September is Workforce Development Month, when we highlight the variety of job and career opportunities throughout the aging services sector and the contributions staff make across all settings of care. Workforce is the top priority for our members; to help with recruitment, retention, and career development LeadingAge offers a large variety of workforce tools.
“We support our members adopting numerous workforce strategies to meet their current challenges,” says Jenna Kellerman, director of workforce strategy & development for the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston. “Members are always clear that they want things to be turnkey—no time to recreate the wheel or adapt resources. [We] take this to heart when creating resources.”
Among those turnkey resources and tools are those that help busy managers build a sense of belonging and trust in the workplace, while developing leadership styles that foster positive environments. Examples include:
Are You Living Your Core Values? Use this checklist to discuss and display the core values that underlie your organization’s work, and help embed them into meetings, events, performance reviews, the hiring process, and more.
Leadership Rounding Tool: Thoughtful, regular interaction with staff, talking with them directly about the care and service they provide—a process known as leadership rounding—is a critical leadership skill. Leaders who regularly, authentically engage with staff build a high-trust environment. This tool offers principles and tips for developing effective rounding practices.
A Guide to Effective Individual Development Plans (IDPs): IDPs can increase staff engagement and growth, help employees build careers, and increase retention. This tool helps managers use IDPs to empower staff while increasing quality.
Activities and Games to Build a Healthy Workplace Culture: Use activities and games as teaching tools, team-building activities, and stress-relievers. This checklist matches challenging team behaviors with activities that can alleviate those stresses and build a healthier environment.
Peer Interviewing Resources: Peer interviewing has been shown to be an excellent way to engage current staff in the hiring of new employees, leading to decreased turnover. These three resources help you create your own peer interviewing process:
Nurse LEAD Training Program: This popular program was developed by The LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston in partnership with University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing. It helps nursing professionals improve their own leadership, supervisory, and coaching skills in order to build excellent clinical teams.
The Opening Doors to the Aging Services Workforce initiative offers communications strategies, tested message themes and language, and information about the job attributes employees seek. Download the Workforce Recruitment Communications Toolkit to make your recruitment communication effective.
For insights on use of these tools and building workforce culture from LeadingAge members at Edenwald, Goodwin House and more, see Can a Cup of Tea Improve Organizational Culture? along with President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan’s article, Building Our Workforce One Person at a Time.
And for your own communications about how you are celebrating National Workforce Development Month, use our Social Media Sample Text & Campaign Graphics.
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