Senior Care Leader Finds EWA Helps Retention, Staff Engagement
“Anything that we can do to differentiate ourselves is a good thing. There are a lot of senior living companies that don’t have this benefit, and we decreased our turnover rate last year.”
A Big Player in Senior Care
With 51 locations and over 2,000 employees, Navion Senior Solutions is a premier provider of senior care throughout the Southeastern United States. They put their caregivers at the center of their mission, always looking for ways to improve their experience.
Navion Senior Solutions
51
Senior Living
PrismHR
2,200
How the Industry Handles Hiring
Senior care is a vital sector of the healthcare industry, indispensable to the safety and wellbeing of millions of older Americans. But the work can be challenging and demanding, requiring a level of intimacy in caretaking that needs a caregiver willing to meet that challenge. Whether it’s helping someone bathe, cook their meals, or help them tie their shoes, the assistance that Navion caregivers provide can be equal parts fulfilling and draining.
“It’s very hard to find people that have the heart and compassion for this work,” says Amanda Wickert, VP of Engagement for Navion Senior Solutions. Wickert didn’t begin her career in senior care but quickly came to love it, holding her own certified nursing assistant (CNA) certificate and providing frontline care herself. “When I first came to the business, I was going to go back to nursing school. But I was sold as soon as I was introduced to the residents.”
Matching that level of dedication isn’t easy, and finding enough qualified candidates to keep up with the industry’s 85% annual turnover rate can feel like a herculean task. Adding to the complexity is the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, as thousands of workers sought other opportunities in the industry or opted to leave it entirely in favor of remote work.
“I think that Covid did wreak havoc, there’s no question about that,” Wickert said. “Historically, the industry has had a high turnover rate to begin with, and a lot of it is due to caregiver burnout and stress. But people also use this as a steppingstone to something else, especially if they’re clinically minded.”
On-Demand Pay as an Engagement Booster
As a VP of Engagement, Wickert’s job focuses on how Navion as a company interacts and impacts their employees. The Navion team conducts surveys with their employees, gaining valuable insights into how to best serve and engage with their team members. When it comes to on-demand pay, the team saw it as another arrow in their quiver to improve general employee wellness.
“There’s always some room for improvement around benefits. I genuinely believe that if we can win in our team member experience, then we’re winning all the way around. That’s our mission,” said Wickert.
“We’re always looking for ways to add soft benefits for our teams that are affordable or bring value. They don’t have to be free or low-cost, but do they bring value, either from an experience or dollars perspective. There’s a lot of ways to measure ROI.”
On-demand pay benefits can be a critical lifeline for hourly-wage or low-income workers that help staff many senior living facilities around the country. But it’s not just about improving benefits for their own sake – it's about creating value as an employer and showing both prospective and current employees that Navion is willing to walk the walk when it comes to caregiver engagement and retention.
“Anything that we can do to differentiate ourselves is a good thing. And I can tell you, not a lot of places in our industry offer this kind of benefit. There are a lot of senior living companies that don’t have on-demand pay.”
Strong Usage Leads to Downstream Impact
Navion has seen strong metrics since adopting Tapcheck, outpacing industry benchmarks for both registration and ongoing usage. Their registration rate is 60% better than the average for other healthcare and senior living providers, offering proof that this benefit immediately clicked with large swathes of their employee population.
“The reports that we get show pretty clearly that people are tapping into Tapcheck,” said Lisa Lopez, Corporate Director of Systems Management. “We’ve really zoomed out and put a lens on that financial wellness is just as important as anything else out there for our team members.”
With more than $2 million in wage advances funded, the Navion team is seeing strong success with the program. And while small, there is real signal that on-demand pay is helping boost retention. Amongst those Navion workers that register for Tapcheck, they are 5% more likely to remain with the company than their peers who didn’t. Better still, employees that used Tapcheck once were 23% more likely to stay – stronger proof of the impact and ROI of on-demand pay.
“Going back to the connection between financial wellness and their overall wellbeing -- sometimes it’s as vital as: “I don’t have $50 to go to the urgent care, so I’m just going to let this infection get worse,” or whatever the case may be,” said Wickert. “I think it would be detrimental for a lot of our communities if we didn’t have this kind of benefit.”
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