Transforming the Colleague Experience for HC-One

HC-One is the UK’s largest care home provider. They were struggling with extremely high staff attrition of 41%. Reinvigoration helped HC-One to identify the root causes of this problem and achieve a fundamental mindset shift in culture to successfully transform their ‘Colleague Journey’, resulting in dramatic cultural, morale, financial, and most importantly - quality of care improvements that provided dementia sufferers with exceptional outcomes.

Outcomes achieved

• A redefined ‘Colleague Journey’
• A fundamental mindset shift in culture
• Alignment of all leaders, managers and carers to a new way of thinking
• This contributed to:
   
  • Induction rate improved by 183% (30% to 85%)
  • Staff turnover reduction of 32% (41% to 28%)
  • Temporary worker usage reduced by 50%
  • Internal colleague NPS score – increase of 23% (60% to 74%)
  • Residential occupancy increases of 5%

Client Overview 

HC-One is the UK’s largest care home provider. With c.270 care homes, they’re proud to provide positive, personalised care and support to more than fourteen thousand Residents who live in their homes, encompassing dementia care, nursing, residential and specialist care.

The Challenge

HC-One were experiencing high staff attrition of 41%, driving the need for c3,500 job applicants per week. Just c120 (3.5%) of these were successfully placed with HC-One per week. However, due to a variety of factors, including onboarding, induction, culture, systems, structures and processes within the organisation, 37% of these employees left within their first 6-months.

The Solution

HC-One (with their strapline of ‘The Kind Care Company’) had focused incredibly hard on the care for residents but needed a fundamental cultural shift.

A rethink of how the business operates was required, really emphasising the focus on the Colleague Journey, and striving for excellence in everything within it.

The required transformation in culture was linked back to the HC-One strategy, highlighting with data how the resolution of the issues would achieve all of the goals the organisation had.

That brought the whole company together, and the implementation of the end-to-end improvements enabled all areas of the business to become involved practically in the mindset shift.

The project aimed to resolve the issues with staff attrition as well as transform the culture of the organisation. Through the successful implementation of the recommendations, HC-One saw big improvements.

“There are two key things come to mind when talking about the most significant impact of working with Reinvigoration. The first is the depth, quality, and detail of the analysis that they helped draw together in a very compelling, incredible way. Secondly, it’s alignment with the senior team. Reinvigoration helped us pull together to tell a story and then test the level of alignment around our appetite for risk and change. And that's a huge step forward for us. Reinvigoration has been core to both building the insights and in helping us tell the story.”

John Handley, Executive Director, People, HC-One, UK

How Reinvigoration helped:

• The first step was to assess the problem by undertaking a deep diagnostic, following our codified End-to-end Process Improvement offering, adapted to suit this specific issue.
  
  
• This included engaging with 125 colleagues across the business, mapping out 9 different processes, 360 colleague surveys being completed, 11 homes visited, 23 workshops held, 4 colleague personas mapped, 1 end-to-end colleague journey created, 320 issues were categorised, 7 themes were developed, and 4 playback discussion sessions were held.
  
  
• This full assessment of the issues allowed Reinvigoration to understand the root cause of many of the problems that led to poor colleague experience throughout the colleague journey.
  
  
• Reinvigoration helped HC-One to rethink the colleague experience and all aspects of their touchpoints with the company during the recruitment and onboarding process.
  
  

The Outcomes

Reinvigoration successfully helped HC-One to achieve a fundamental cultural shift.

The end-to-end Colleague Journey was improved across all aspects from hire to first pay cheque and included central HQ in Darlington, as well as throughout 262 care homes across the UK.

The Conclusion

By identifying the root causes of the problem HC-One were able to achieve a fundamental mindset shift in culture to successfully transform their ‘Colleague Journey’.

This resulted in cultural, morale and financial outcomes.