction to engagement and satisfaction.

And then we have this other side of the house that does community engagement needs, community health needs, assessment. So using that research background and that value of data to answer lots of questions, we have that side of the house as well. So between the two and then custom surveys that we do just to kind of answer those burning questions and senior living keeps us pretty busy.

Jennifer Drago: [00:03:20] Wow. So all different types of research, which I love. And we want to dig in a little bit today because I’m dying to know what trends you’re seeing in some of these things, especially after the pandemic. What’s changed? What’s maybe the same? So you’ve mentioned some of the key surveys that you do for senior living organizations, but I heard resident engagement, employee engagement. Are there other types of surveys that you commonly do for senior living providers?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:03:47] Yeah. Yeah. And to your point, Jennifer, some of these did come out of COVID. In the midst of COVID, we did a COVID survey. So kind of helping senior living communities understand where their residents and employees were as far as that was concerned. One of the things I really like that came out of this and it had a lot to do with the workforce was our well-being survey. That’s like a quick 13 question survey that really digs deep into how employees are doing, how they feel their employers are helping and supporting them.

And two of the things I really like about this survey is there’s two questions we ask. One is their three biggest stressors in life. And when we did the pilot which was over a thousand responses, the three were workload at work, household bills, and personal mental health. And if that doesn’t speak to what we’ve been hearing, I don’t know what does.

So this survey can be attached to an engagement survey as an add on or it can be a standalone survey. But I just find that the feedback that we’ve gotten because of this survey has been so insightful. And I think employers have really learned a lot about where their needs are, where their employees’ needs are.

Jennifer Drago: [00:05:04] Yeah, I love that. Let’s stay on that topic for a minute. So you mentioned that during the pilot, the three biggest stressors were workload at work, household income, and then personal mental health. So this started during COVID. And so have those three biggest stressors shifted? Have they pivoted since COVID or are they still the same?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:05:25] No, they’ve kind of stayed there. And the crazy thing is it kind of correlates with the other question we ask which is what they look for when they’re looking for a new job. And you might always think that that’s, oh, it’s just salary. They just want a great salary, but they do want flexibility. They want to be able to have that flexible, either whether it’s a schedule or the ability to remotely work or whatever, that kind of balances right up with the workload at work.

Also, the household bills do relate to salary, but it might also be how they get paid. Maybe they want to get paid every week instead of every two weeks or something like that so they can kind of budget better. It’s amazing how the two just kind of connected. And of course mental health continues to be a challenge in our industry.

Jennifer Drago: [00:06:12] Sure. Have you seen any of your clients armed with this knowledge about what their employees three biggest stressors are? Have you seen them take different types of action that you thought were pretty inspirational or innovative around any of these items?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:06:28] Yeah. One of the ones that I talk about a lot of case study that came out of this survey was a community did this. And as you mentioned, just right in the height, I think it was somewhere in the middle of ’21. And this community was doing everything right. They were working. The leadership was working side by side with the employees. They were doing the gift cards and the food trucks and the part, you know, they thought that they were going to get a great response.

And not only were their scores challenging, but when we dug into the comments, and I always think that there’s just such an amazing amount of information that you get, it’s kind of hard to get through. You have to have thick skin because you might not want to hear everything. But what they uncovered was that the employee assistance program they were using was not able to give appointments to employees that were calling for help for months out.

Jennifer Drago: [00:07:16] Oh, my gosh.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:07:16] They were completely booked. And that’s not something that you’re going to answer on a survey or that you might even be comfortable coming to your supervisor with because, of course, EAPs are supposed to be confidential.

Jennifer Drago: [00:07:27] Right.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:07:28] But they felt comfortable enough to share it on the comments. As soon as the community found out, they went to their board and they said what should we do? The board said, absolutely fix it. Go find people. Contract with the therapist down the road, find a college, and get get it done. So I thought that was really, really inspirational.

And then, of course, we’ve seen other folks that are building more conducive restrooms or not restrooms, break rooms, where people can have quiet time. They are being a little more flexible and maybe doing a — you know, I had another community that came to me and said we’d like to establish a bus route because we find that it’s been hard for people. There’s so much traffic and not everybody owns a car. We have these vans sitting outside. What if we did a stop along several bus routes? Can you figure out where people are, that answered this question, that transportation was going to be difficult for them, where they’re located, and we’ll establish a plan to pick them up and bring them to work and take them back.

