You can't measure what you don't have.
A common friction in senior living is between marketing and operations. A resident moves in, and a few months later, they move out. The fingers point toward operations. The resident didn't get what they were promised — but who made the promise? Did marketing oversell, setting unrealistic expectations? Or did the community fall short once the resident was through the door?
So what's the best way to solve this problem?
Maybe it's all of the above. But these are the same fixes you've already tried — and the same challenges keep coming back around. What we hear most often is that the Executive Director makes or breaks a community.
If that's true, why hasn't every operator blueprinted what a great ED does and repeated it in every building?
You're probably investing in technology. That's a good thing. But technology alone — especially deployed in silos — won't fix a systemic problem. And the systemic problem is that senior living hasn't gone through digital transformation. It isn't standard for two communities to run the same tools, even inside the same company. A family app isn't expected. Neither is consistent time tracking, or workflows that are defined and measured. People do things their own way, and when a strong Executive Director is in place, they're given that latitude — because strong EDs are so hard to find.
In fact, what we hear is a version of this: people are hard to find, so you can't expect them to follow workflows. You just hope they do their jobs. But the same staff member has forty apps on her phone and uses all of them without training. She can't use one at work?
Every industry has gone through digital transformation. The companies that did it well thrived. The ones that didn't are gone — Blockbuster had stores in every strip mall, and none of it mattered. Digitizing a business doesn't mean buying an engagement platform or swapping your EHR. It means your staff and your workflows run on technology. All of them. That's what makes operations efficient, captures the data you need to compete, and connects people who currently work in parallel. This isn't a line item.
Digital transformation requires ownership, and every level of management to accept that the problem is real and the fix costs money. It requires change.
If you don't digitize broadly, you'll have fragmentation. Fragmentation gives the impression that technology isn't working for you — that it's not helpful or needed. And it prompts staff to say they don't need it, or that they can just do it the old way. But the actual problem is upstream. You bought disconnected systems. Or you have people in key seats who won't adopt anything. Or somewhere in your management chain, no one bought into the big picture.
A thriving community has to capture the same consumer-level behaviors we all move through every day — just inside your four walls. Residents consume content, order products and services, interact with people, and move around. Every one of those is an expected behavior, and every one is a data point you should be capturing and measuring. Because you can't make an informed decision about something you don't measure. Without it, you're back to paper and superheroes.
Stop treating technology as a point solution for one department. Start thinking about digitizing the business itself — into something closer to a marketplace. A fall-detection vendor is great. It's also one element of a strategy, not the strategy. Technology as a competitive advantage takes time, people, and money. And you probably don't have someone owning the vision — a leader whose job is making the business more measurable and more profitable. If you do have that person, ask yourself what you hold them accountable for. Resident retention? Staff retention? Revenue targets? Or vendor selection, fire drills, conference panels, and "innovation"?
Technology has been a competitive advantage in every industry that took it seriously, and senior living won't be the exception. Other industries built for it — they hired leaders and brought in firms that had done it before. But the part that mattered most came from the top: ownership and the board held technology leadership accountable for measurable results.
So — do you have a technology strategy? Do you have a leadership team that owns it? Do you have goals you can actually measure?
Here's a suggestion. When you want to know which residents are at risk of moving out, where do you look? Not who do you ask — asking is subjective, inconsistent, and dependent on superheroes. Where do you look?
Where does anyone look?