Dive Brief:

• Managing a senior living facility is hands-on work. Front-line staff including nurses, housekeeping, and food and beverage employees interact with residents 24 hours a day.
• The pressure of being in constant demand typically leads to high attrition rates, which are detrimental to both the residents’ experience and a company’s bottom line.
• To lower its attrition rate, a national developer, owner, and manager of high-end retirement communities (Vi) created a comprehensive learning and development strategy that has turned things around, according to an article at Chief Learning Officer.

Dive Insight:

Vi's original learning program focused primarily on training sales staff and executive chefs, but when a new SVP of HR arrived, she realized that to cut costs and keep employees happy, development opportunities had to be available to all staff.

As is the case with many employers, Vi faced the challenge of boosting both employee engagement and retention. In this industry, attrition rates can be up to 75 percent. Vi addressed this by creating opportunities for its employees to develop and move vertically through the company.

For example, a one-year nurse leadership development program gives employees the skills necessary to move to assistant director of nursing from certified nursing assistant. Providing these types of opportunities decreased turnover in nurse leadership to 10% from 75% in less than three years. Overall, Vi's attrition rate has dropped from 27% percent in 2010 to 20% currently. Even so, the company is always looking for improvement.

“At face value, you’d say we don’t have to do anything differently,” Judy Whitcomb, senior vice president of HR and learning and operational development at Vi told CLO.com. “It’s no longer about trying to create the best and biggest program. The focus now is on getting more granular and refining what we’re already doing to be more efficient and relevant.”