Jennifer Drago: [00:08:31] Wow. Those are really innovative. Another one that comes to mind that I’m wondering if you’ve seen anything around and it’s something that I never got to do in any organization that I worked in, but I thought it would have been fantastic is when folks are struggling with household income and their bills. Right.

Lots of people were never educated on kind of how you take care of your financial things at home, how you budget, how you should manage your savings account, how much you should keep in a savings account for emergencies, those kinds of things. And so I’ve seen some employers offer financial university type classes or Dave Ramsey sponsored classes. Have you seen any of that come out of this as well?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:09:16] I’ve heard of it, yes. Among our communities, not necessarily in relationship to this, but I’ve definitely heard doing a financial planning workshop or a budgeting workshop. Absolutely. I think that’s been very, very prevalent and very responsive to what we’re hearing is happening in the community. So I think that’s great. Great intervention as well. Yeah.

Jennifer Drago: [00:09:35] And one last question on this. Maybe, I might think of others, but on the well-being survey, do providers generally do this year over year so they can kind of track if there’s any improvement?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:09:47] That’s a great question because we’ve only done this for about a year or so. So I don’t know whether they’ll pick it up again. It would be nice because we could establish a baseline. And as with anything at Holleran, if we get enough responses, we can even build a benchmark.

Even though I feel like the responses are going to be very individualized per community, right, because your community is your community. However, if we get a certain number of responses and survey responses, we can establish a benchmark. But it wouldn’t be nice to establish a baseline and see how things have improved year over year. I would highly recommend that to our communities.

Intro: [00:10:25] Yes. And you mentioned this can be an add on to existing employee engagement. Can it also be a standalone survey?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:10:31] Sure, absolutely. It’s a quick 13 question. Easy answers, very, very easily interpreted. And yeah, it could go either way.

Jennifer Drago: [00:10:39] Okay. So let’s switch now to employee engagement surveys as a whole. And we all know our industry is struggling a bit with staffing shortages. We really want to improve our recruitment, improve our retention, of course, reduce turnover over time. So engagement is really important to us. What trends are you seeing in employee engagement and specifically since COVID?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:11:01] Yeah. So that’s a great question. So when we look at our benchmark, the national benchmark, traditionally it used to be a two year look back. And with 2020 being a year where not a lot of folks were able to ask the opinions of the residents and employees, understandably, right?

So in 2023, when we did our look back, it ended up being ’20, ’21 and ’22. Good news, bad news. We now have three years of COVID data, which is not something we want to celebrate, but it is what it is. Versus prior to that, we had a ’19, which was one of the best years overall for engagement in both residents and employees. So now we have three years of COVID.

What we have seen on the positive side is while employee engagement really did suffer in ’20 and ’21, it is rebounding and it’s doing better, which is really great. Our supervisors are saying that more than in the years past, they can see themselves in three years still being at the community, which is really great.

In addition, we’re also seeing the number of — we do an employee survey, we categorize folks in catalysts and advocates. So those are your cheerleaders. They’re pushing the agenda. They’re really advocating for change or whatever administration wants. They’re your go getters. They’re going over and above. That’s called our orange zone.

Then we have our blue zone folks. Those are your contributors, your endorsers. They’re showing up. They’re doing their job. They’re not really going too much overboard, but they’re certainly not rocking the boat. And then we have our Green Zone, and that’s our resisters. And the resisters can sometimes be toxic. They could be very loud. They could really be rowing the boat in the opposite direction.

So what the good news is, is that the number of catalysts, the folks that are cheering on the organization has gone up. So hopefully, they’re seeing that change that they are looking for in their communities, that more support for mental health or flexibility. Those things we talked about in the well-being study. And the resisters, the number of resisters has gone down.

Jennifer Drago: [00:13:04] That’s fantastic.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:13:05] And again, I have to be very careful because I’m not a researcher and I tend to — I’m a marketer at heart, but I would hypothesize that maybe those resisters, the larger percentage of resisters have left and maybe the ones that are there are there because they really do truly care about their jobs and their communities. And we know that the higher engagement that we have among employees, they’re three times more likely to stay.

Jennifer Drago: [00:13:29] Wow.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:13:30] The higher — yeah, the more we can — and that goes conversely, the lower, the more they are to leave, the more likely they are to leave.

