The importance of seamless internal communication and engagement to improve the quality of care provided

Amrit:
Amrit Dhaliwal, I’m the CEO and founder of Walfinch. Walfinch is a home care organization. We provide care to older people, invariably, but anyone over the age of 18, we've got locations all around the country. Furthest north is Edinburgh and furthest south, I think is Southampton.

Shaked:
What brought you specifically to the home care sector and not any other sector you could franchise?

Amrit:
It was total by chance, you know, lots of different things happen at the same time. My grandfather was very ill, was living with us. We were providing a lot of that sort of home care for him ourselves. I was also, you know, going through some life changes myself. I was looking at proposing to my wife, who's a dentist, and she was very… 9 to 5 and I was 5 to 9 at my restaurant.
And so all of those things kind of brought me to home care. And I thought, well, this could be an interesting place to make a difference, to earn a living and to make some meaningful change.

Shaked:
You're calling to revolutionize the home care sector.

Amrit:
Yes. Yeah.

Shaked:
What is this revolution about?

Amrit:
A revolution required at leadership level. They do need to be qualified leaders. that are, you know, inward thinking, that are growth mindset orientated, the development of leaders, you know, a carer that might want to be a homecare franchisee, for example. How do we develop them with all the right soft skills from that stage to then go off and then be the next generation of good quality leader? Values based recruitment and val es based retention. Thinking about who are we recruiting within the sector, We say no to a lot of people, actually, that apply to become carers because we're super selective and gone have the days where it's a pulse on a call, great, you've got a job.
Most of the people coming to the market leave, But if you dig deeper into that and say, well, okay, actually what the stats are saying, that people that are coming in from job portals will leave quickly. But the people that are coming in from a referral, for example, will do 40 times more hours before they think about leaving.
And they are people that will stick around and a year later still be there, and they are the people that will, you know better the reputation of both your organization and the industry.
For me, I think it's about revolutionizing the branding around that. You know, you've got the leadership piece, you've got the recruitment piece, but also you've got the digital piece. If we want to provide good quality care, well, it needs to be something that we can operate off our mobile phone and say, well, look, I can dig in. I know what's happening with Mrs. Jones over there, you know, we can track something immediately.

Shaked:
How do you foster that engagement, which leads to better retention, better hiring, using these type of technologies, mobile smart phones?

Amrit:
What are we doing on social media? What's the image of the organization? They come into our office, What's the image of the organization? They come into our office, How are we welcoming them to that interview? How many minutes is a telephone screening process and so on, and really think about each stage so that it's a seamless service for the care worker and it's about being deliberate about that whole thing.

Shaked:
How do you go about training for those mid-management level?

Amrit:
We've got essentially a month onboarding with this person. So and that's our investment in that person and that immediately starts improving retention because we can. We've invested a month in this person and they're thinking, Well, hold on a second. I haven't just been thrown in the deep ends, and go on, go and sort out that rota. This is how we do the recruitment. Please watch me, now I'll watch you. And there's a week of observations and so on.

Shaked:
How do you measure the success of the onboarding and actually know that it was implemented properly,
the training, the processes that you want them to learn and also to deliver what you want them to deliver to the carers?

Amrit:
When I first started doing this, I would just do it, show you and expect you to know it.
Now it's I'll do it, show you and then ask you to show me. So there's that whole piece around receipt of understanding and actually observations. But then there is the feedback. So we get feedback from that member of staff themselves. It's really about tracking data and then saying, Well, okay, well what could we do to improve that process and how do we keep finessing it? Using a technology to track that, and you've got to understand whether they get it.

Shaked:
How do you deal with internal communication between the head office, the supervisor, the care management and the carers themselves when they need it?

Amrit:
Part of our onboarding is that responsiveness. When you're talking about teamwork being a value of ours,
that's part of what we do. If a care worker is out there and saying, Well, I don't know if Mrs. Jones is taking her second dose because the dosing box is empty, and she can't get hold of us, That's problematic.
Having, you know, communication and having someone that is there for the pastoral care and saying, well, okay, this is the person I speak to, so here's my chain of command. But actually that person over there is someone that I can speak to by anything, and they're available. There's people available in the office.

Shaked:
What does your toolbox look like in terms of technology?

Amrit:
Everything is digitized from our bookkeeping to our rostering, the whole thing. You know, we are fully paperless as an organization.
When I was a franchisee, someone would come along to me and we'd spend this wonderful day together. But actually I only need them there for 45 minutes to ask the questions I need to ask.
So, you know, that got me thinking, Well, okay Zoom needed to be part of what we were doing. So we were already thinking about that, you know, pre-pandemic. You know, moving forward from there and saying, well, okay, well, where is your bookkeeping, where's your rostering? And we keep looking at it. We look at our suppliers every year and so on, constantly saying, well, is it right? Is it, you know, is it kind of cutting edge enough? Are we looking around the corner

Shaked:
bringing new technology to help with the day to day, looks better in the eyes of CQC as well?

Amrit:
Absolutely. How can you be outstanding with medication if I don't know right now what's happening right this second?
My view is that within the next 5 to 10 years, everyone would be fully digitized within the industry because we will have to be.

Shaked:
If you could give a key piece of advice to new care providers, franchisees that starting their way, what would it be?

Amrit:
Have an open mind and keep learning, constantly keep learning. One of the things I always say to my franchisees is invest 10% of your earnings back into your own leadership development, because the only thing stopping a business’s growth is the leader. And so if you can remove your barriers,
there is no end, right? You can carry on providing that phenomenal service to your carers and your clients.