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Cultivating Positive Team Spirit: Tendercare Wayne Seniors

Focus of the Appreciative Inquiry:

To discover the positive core of the Wayne Seniors group which enables the staff to focus upon projects, process improvements, and rewards that are aligned to increase census while cultivating a team spirit.

Client Organization:

Tendercare, Inc. is Michigan’s largest provider of long-term care services with 35 health centers located throughout Michigan and over 3,400 employees. The Marketing Department created the Plus One Campaign and selected Wayne Seniors (WS) as one of four facilities, which possessed the most potential for increased census (based on location, staff, building showing, etc.). Wayne Seniors has the capacity of 120 beds with a current census fluctuating between 93 and 96 residents. The budgeted census for this fiscal year is 102. Tendercare’s mission is to be the provider of choice.

Client Objective:

The Plus One Campaign Appreciative Inquiry (AI) project had the following goals as its focus:

Discover the Positive Core of Wayne Seniors
Educate the staff as to the importance of census building, its impact on the center and how they can help with the census development efforts
Create an environment of energy and excitement toward the center’s census goal
Increase census and teambuilding efforts

What Was Done:

Over 75 interviews were conducted of staff and residents. This AI intervention was designed and combined with the Plus One Campaign to enhance the education and participation while identifying the positive core of the center. Four topics were chosen as the project focus: Provider of Choice, Resident Loyalty, The Excellent Team, and Appreciation. The main goal in using the AI approach was to constructively obtain information as to what has been working best at Wayne Seniors and to learn what can be done to increase census and community, plus improve in areas as it relates to the four topics.

Outcomes:

The AI approach was favorably received by the staff and residents and yielded highly insightful information about how the staff relates to each other and to the residents, and how the residents relate to each other. Four managers at Tendercare remarked how drastically the culture had changed. They observed that the culture had gone from a negative to a very hopeful and positive one in a matter of weeks. A Master Wish List was created and used as an action list by management and employees to implement the ideas to improve the overall quality of work life and living conditions. It was found that the positive core of the staff lies within the genuine compassion and sincere caring for the residents and for each other.

The census at the beginning of this project was 92. Within six weeks of the campaign launch, it had increased to 99. Monthly in-service meetings for the staff were re-instituted. The employees of this center, who were unionized, initiated a union de-certification campaign. Additionally, a cross-disciplinary team of employees within the center completed a marketing action plan based on the information collected from the interviews and within the framework of the four possibility statements. The goal of this on-going project is to make Tendercare, Inc. the provider of choice by building an excellent team through appreciation and developing resident loyalty thereby making the world a better place for our residents and staff.