Jennifer Drago: [00:13:37] So those are really positive trends that you’re seeing over since COVID. Now, how does the overall engagement — you said it was really good in 2019. How does it, your most recent survey, compare to 2019? Are we back where we were or?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:13:52] No, no, we’re down.

Jennifer Drago: [00:13:53] We’re still down.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:13:54] Are we back where we were? Yeah. Okay. So I can tell you that one second. So we are not. We are not but we’re getting there. We’re very close. We’re very close. So let’s say in 2019, we were about 4.06 was our engagement mean and in 2022, we’re 3.97.

Jennifer Drago: [00:14:10] Okay. So to your point, really close. Yeah.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:14:13] Not bad. Yeah, we’re getting there.

Jennifer Drago: [00:14:15] Yeah. And I have to believe that a lot of the things you said that we as employers have really tried to work on the flexible scheduling, the work from home options where it’s possible with certain positions, I think that that has to add to work life balance and overall engagement. And I’ve seen a lot of employers that have really focused on being connected to their employees.

And I just did, my last interview was with Denise Boudreau from Drive, and she talked a lot about culture and what do employees want, number one, of their own personal values, what do they want their employers to fulfill that are values to them. And it’s respect.

And it’s easy things. It’s Hi, Chris, how are you doing today? Is there anything I can help you with? I mean, it’s just simple things like that. And I think, not that we weren’t getting the point before, but I’m just so happy to see that we’re almost back to where we were before.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:15:10] Yeah, same, same. And to add on to that, I think one of the areas that we do find that there’s still opportunity in the employees, and not to say everything’s solved, but we are making positive trends. That’s for them to feel valued for the work that they do. And one of the gaps that I saw a lot was, and this is just kind of makes sense to me, is seeing that future career path, having that mentoring and that opportunity of thank you for coming to our organization, here’s how we see your future evolving.

But really, again, hypothesizing that this was not able to be done because there just wasn’t time and an ability to focus on that. It’s not that we don’t still want our employees to be vested and consider themselves long term and see a future for their career path. It was just hard to stop and take a minute and share that vision.

Jennifer Drago: [00:16:02] It sure was. It sure was. And I’m so glad that now maybe we do have time because as a leader, that’s the fun part of the job, right, I think is trying to help your people grow. And even if they end up outside your department or outside your organization, the fact that you’ve helped them fulfill their dreams is pretty powerful, I think.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:16:22] Yes, absolutely.

Jennifer Drago: [00:16:23] So tell me about resident engagement and some of the same questions, how did we fare through COVID and how are we coming out on the back end?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:16:31] Yeah, so this is an interesting trend. Again, 2019 was strong, 2020 was really high. And when you think about, oh my gosh, like what was going on back then, what was making them have that kind of a sentiment? There was a study we did a little bit after that. I did this with Linkage. And we asked people what their experiences were during COVID. And so many people just felt this immense sense of gratitude. And overall, we’ve learned that people felt safer in lifeline communities, in senior living than they would have if they were alone in their homes.

So we think that that’s why 2020 was high. But then if we think about ’21 and ’22, that has dropped. But think about this. So ’21, maybe they were a little, and again hypothesizing, just trying to take what I know and extrapolate maybe what might have been going on. ’21, they were still very much locked down, inhibited, not socializing, not doing what they want. And then maybe they’ve been they were a little like –.

Jennifer Drago: [00:17:35] Fatigued.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:17:36] This is — yeah. Really. And not this is not why I moved to senior living. I want to be with my friends. So it kind of dropped. ’20 was good. It was our highest. And since then, it has fallen each year.

Jennifer Drago: [00:17:48] Okay.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:17:49] And so ’21 was lower and ’22 is still. When we measure our resident engagement, we do four domains for that. The voice domain, their ability for their voice to be heard. Do I have a forum? And even for my family, is my family being heard? Then we have connection. Do I feel, my friends, that I’m connecting even with the employees and with my neighbors? Fulfillment. Am I living my best life? Self-actualizing, achieving my goals for living. And their well-being, body, mind, spirit, am I able to do the things I want to do.

And voice, it really did almost, I’d say kind of — I said it debounced a little bit because it was up and then it just fell again. But the one thing that has gone back up again is I would recommend this community to my friends or family. So again, going back to that, I really felt like I couldn’t have survived had I not. And they used those words. I’m not exaggerating. I was safer. I was well taken care of.

