The latest issue of GlynnDevins’ News You Can Use is now available. The issue focuses on Bing and how Microsoft’s new search engine fits within the search marketing landscape. There are also articles on the role of attitudes during the sales process and items to consider when thinking about using social media.
Get more senior living insights by reading News You Can Use.
Day Four at CASP brought home an important point – this is a business. And businesses run on money. Day Four gave us a perspective on how these communities and organizations budget, manage finances and raise capital for improvements. This was the best line of the day: Just because you are a non-profit organization doesn’t mean you are a for-lose organization. A great thought when you consider the strong role that mission and the desire to serve plays in these organizations. How do you balance benevolence with a healthy bottom line needed to best fulfill your mission?
And a healthy financial statement of a well-run community means it can invest in the community, and it can develop, redevelop, expand and re-invent itself to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s seniors. And that’s what the last session focused on – designing an environment that supports independence. And remaining independent, as we all know, is the single most important factor in making decisions as we age.
This builds directly on the information we learned about the aging process. Because good design, like communication and interaction, must take into account the reality of aging. Now I can’t possibly summarize all the design concepts and innovations that were covered and discussed. But sharing just a few examples will illustrate how important environment is to the quality of daily life for a community’s residents.
A carpet pattern that is too busy may look uneven to someone with depth perception issues —their eyes may be adjusting for uneven surfaces that aren’t there. This can throw off their balance and possibly cause a fall.
Visual cues can help individuals navigate around the community; they call this “way-finding” in design lingo. We all navigate by physical landmarks, so why not build landmarks into the community hallways through distinctive artwork at key intersections. “If this is the lighthouse painting, it must be my hall.”
What about acoustics in the dining room? If you can’t hear the person across the table from you, you can’t be part of the conversation. This makes any of us feel isolated when it happens to us at a restaurant. Now think about that being your experience every night.
And what about the height of the cabinets in your kitchen, what about the ability to open windows, what about minimizing glare to avoid sight problems — and more and more and more.
It all comes back to a spirit of service. If you are going to serve your residents, you have to think as much about the environment that service occurs in as you do about who and how it is delivered. It is so exciting to hear that innovative senior living organizations are working hand-in-hand with architects to create these environments.
The future of senior living design is bright. But not too bright, because we’ve put some film on the windows that cuts down the glare — and that makes it so much more comfortable.
Every human interaction has two sides, two people with different personalities, different values, different wants and different needs. Good communication and positive enriching interaction comes from having an appreciation for the other person. We know ourselves, but what do we know about the other person? What is their state of mind? What are their experiences, what are they dealing with? Sometimes we can know these things and sometimes we can’t. Day Three at CASP was about learning a little bit more about the other person.
Actually, Day Three was specifically about the physiological and emotional aspects of aging. We discussed the changes in muscle mass, balance, flexibility, sensory perception, memory, cognitive abilities and more. I was well into information overload by lunch. But our lecturers were fabulous, in that the material was presented not for fact value, but to enlighten us so that we can better serve the resident population. How can CCRCs and particularly staff at CCRCs better serve residents by taking these physical factors of aging into account? How can they help and assist residents in maintaining and improving their quality of life and, perhaps more importantly, how can staff interact with the residents in a genuine and hospitable way by knowing just a little bit about what life is like in an 85-year-old body.
Let me give you a specific example and something that really struck me. We do not lose any ability to learn, nor do we lose our level of intelligence as we age. We have the same or greater ability to learn and reason at 85 as we do at 45. But here’s the insight – it takes longer at 85, because processing speeds in the brain have slowed for natural reasons. The quality of thought doesn’t necessary diminish, just the speed at which we can formulate those thoughts. Now think about our interaction with older adults? In this go-go world of instant communication, 24-hour news, over-scheduling and rapid technological evolution, do we have the patience and capacity to have the thoughtful, insightful, meaningful and personally enriching conversation with our 85-year-old friend on their terms and at their speed?
As this was being discussed, I was thinking about a recent conversation with my 77-year-old father. I had asked a question about his boyhood. He began to tell a story I had never heard, but Dad, no fast talker 30 years ago, was telling the story at an agonizingly slow pace. And as interesting as the story was, I lost my patience, found a reason to excuse myself and went away thinking Dad is starting to lose it. What a wasted opportunity. Now I think perhaps it was just taking my father a little longer to retrieve those memories and find the words needed to describe what he was remembering. It is nothing that he can control, just a function of age. And the pace didn’t really affect the richness of his story or the enjoyment I may have gotten from it. But my inability to adjust my behavior to meet his needs caused a breakdown in communication.
Now that I know a little bit more, I have promised myself that I will sit down this weekend and ask Dad to tell me the lost jacket story again. And this time, I’ll be listening with different ears.
June 6 marked the 65th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy during World War II. The event received a great deal of national and international coverage in all forms of media. You can imagine that an event of this magnitude is bound to have local tie-ins. We were able to work with two senior living communities to help them receive coverage of their residents who participated in that event. The result? One newspaper article, one magazine article and three television news stories. One community has a former flight nurse who treated the wounded; the other had a pilot who was flying over Normandy and also a former nurse. These resident feature stories were heartwarming remembrances of an event that played a pivotal turning point in the war.
Senior living communities have so many people who have stories to tell. BUT those stories can’t be told and shared if nobody knows about them. Storytelling is a great way to generate awareness about your community and your residents. National stories with a local tie-in are always more appealing to editors and reporters seeking to fill their newspapers and newscasts.
The stories you uncover don’t always have to be about the past; senior living communities are full of residents who continue to live active lives and contribute in so many ways. So ask yourself today: What is the untold story in my community? Who is in my community?
Don’t you love provocative headlines? I do. But I am going to make you wait for the connection between green beans and what I took away from Day Two at CASP.
Day Two finished up the course on community administration and management. We discussed management styles, governance, strategic planning and the regulatory environment. What struck me was the complexity of managing a CCRC. There’s the need to balance a hospitality model with an environment of compassionate care. You want to empower staff to deliver service, yet you must operate in a highly regulated environment. You are a faith-based organization, yet your survival is often dictated by how well you address “retail issues” such as consumer trends or competitive pressures. On the surface you might say, well that’s business – everyone deals with these types of complexities. True, but here’s where the green beans come in – a CCRC is someone’s home.
Senior living isn’t a transactional business. The community isn’t a store they frequent, it isn’t a car dealership where they have purchased every one of their vehicles, and it’s not even the bank where they’ve banked for decades. The community is their home. It is where they live every day. And because of that, they care about the little things, like for instance, when there is a problem with the green beans. It is all very personal and it is personal in different ways for every single resident. Just think about the responsibility you would have in managing someone’s home.
So if yesterday’s theme was relationships, today was about service. Not specifically about delivering service, but about all the factors that create the environment in which service is delivered. We talked about the importance of strategic planning in maintaining a vibrant community for years to come, the need for a strong board to provide fiduciary oversight to maintain financial stability, and the power of a well-defined vision statement to motivate the organization and provide a strong compass for resident life. And these are just a few examples of the larger business issues that must be managed to create that community so many individuals call home.
That’s how the dots connected today. Ok, now back to the green beans, I like mine slow simmered with a little bacon and a lot of onions, please.
