WS-7 - Using Culture Change Principles to Enhance Your Workplace

Thirty years ago, the “culture change” movement set out to overcome the three plagues of people living in nursing homes: helplessness, loneliness, and boredom. By prioritizing the well-being of elders and reframing the roles of employees, this movement resulted in significantly improving elders’ well-being and clinical outcomes. Today, these same three plagues affect employees working in long-term care, which are the primary causes of today’s staffing crisis. They feel helpless because they’re not properly equipped for success, lonely because they don’t feel known or valued, and bored because they don’t feel engaged in meaningful work. To overcome these three plagues, a “workplace culture change” movement is necessary to transform employees’ working experiences in order to significantly improve engagement and retention. Today, over 70% of employees are not fully engaged, which is now become known as “Quite Quitting.” To be fully engaged, employees need to be fully committed to their organization. In her book, “Disrupting the Status Quo of Senior Living,” Christian Living Communities CEO, Jill Vitale-Aussem, suggests taking “culture change” a step further by reframing residents as “citizens” and engaging them as active participants, as fully engaged and empowered problem solvers who have influence on their community and share responsibility in caring & supporting each other. In this inspirational session, leaders will discover how to follow a similar path taken in the “culture change” movement by learning how to prioritize employees’ well-being and create workplace environments where they feel valued, a sense of belonging, engaged in meaningful work and have opportunities to grow. They will also learn how to walk beside their employees, harness their collective genius, and inspire them to be “citizens” and become active participants in supporting and enhancing the well-being of everyone in their community.