For sustainable top-line growth, your senior housing organization faces a crossroads.
You can continue to use outdated models of serving customer needs. Or you can recognize the coming Silver Tsunami, shift your organizational culture, and radically reinvent how you meet customer needs.
As you already know, making a shift requires more than a C-suite meeting to discuss your initiatives.
Your team needs guidance. They need a strategic course of action. They need clearly defined steps to recalibrate.
They need a change management plan.
It’s important to cast a large vision for your goals. But it’s also critical to spell out how you’ll implement, execute, and collaborate.
As CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a recent interview with QSR…
“The reality is a strategy can be fantastic, but if you don’t execute it well, it becomes worthless. I’ll always say that an 80 percent perfect strategy executed 100 percent is way better than a perfect strategy executed at 80 percent.”
In this article, we’re sharing how to avoid this pitfall—so your operation executes your change management strategy and culture transformation shows up at the site level.
#1. Define who owns each piece in your change management plan.
Like any big project, your change management plan requires extensive teamwork, collaboration, and interdepartmental interaction.
After all, increasing top-line revenue isn’t the sole responsibility of your on-site sales teams.
For instance, your regionals of operations play an important role in guiding your executive directors, and your EDs are directly responsible for monitoring sales team performance.
The significance?
Both your EDs and your regionals of operations own a piece of your change management plan.
To start defining ownership, take a moment and…
- Write out your top objective, whether that’s increasing your conversions or improving your referrals.
- Identify each team member who impacts your goal, including those who are indirectly responsible for improved performance.
- List each person’s responsibilities as they relate to increasing occupancy.
#2. Define what accountability looks like…at each level.
Once you’ve outlined who is responsible for meeting growth goals, it’s time to define accountability.
While this step may seem uninspiring, make no mistake.
Accountability is the key to seeing results from your change management strategy.
To define accountability, pinpoint the short-term goals that will help you reach your broader objective. (For more on this, see Traci Bild’s 90-Day Visions.) For instance, this could be something as simple as…
Increase memory care tours by 25% in Q3.
Now, determine the key performance indicators—for each organizational level—that reveal you’ve met this goal.
Here are a few ideas to get you started…
C-suite Level
- Is this item on our executive meeting agendas?
- How much time does each C-level member spend on this goal?
- Have we outlined our action steps for Q3 in Q2?
Regional Level
- How much time do our regionals spend on-site?
- How is regional productivity allocated across the portfolio? Are a few problem properties eating my regionals’ time?
- Do regionals spend more time training and providing strategic guidance, or are their reports filled with micromanaging activities?
Site Level
- How many lead generation events do my communities hold?
- What are the conversion ratios for each property?
- How often do my communities conduct outreach activities…and with whom?
Important note: You’ll notice accountability requires accurate benchmarking and data reporting. However, at Bild & Co., we see on-site teams with nonexistent CRM usage.
If your operation struggles with reporting, you’ll have a hard time executing your change management plan. We encourage you to
#3. Define who will monitor accountability.
When it comes to your change management plan, go beyond defining what accountability looks like.
You need a plan for who will monitor accountability.
Now is the time to determine…
- Who will help you, as a senior housing leader, focus on your high-level goals.
- Who in the C-suite will monitor the performance of regional teams.
- Who will be primarily responsible for the performance of on-the-ground sales team members.
At Bild & Co we know that, in reality, operations face difficulty when it comes to accountability.
It’s hard enough to implement your change management plan. It’s even harder to make sure your portfolio follows it consistently…
Our organization has the capability to empower an organizational shift and provide the consistent oversight your team needs for success.
From data reporting to weekly coaching, we can help your vision show up in the customer experiences at your individual communities.
Let us dig into what’s holding your operation back from executing your change management plan.
Plan a 30-minute call with one of our team members.