So maybe they would recommend. Maybe everything’s not perfect for them because they’re saying from an engagement standpoint, I’m not quite where I was in 2020 or in 2019 prior to COVID. But they’re saying I would tell my family and friends they should be here. And they always, and they’re the first ones to say, God forbid it, it should happen again. And we all kind of feel that way, too.

So interesting trends there that their engagement spun down. But then again, their definition of engagement has changed, right? So they’ve had to be engaged with a little less interaction. Some of our communities are just opening dining, just really opening activities. And that’s the minority, not necessarily majority. Many of them have been open for a while but maybe they’re learning to be engaged with and it looks differently than it used to.

Jennifer Drago: [00:19:45] You know, like Zoom, like we’re on right now. Yeah, exactly.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:19:49] I wish I was in Phoenix with you. Yeah.

Jennifer Drago: [00:19:51] Yeah. It’s nice here right now. It’s interesting because, take your research hat off and mark it with me for a second, but I was just at Leading Age Arizona, and I heard Michael Marlow talk about the black eye that senior living is still dealing with from COVID. Right? You would have thought that we weren’t the safe places that our residents are telling us that they felt safe in based on different stories in the media and gosh, horrible losses in certain communities for sure.

But overall, the safety level and the amount of deaths compared to the general senior population living out in the community at large was much, much less. And what kind of campaign, it’s not the sexiest thing, but I mean, we really should be touting all the successes that we had and why we’re still a great option. And I think our residents themselves will be, to your point, our biggest ambassadors and cheerleaders in this.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:20:53] Absolutely. I think there’s an amazing opportunity to get those sound bites and to use them. We have a survey that we’re launching called the Resident Experience Survey. And I’m using it as, again, it’s my selfish ambition to have a marketing survey, right, so I can sell to marketers.

But if you remember our marketing 101 concept of a market profile, so being able to create marketing that accurately reflects not just the persona of the resident, but what the resident feels about their organization, because we don’t ever want to let our reputation or our offerings be measured by a Google review. I don’t want someone else telling my story, as they say, right? So I want to tell the story.

So I’m encouraging senior living communities to take this survey so they can understand what’s on the minds of their residents and why they should market incongruency with the, you know, to be congruent with the persona of the community. Someone’s going to walk into your community and within minutes decide, if not, a couple minutes of their tour, I can see myself living here. I see people that seem to have the same persona as me, hobbies, things like that.

I make a joke, but it’s really serious. And the community that I did work in was very a culture kind of steeped in Jewish faith. And they loved culture and ethics and travel, and that was a wonderful thing. And if you walked into that community and that’s what you liked, you would feel absolutely embraced. But if you liked birdwatching and hiking and other things, it would be pretty challenging for you to move into that community because you’re not going to find a lot of people that would be able to go birdwatching with you or to be able to go on a hike with you.

So it seems simple, but seniors and their families are doing lots of research about this. And what do they want? They want a place that they can call home. So that’s why I think this opportunity is a great thing. And to your point, and then use that opportunity to pull those messages out, those testimonials that say they saved my life. I don’t think I would have made it if I’d stayed in my house. I think everybody needs to live in a senior community when they blah, blah, blah. I just think that that’s a great asset to have. Great. They’re just gems, you know?

Jennifer Drago: [00:23:24] Yeah, for sure. So the survey you just mentioned creating kind of this resonant experience profile. I don’t know if I — is it under development?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:23:34] No, it’s available. It’s available. Yeah. So I’m actually going to be taking it on the road pretty soon. It’s been available for a couple of months now. I think what we’re finding there is, again, like something very simple. One of the communities that did it for us, we inventory the activities that people like to do in a community and it helps them with their activity planning and maybe their trips and things like that.

But one of the things they loved was reading. They loved books and reading, and you would think that that’s kind of a solo activity, right? Oh, they probably read in their homes. But I asked the community, I said, so do you guys have a book club and have you brought in guest authors to speak? And they’re like, oh my gosh, no, that’s a great idea. So what a wonderful opportunity to see that and then to be able to make it more of a group collaborative activity.

Jennifer Drago: [00:24:25] Right? And then you have a prospective resident who you find out really likes to read and they can be introduced to the book club president.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:24:33] There you go.

