Assisted Living

2018 AHCA/NCAL Annual Convention

AL-1 - Employee Focus Groups for Staffing Stability: Theory-to-Practice

Speaker(s)

• 

  David Lucia, PhD

  Human Resources Consultant
  Tealwood Senior Living

Facing the challenges of recruiting and retaining qualified staff in the ever-changing workforce is a top priority of healthcare leaders today. Staff turnover affects clinical, quality, operational, and financial outcomes. Focus groups can be used as a vital and useful supplement to employee surveys, exit interviews, and other resources. Whereas quantitative data, such as surveys, are most effective at providing quantifiable data, focus groups can be used to “enrich” these results by revealing the more qualitative perspectives underlying the numbers. Often, qualitative data seeks to explain - focus groups seek to understand. Although conducting a focus group may appear to be a few questions and having a “discussion”, a productive focus group is much more than a chat session. Too often, the assumption is made that if a group of people is gathered in a room, a collective and representative opinion will naturally emerge. However, principles of group dynamics suggest otherwise. In fact, left to chance, a focus group will almost certainly fail to live up to its potential to provide keen insights on recruitment, creative retention strategies, and how to engage a multi-generational workforce. This presentation provides a demonstrated model and core principles for designing and engaging effective focus groups. Additionally, the presentation demonstrates take-away tools and techniques to synthesize the feedback into action plans for meaningful change and outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss core principles, practices, and design of focus group methodology
• Adopt a broader understanding and perspective for the impact of initial 90-day employee socialization and engagement
• Adopt a theory-to-practice action planning approach of focus group feedback to improve outcomes for staffing stability