PHOENIX — Giving employees a greater role in leading their companies — and acting on both their bright ideas and their criticisms — will help shepherd quality skilled nursing providers as the sector rapidly evolves, a panel of C-suite leaders said here Tuesday.
Jess Dalton, vice president of strategic alignment and innovation for Ensign Services; Owen Hammond, president and CEO of Cascadia Healthcare; and Joshua Kochek, president of California-based Sun Mar Healthcare, headlined a panel on business leadership and navigating the future of skilled nursing at the second annual eCap West Summit.
Dalton offered rare insights into Ensign’s embrace of a local leadership model and its willingness to enter new markets and new aging services and healthcare segments based on team members’ commitment to growth and innovation.
Ensign is believed to be one of the nation’s top three largest skilled nursing operators, acquiring two more nursing homes this month to hit 312 healthcare operations in 14 states. But it’s also growing its extensive list of ancillaries through its Quorum arm, a division that has spun out home health, LTC pharmacy and even medical flight service lines based on proposals from its building leaders.
Dalton described it as a “Shark Tank”-like incubator that allows the best ideas to bubble up, offer new options for professional development and diversify revenue streams.
“There’s going to be a need for us to become more operationally diverse, and I think that means adding different and emerging lines of business that may not typically fall under the umbrella of post-acute or SNF operators,” Dalton said during a wide-ranging conversation that covered everything from frontline employee retention to acquisitions and value based care’s impact on margins.
“That’s part of the pathway of the future: really looking at the full scope of care and needs [and] ancillary services demand really tight coordination so that we can be handing off and caring for and transitioning patients responsibly,” he added. “There’s a lot of thought about what the business we’re in will look like with more needs, chronic disease states, more requirements for specialization. … As an industry and as an organization, our investment in our own clinical innovation and skills set, especially in key specialty areas, is going to be critical.”
Regional leadership model
Hammond, head of 9-year-old Cascadia and its growing, mostly Northwestern footprint, started his company after leaving Ensign. He spoke at length about giving building leaders control of their operations, not just in theory but as an everyday reality. It’s an approach that can attract new leaders and invigorate companies looking to grow, but not if it’s built on empty promises, he said.
For too long, the instinct in the sector was to build in layers of corporate leadership to reduce risk taking and liability. That, he said, served to stunt innovation among the building staff best positioned to see weaknesses and envision solutions.
“You have to actually give them control, not ultimate control, but you have to be able to exercise that and trust them and create the base and the conversations that allow them to have a voice,” Hammond said. “If your policies and procedures and how you act and treat people is completely counter to that, it implodes the whole idea.”
Cascadia has also looked to incentivize an ownership mentality with financial stakes. The company has set up a program to share interest on profits with some qualified building-level leaders, known as CEOs, and also offers a long-term compensation plan that rewards leaders who stay with their facilities year after year.
“We want to have a financial impact so they don’t have to go somewhere else to get it,” Hammond explained.
Addressing concerns with tangible change
But the ability to shape company programming shouldn’t necessarily stop with leadership, Kochek said. At the 42-facility Sun Mar, one to two certified nurse aides per building are elected to a House of Representatives, which meets annually to celebrate their week and gather their feedback on everything from the jobs to the larger organization and its leadership.
Because the company often has multiple competitors within a 15-minute drive, retention efforts can’t be based just on money. The three-year-old Representatives concept is already making a dent in employee satisfaction, Kochek added.
“Each year, we find that there are less complaints and more, ‘I’m so happy to be here. I’m part of something bigger,’ ” he noted. “Engagement on those types of levels throughout the organization and making sure that there is tangible change that they can see at the facility level and in the direction of the company, they come from those conversations.”
Circling back to his Quorum concept after the panel, Dalton told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News that Ensign wants to give any leader a chance to do more within the company and its growing framework. Some examples include an executive director whose son needed hospice and helped launch what would become the Pennant Group spinoff, as well as a therapy leader who wanted to better serve the community and is now pursuing an outpatient therapy concept for Ensign.
“We’re a leadership development company,” Dalton said.
Ecap West, a networking event for providers and lenders held at the Arizona Biltmore, drew about 450 attendees and wrapped up Wednesday.
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