Jennifer Drago: [00:24:34] Yeah.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:24:34] Your residents are your best ambassadors, aren’t they? I mean, I used to love when I was on a tour and the residents would come up and say, oh, do you play this or do you like to, you know, we love these kinds of movies. Do you like Shirley Temple or whatever? I think you’re absolutely right.

Jennifer Drago: [00:24:49] What I love about what you just described, and this session with Michael Marlow, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard him speak, but he does a lot of sales training and it was very impressive. And he’s basically saying we have to stop doing all the things we’ve always been doing the way we’ve always been doing them, right. So calls and tours and reach outs.

And his message was really all about how to personalize the experience. And he called it resident experience also, but he said the resident experience starts before they’re a resident. And it’s understanding everything that they’re interested in and matching that with what you have to offer. And so how great if a community was able to take your survey, make a profile and really understand itself so that it would know how to market it?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:25:36] That’s absolutely right. Absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, we used to practice that as well. It was called something different, but it was about learning what makes them tick, what are the demons, what’s holding them back. Right. Because we all know there’s something for some folks that just can’t get them to pull the trigger and unraveling that and uncovering that and making it that gesture or whatever it is that connects them to the community and that makes them say, you know what, I am going to be okay. I can make this decision and my life will be better.

Jennifer Drago: [00:26:06] Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about another topic that you and I really connected on when we first met. And that is something that I bet many senior living communities may not be aware of, and that’s community health needs assessments. And I became aware of community health needs assessments in the health care world. And we were required in our state and as a nonprofit to actually do those as a health system so that we could direct our resources and our planning to underserved needs, underserved services. And we could also identify where services existed so that we could connect them better together. So I know that you help communities do CHNAs. Are they predominantly on the hospital or health system side that you’re working, or are you starting to work also with senior living providers on these?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:27:01] So we have done many, many, many CHNAs. And you’re absolutely right, Jennifer, those are for not-for-profit hospitals to help them keep their not-for-profit status. It’s actually an IRS rag and it does help them identify opportunities and gaps in services. And so then when we saw the need for other entities to do this, the name has been changed to either a community needs assessment for that side or a community engagement needs assessment.

Recently, we have also found that this product is very applicable outside of our community, our industry for public health departments. There’s certification out there, and one of the first things they have to do is a community engagement needs assessment. So we have worked with a fair amount of folks that are either doing that because they have grant funding, or they actually want to do this for accreditation.

But when it comes to life plan communities and senior living, we think that this is a wonderful opportunity for communities to look outside their walls, to be good stewards and good neighbors of their community and kind of do the same thing, see where there are opportunities to provide services, whether it’s outside the walls kinds of things. I’m going to take my case management or I’m going to invite community members to come in and participate then go to our swimming pool or community or lifelong learning or something like that.

But I think it’s also opportunity to partner, to build valuable partnerships with community entities to jointly do something. When a hospital looks at their results of a CHNA, there’s an opportunity there for mother and child health, mother and baby health, but they don’t have maternity. Well, they’re not going to pick that. But if there’s an entity that can bring value and help them partner with that, they’re going to pick, they can pick it.

Same thing for a community, for a life plan community. If they see an opportunity where they can either partner or provide that service, the social capital just is elevated. Not to mention the fact that obviously there’s two other options. You might be hitting on prospective residents, right, that would have an opportunity to come see the community and see the value. And then even if people never ever have an opportunity or any interest in joining, they’re going to be aging in place in the community forever. You’ve connected with them as well, and you’ve given them services that they need.

So I think that for the life plan community, this study, it includes secondary data, which is like your census data that gets you your disease, state, and your housing opportunities, transportation issues, average income, your statistical data, but it also has primary data information. We can bring in key stakeholders and do a focus group or a survey and suddenly find out where the disparities are, where the opportunities are, where the gaps are.

And then we can also do community surveys and get direct feedback from the people right in our backyard as to what they can consider. And then by taking that information and kind of aggregating it all together, we can look at priorities and put together an implementation plan. We’ve also seen people do this for social accountability to think about where do we donate, where do we put our money, where do we commit to our community where we’re most impactful to make a difference?

And then not to mention, I think, advocacy also, to be able to take this data to your representatives who are advocating for change, for your industry or your field or your lifestyle and say, look, this is where the need is. I just think that kind of survey is just so, so valuable.

Jennifer Drago: [00:30:38] Yeah, I love that. In our area, we didn’t commission our own community health needs assessment when I last did this. This was at the time I was chief strategy officer for a senior living organization. We reached out to the local hospitals and there were a couple hospital systems in our area, and they were willing to share their most recent community health needs assessment.

