As senior living providers face rising expectations from older adults, continued workforce challenges and pressure to deliver more personalized experiences, operators are being pushed to rethink how they build communities, support team members and create value for residents.
For Sean Kelly, CEO of Front Porch, meaningful change starts with connection, inclusion and a focus on what is possible as people age. In this Changemakers interview, Kelly discusses the importance of whole-person well-being, the need to elevate senior living careers, Front Porch’s efforts to build a stronger organizational culture and why the sector must embrace change while preserving its human touch.
What economic forces or market trends are currently changing the senior living industry?
Increased flight to quality. While census is relatively high across the sector and the average age of the current customer/resident increases, the market is more consistently demanding even higher quality experiences.
These experiences include traditional “care” of course. Today, that “care” must be delivered in environments that allow for and promote real engagement, real opportunities for socialization, a blend of authentic amenity experiences and evidence-based interventions that support health and whole-person wellbeing.
The evolution toward, if not a movement to transformation to new models in the senior living sector requires significant investments in people, technologies, program development and infrastructure. The level of creativity and expertise that is required to maintain the pace of change is increasing, while at the same time funding and payor sources are stressed as always.
The movement forward requires that providers build cultures that deliver a balance of sophisticated operational scale with a personalized approach supporting team members and customers/residents alike.
The business today also demands degrees of efficiency-finding and technology adoption that take full advantage of the tools that are developing more rapidly than ever, without sacrificing the human touch which is indeed the heart of the work.
In what ways do you think senior living operators need to change for the incoming generation of older adults?
It’s been said before, increased focus on the whole person, increased expertise and resources provided to support real health, well-being and “joy-finding”, taking full advantage of what we know: that it is possible to close the gap between lifespan and health-span and doing so requires increasingly coordinated, multi-dimensional efforts that combine public health initiatives, address social determinants of health – especially connection and community – and leverage emerging technologies in doing so.
In what ways can senior living companies change the public’s perception of the industry?
It’s a huge order and while I would say that we as a sector have the most unique and aspirational views of any professional group, sharing them among ourselves and in our marketing materials is not nearly enough. We can be a “cacophony in our own echo chamber.” We have to stand up and speak aloud to those things that are actually possible in the lives of each person. Speak against an overwhelmingly declinist attitude that too often prevails. Speak powerfully to our own experiences and the experiences of the millions of people whose lives have been enriched in communities. People who have enriched others and the world around them as they have gone on in their lives.
While a massively tall order, we are fortunate that in this day and age, there are generations coming along that do not intend to be put away, to be told what to do, to be demeaned, to be ignored. We are living in an era where change-makers are coming of age and they don’t intend to stop making change. It needs to be a part of our job to walk with them and be another megaphone for what’s actually possible versus that tired declinist narrative we’ve accepted for too long.
Tell us about some of your recent efforts to change the senior living industry for the better.
Since the question is about efforts to “change the senior living industry,” I would say that our first effort is to “show our work.” I’ve talked an awful lot in the last year especially, about our emphasis on culture and community. We recognized that in order to be a great place to live across Front Porch, that Front Porch also had to be an amazing place to work, for each person. We invested in an entire operating division focused on building a culture where every person can feel they belong and contribute to the larger experience beyond their job description. Among the outputs is a roll out of a system-wide service excellence program that touches every operating element of the organization. This program was born of a massive collaboration among team members of every sort, guided by input from our residents, our customers, outside experts and our professional partners. Because we built it with and among the entire existing community, it took time, an incredible amount of planning and inspired leadership. All of these investments though are paying off as the speed and depth of adoption can be accelerated because of the nature of the inclusive process that created the way forward.
Likewise, we’ve invested heavily in listening and generating real dialogue with our existing residents, future residents and constituents outside of our walls. As these relationships have been forged in an environment that is more transparent and open, we have been able to share opinions and perspectives that have generated the learning that underpins the innovations to our processes and programs. Last year we launched The Front Porch Podcast, to put an even finer point on the wisdom and power that exists within each person among us… not to mention the joy.
Additionally Front Porch’s Center for Innovation and Wellbeing continues to conduct the research and explore the possibilities for how we can enhance what it is that can be delivered to improve the quality of a person’s experience, whether a person working on one of our teams or taking advantage of the many programs, services and places that we may offer. This year we’ve begun rolling out intentional utilization of the Embodied Labs tools where technology is leveraged to assist in the empathy training that is so essential in so many circumstances in our work.
What staffing changes does the larger senior living industry need to make to meet the staggering level of demand ahead from new residents?
We have an awful lot of work to do if we are going to attract enough people to our sector. For starters, we have to help the larger world understand what this work actually is, apropos of the discussion above on how “getting older” (and henceforth aging services and senior living) is perceived.
