As home care business owners, we all operate on systems that we’ve so eloquently built in order to achieve proper care for our clients. Once we’ve mastered those systems and our care units are running efficiently and effectively, we naturally start to think about how to scale to the next level. In this series, we explore the key components to scaling your home care business while maintaining the highest quality care, optimal efficiency, and meeting your financial goals.
Today, we focus on communication. Simply stated, the success or failure of your home care agency success hinges on supremely clear communication.
First, a reminder. The care of your clients always comes first. Becoming a master communicator in your home care agency is mission-critical to maintaining high-quality care.
Building on our prior discussion about saying no, we introduced the idea that no was the first and most simple, clear communication of the boundaries you’ve set- which we discussed first. Obviously, in the complex and quickly-moving home care agency, we communicate far more than just yes and no. We as directors must establish methods for timely, accurate, and frequent communication from us to our caregivers and clients, and in the reverse. Whether communication was our innate talent or not before we started running our home care agency, it is now! Our role calls upon us to become experts in every facet of communication – from highly descriptive disinfection protocols to the conveyance of client prescription dosages, to payroll details.
How Do I Do This?
- Establish systems and redundancies. It is said that a leader can never over-communicate. Even when our recipient is right in front of us, there is always a risk that our message doesn’t actually penetrate, or is misheard. Set up an email messaging system to reach your home caregivers. But don’t stop there. Layer up. Establish a text distribution as a redundancy. Call your clients with important changes in their home care plan, but don’t stop there. Email them, their authorized family members, and their caregivers too. Communicate. Communicate again. And then communicate what you just communicated.
- Be succinct. Everyone, from your caregivers to your clients to your clerk in the grocery checkout line… is in a hurry. Everyone in your audience can and will be guilty of missing your text, not seeing your call, or deleting your email. Your entire audience will overlook important information, even in the most succinct messages. Keeping your lines of communication lean, with each word passing the “do I really need to say this?” test, will reduce the chances that information will be lost, overlooked, or misunderstood.
- Know when to sit down face-to-face. Email is great for communicating schedules, but not sympathies. The mastery of communication in your role is realizing when your eyes, and arms, are needed. You are at the helm of a business that delivers care as its primary product. Caring for your staff and clients when they need to talk about their careers or need to hear from you when someone special passes away, is the differentiator between you and an average home care agency. You authentically care, so carve out the time in your role for human-to-human communication of your compassion. Not only will your business benefit, but your people will never forget that you showed up for them.
We will say it today, and over this series: there’s nothing easy about growth. You’re not alone if it feels challenging. But if you establish early on that communication is your superpower as a home care agency director, you have laid a critical foundation for growth.