And then the other thing that was really interesting to me is our biggest city in the county that we or in our immediate area had done a CHNA and theirs was really different. That was really truly a community needs assessment because it wasn’t only around health, it was everything from food and transportation and homelessness and which all relate to health of course. But we were able to kind of take those surveys and try to find the common threads and the common themes.

It wasn’t as meaningful, I think, as other processes that I’ve gone through, which mirror what you described, where you actually are bringing people into a room and sharing the data and saying, okay, now what? What do we want to work on and where are the partnerships we can pull together on this. But it was a start. Had I stayed in that role a little bit longer, I think I would have advocated for doing our own for that very reason.

But yeah, so I love how you describe the opportunities for senior living providers, because I really think, to your point, it’s augmenting your mission or amplifying your mission outside your walls, right? We’re all nonprofits. That doesn’t mean that we’re only serving our residents. Many providers and organizations have a plethora of home and community-based services, and maybe there’s another opportunity out there that can be met. Or maybe we can find a new way to connect to a prospective customer. And I love what you said about how we all know that there are many people in our community that never see themselves moving into our communities, but they change their mind sometimes.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:32:39] They may. They may. They may say, hey, I like it here. I have to give a shout out to Jenna Kellerman. We were talking this morning. She’s at National, LeadingAge National. And we were talking about this scene. And I have to give her credit, she said, I see another value for this, Chris. And I said, what is that? And Jenna’s whole focus is workforce, workforce development.

And she said, how about doing the CNA and taking the data and evaluating it from a recruitment and retention standpoint? What would it take for people to move here to take a job? Where are the gaps in our community that are preventing people from coming? I met someone at LeadingAge North Carolina a couple of weeks ago and she said, yeah, we still have workforce issues because it’s hard to get people to work in our town. And it was a more rural kind of remote area and that makes so much sense.

But rather than just saying, yeah, it’s hard, why don’t we look at the data and build support systems? Maybe we need on campus housing for our staff, maybe we need daycare, maybe we need better transportation or transportation routes or whatever. So I just think that like anything, Jennifer, I want anybody who does a survey, I really, really want them to do something with the results, right? Please don’t check the box and put it on the shelf and never really do anything with it. You’re doing yourself a huge disservice. I think there’s so much we can learn from these studies, whether it’s, like you said, marketing, whether it’s being a good servant leader. Oh, there’s another thing. Can I mention another opportunity for these?

Jennifer Drago: [00:34:21] Yeah, please.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:34:22] The AARP age friendly communities. Right. There’s about 150. There’s a ton of them over in California. When they get the certification — I actually went on a site and there’s strategic plans that need to be made and they haven’t been made yet. So what a wonderful opportunity to get the data you need to decide how you’re going to implement, whether it’s grant money or whether it’s just to continue to sustain that age friendly community designation.

Jennifer Drago: [00:34:54] Yeah. Wow. That’s another fantastic opportunity I hadn’t heard of. So thank you for sharing that. So if a senior living provider wanted to learn more about CHNAS, CENAS or really anything that you do, I imagine you have that information all on your website. Do you have case studies on all of these too?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:35:14] Yeah, we do have. We have some white papers. We have some great white papers, especially about the correlations and observations in our benchmark, well-being. We have a culture white paper as well. So yeah, you give us a call or check us out. Our website is www.holleranconsult.com and our phone number is 800-941-2168. We’re just really open to anything.

Even if you have like a custom survey, something you just are always just very curious about learning more about, we’ll do a custom survey and even a pulse survey. So a pulse survey would be something that we would measure on an ongoing basis to see how something’s changed.

So let’s say you took some action planning as a result of a survey that you did and you implemented it and you wanted to see how you’re tracking and whether or not that was what they meant when they said they wanted the exterior of the building to look nicer and you did X, Y, Z. Maybe you missed the mark. Maybe you were on the mark. So how great would it be to know that you’re making an impact?

Jennifer Drago: [00:36:19] That’s awesome. And you mentioned a couple of times, and I just want to make sure I understand and also that our audience does, a national benchmark survey. So when somebody — so how does that relate? Are there national benchmarks on all the different types of surveys you offer, employee engagement, resident engagement?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:36:37] So we have them by level of care. So we have an independent living benchmark, assisted living, skilled, and we have affordable housing as well. We also have discharge. We do discharge surveys as well. So overall, what we do when we give a report is we’ll give you where your engagement mean is or whatever aspect of the survey we’re mentioning and how you compare to the Holleran benchmark.

