Main Library
The long-term care industry is facing an employment crisis, and providers must go beyond traditional compensation and benefit offerings to solve them.
This industry’s employee demographic operates with unique characteristics that influence their needs and desires from an employer. Employers must consider their employees’ social determinants of health in order to build a customized incentive, compensation and benefit plan that fits their needs.
For example, increasing an employee’s wages or making changes to the organization’s health insurance plan may be among strategies a traditional employer would deploy. However, in long-term care, some employers are increasing their starting wages from $12 to $14 per hour to $15 to $25 per hour for starting caregivers and still not getting applicants for open roles. Others are making significant changes to their health plans and still getting only 40% of their employees to enroll in health insurance. This implies that changes to health insurance aren’t enough.
Today, creativity is necessary to get people in the door to apply for open roles. At a moment in society where employers in many industries are struggling to find employees who can (or are willing to) work a productive number of hours, addressing employees’ social determinants of health can help long-term care employers meet workers where they are.