Seven Steps to Building Your Company Culture

By Stephen Tweed

As the home care caregiver shortage continues, we recognize that there is no short-term fix. If you want to be successful in home care over a long period of time, you will need to develop a long term strategic initiative to attract and retain the caregivers you need. That means working diligently to create a great place to work.

Crafting Your Company Culture:

Creating a great place to work for caregivers means crafting a company culture that is in alignment with the needs and wants of your best caregivers. The most recent Best Caregiver Study from Leading Home Care and the Home Care CEO Forum showed that the most reliable workers in home care want:

1. To do meaningful work
2. To feel valued and respected by their clients, their supervisors, and company owners
3. To have a flexible schedule
4. To receive the proper education and training to do their work
5. To feel fairly paid

We define company culture as … “The way we do things around here.”  Your culture is influenced by four factors; the leadership style of the CEO, the core values that guide your decisions and actions, the behavior you expect, and the behavior you permit.

Building a company culture that will enable you to systematically find and keep the caregivers you need is a long-term commitment.

Seven Steps To Crafting Your Company Culture:

Crafting your culture is not easy, but there is a system that works. After studying dozens of companies that have crafted amazing cultures, and after interviewing CEOs of these companies, we have developed seven specific steps that are necessary to build a strong culture over the long haul: 

1. Define your Core Values
2. Define the behaviors you expect for each Core Value
3. Communicate your values and expected behaviors
4. Train your leaders to Live Your Values
5. Engage your Caregivers
6. Promote Your Culture
7. Reinforce Your Culture

After leading this process for a number of home care companies, we’ve found that this seven step process takes at least a year to get through, and you are never done. The largest, privately owned home care company in the world has spent over 40 years working on their culture, and they are not done yet. The good news is, you can start today.

Where To Start:

The place to begin this process is defining your core values. When we lead this process of crafting your culture, we begin by brainstorming a list of values that members of the leadership team believe are important. Then we discuss each value, and define its meaning. We talk about what it means to live this value.

Then, we narrow the list of values down to three. Why three values? Because people can’t remember more than four. If you have seven core values, and people can’t remember that last four then why have them? Pick the three that are most important and that your team members resonate with. Begin there.

Top Tier Home Care Companies Are Working on Their Company Culture:

As you know by know, through the Home Care CEO Forum and our Home Care Mastermind Groups, we work with companies in the very top tier of our industry. One of the common characteristics of our Top 5% Mastermind Group and our Top 7% Mastermind Group is that they are all working on crafting their company culture. They are working through the steps in this process in varying degrees. The fastest growing companies in these groups have built on their company culture to develop systems to recruit and retain caregivers. We’ve learned that you can only grow your home care company when you are able to attract and retain high quality caregivers, and crafting your company culture is part of that process.

This article is being re-published with permission of the writer, Steven Tweed:

Stephen Tweed, CSP, is an internationally known health care and business strategist, award winning professional speaker, and published author. He is the CEO of Leading Home Care… a Tweed Jeffries company and the Founder of The Home Care CEO Forum® and Caregiver Quality Assurance®.

If you need assistance in your recruitment and retention efforts as well as looking at company culture, call Kenyon Homecare Consulting at 206-721-5091 or contact us online to see how we can help.