So the benchmark right now as we close ’22 was representing 36 states, including DC and Canada. We had over 608 communities and close to 162,000 surveys.

Jennifer Drago: [00:37:18] Wow.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:37:19] So when we’re showing you how you measure, it’s a typical bell curve. So it’s, are you on the poorer side or are you a higher achiever? I always say there’s always opportunity. There’s always opportunity for improvement and celebration. And we did a lot of celebrating, some good information, like the community handled COVID well or the communication during COVID went well. So we do see a balance, but it always is good for some communities to see how they’re performing against their peers, to see the benchmark and to strive for something.

Jennifer Drago: [00:37:55] Awesome. That’s so great. Thank you for clarifying that for me. And Chris, so you told us how to get a hold of Holleran. If people want to connect with you, I think you’re on LinkedIn. How would they connect with you?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:38:07] I don’t know my — I guess it’s Christine Walley. I’m not 100 percent sure. I know there’s usually a URL that goes with that, but it’s ChristineWalley@Holleran, and I’d be happy to connect with anybody.

Jennifer Drago: [00:38:18] Perfect. Thank you. We’ll include all those connections and links in the show notes. So anybody that wants to follow up, we’ll have that opportunity. But anything else you want to share with us? You’re such a wealth of knowledge being that you work for a research firm. I mean, I think you could probably share things all day long.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:38:35] We covered so much. I guess, just again, what my director of research always says is you can answer any question with research. So if there’s something that you are looking to learn about or whether it’s within your community or outside your walls, give us a call. If there’s something you’re interested in as far as how you may compare, we’re happy to share where our benchmark indicators are.

One thing I will note, though, Jennifer, I don’t take too much time about this, but overall, Holleran prides ourselves in getting a very high response rate. We really help communities be very creative in getting responses from both their employees and their residents, including those methodologies, not just surveying online surveys. We have telephone surveys, written surveys, QR code that they can scan with their phone.

We want to meet your residents and your employees where you are. But traditionally, or not traditionally, this benchmark did reflect a drop in response rates. And that’s concerning to us. And we don’t want communities to take that lightly. And we’ll continue to support and engage them in getting those response rates up, because it’s really important that your residents and employees feel like this is meaningful, that this feedback is important to you and that you’re going to do something with it as a community. So we want to get those response rates up as well.

Jennifer Drago: [00:40:00] Yeah, it’s so important. And I want to put one other plug in that just occurred to me as you were speaking. This podcast is really about how do we kind of build the sustainability of our industry after the challenging time that we’ve had, the inflation, the staff shortages, you name it, right? We’re dealing with so many things. Our margins are tighter than ever.

So if I was in a senior living provider today, I would want to know how can I do things better, quicker, more efficiently, and why not have research point you in the right direction, right? So if you’re struggling with sales, if you’re struggling with your resident experience or employee engagement, turnover, whatever it is, make sure that you have the right research to direct your efforts because we don’t have any time to waste. Right?

Christine Fares Walley: [00:40:50] So true. So true. So true. I completely agree with you.

Jennifer Drago: [00:40:54] Well, awesome. Well, Chris, I want to thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our talk today. And of course, we have so many common interests. I could talk to you for hours, but I know you have a big job and important work to do. So I just want to thank you so much for being our guest today and for being here and sharing your wisdom.

Christine Fares Walley: [00:41:14] My pleasure. Such a great conversation. Thank you for having me. Hope we can do it again.

Jennifer Drago: [00:41:17] You bet. So you’ve been listening to Senior Living Visionaries. I’m Jennifer Drago, your host. And please join us next time when we continue to interview and discuss the innovators, disruptors and best practices in the senior living industry. You can also subscribe at SeniorLivingVisionaries.com or on your favorite podcast platform. We’ll see you next time.

Outro: [00:41:44] You’ve been listening to the Senior Living Visionaries podcast and radio show where we showcase the leaders and innovators in the industry who are pushing the boundaries and setting the stage for the future in senior living and services. Join us next time as we share the bold ideas and breakthroughs of the industry’s most forward-thinking leaders here on Senior Living Visionaries.