Health & Medical
Tool time
How Tim O’Toole reduced employee turnover by streamlining the training process at VITAS
By Mark Scott
Smart Business | October 2009
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Tim O’Toole hates to see an employee walk out the door and never come back to VITAS Innovative Hospice Care. It’s more than just the lost training and effort he and his leadership team have put in trying to develop employee skills to serve the company’s hospice patients.
It’s the bonds that develop between caregiver and patient and between the caregiver and the patient’s loved ones that can’t be easily replaced.
“Our patients are taken care of mainly at their home,” O’Toole says. “Any time we lose a caregiver, that patient loses the connection with their caregiver.”
Those bonds are critical in the highly emotional times that come about during a person’s last stages of life. But as O’Toole looked at his company and reviewed internal employee surveys, he didn’t feel VITAS was doing enough to help its employees or to encourage them to grow in the organization.
“One of the main reasons why a caregiver leaves a company is they were not feeling appreciated or treated fairly by their manager,” says O’Toole, CEO since 2004 at the company, which is part of Chemed Corp. “We want our employees to think that they work for a place that cares about them because we do. It’s important to the culture and important to the quality of service we provide our patients.”
Employees rated the feeling of being valued higher on the surveys than how much they were being paid. But O’Toole decided it was more than just a pat on the back that his employees needed.
They were looking for direction and looking for a means of growing and learning how to do their jobs better. And that’s how the VITAS Retention Tool Kit was born.
“The service you provide is only as good as the employee who is providing it,” O’Toole says. “We wanted to make sure that we were doing the right type of hiring with the right people and then training them and educating them about their job and then giving them very good management oversight.”
The tool kit is built around helping managers in their efforts to hire, manage, reward and retain productive employees.
“We put in some practices under an initiative where we tried to teach our managers to coach and assist and reward employees for their future successes and I think that’s helped a lot,” O’Toole says.
Here’s how O’Toole sold the idea of the tool kit to his employees and used it to keep them from leaving the $808 million company.