At the same time, we have to attract more good people to this sector. No longer can we wring our hands over not having enough people to do the work that we have before us, let alone the work that will be coming down the pike. As stated above, we all need to be thinking about how to generate more interest in the sector. We’ll also need to focus organizationally and as a sector on learning and development programs so that when we draw people in they can find themselves in a place where they can grow and be satisfied personally and professionally over a long career. While it’s a massive positive aspect, no longer is a higher purpose enough to draw folks in and keep them among us. We have to pay better wages, provide improving and relevant benefits, invest in ongoing training and education across the workforce, and begin to generate greater prestige for our colleagues who have been doing this vital and impactful work all along. The Vision Centre is doing great work matching providers with colleges, universities, and other learning organizations in such a way that more students are being made aware of what it is to work in senior living. Likewise, the Vision Centre is assisting colleges and universities in building out curriculum to help build senior living leaders for the future.
At the same time, we’ll continue to need to meet the pace of change and leverage technologies that can help us get further faster with fewer people.
Is the senior living industry moving quickly enough to change in the ways it needs to? Why or why not?
Likely not. In some ways the successes we are experiencing in occupancy across the sector could be contributing to a false sense of security. Sort of an “if it works, why fix it?” phenomenon. In other ways, change is incredibly difficult, especially where there are incredible physical constraints in some of our buildings that take a long time to build and just as long to continuously renovate. And of course the sort of change that we’re talking about here can be incredibly expensive, as in some cases we’re not just talking about changing outputs or programs but the underlying infrastructures and systems that support them as well. And did I mention that we as humans are sometimes reticent to change even when it seems to be in our best interest.
Having said all of this, we’re getting better, we’re pushing the gas pedal closer to the floor. I’m seeing so many leaders in our sector looking beyond senior living for new answers, and even asking new questions.
Change is hard. Can you talk about a time when you tried to execute a change and things didn’t go according to plan? How did you pivot, and what did you learn as a leader?
I had a vision, a timeline and a rough schedule in mind for where we may go at Front Porch since the day I started three years ago. All of it was very interesting and useful … only academically …
Despite any experience, expertise or perspective, I may have had, until I could truly know my colleagues and the people whom we hoped to provide service to, I really couldn’t offer the best counsel to a plan forward. Luckily, I was given a chance to get to know so many great people including my teammates. I was able to say what I thought about things and I learned from the people around me. What we are building now really does bear some resemblance to what I saw the day I arrived, but it’s far better and brings about far more possibility because it’s been guided by a great team and owned by thousands of people at and around Front Porch.
Every day, there’s one thing or another that doesn’t go according to plan. So among the many things that I hope to have learned and will need to keep learning, is that I just don’t deserve an expectation that things will always go according to plan. Having said that, the whole practice of planning and process development is absolutely essential. We have to give ourselves something to move toward, and within a framework that allows for motion to occur in a way that anticipates ongoing adjustment and adaptation. Sharing the vision for where we may go constantly, affirming the direction always, asking for help daily and owning the bumps in the road we may be carving can all go a long way in “leading” the way.
What’s the biggest change you have made in your career or life? How did it go and what did you learn?
In my career, it has to be the decision to move from senior living development and consulting to provider. Looking back I was utterly exhilarated by the work I got to do and the people with whom I got to do it in my time in development and consulting. At the same time though, I was drawn to the ways of life that exist in operating senior living communities. As much as I loved financing and construction, I was finding myself even more in love with the compassion and caregiving that matched the joyfulness and wonder that seemed to accompany so many people living in the communities that I had come to know. Likewise I had an incredible amount of respect and admiration for the people doing this work, across the board, from the garage to the kitchen to the corner offices. The dynamism, brilliance, resilience, and genuine care that I saw people bring to this work was inspiring to me, and I wanted to be a part of it. I’m glad I did, and I learned that there is just as much strength in any person’s purpose as there might be in their expertise.
In my life, I think that’s easy: to listen to my Susan before she was crazy enough to become my wife, tell me that I was better than I thought I was.
What senior living technology do you find most promising or interesting right now?
There are so many, and it seems there are more coming each day. I think the technologies that are evidence-based and becoming more and more available for people to literally decrease the gap between their health span and their lifespan are the most interesting, promising, and inspiring to me.
What advice do you have for other senior living companies implementing their own changemaking efforts?
Be bold in this era, ask for help, affirm your ”why”, find and build a great team with needed resources, take your time, expect bumps in the road, recognize early that the process for change is absolutely just as important as the outcome that you might seek. Remember that never before has there been such an opportunity to generate greater impact in this world in senior living.
If you didn’t work in senior living, what would your career be?
Very likely hospital administration, although since I’ve been able to spend so much time in LA, maybe the movies.
Are you a coffee person, a tea person or something else?
Coffee among old and new friends with a splash of cream and, if Susan’s not looking, a Splenda.
What book are you reading right now?
It’s not always like this but right now I’ve got: Kerry Burnight’s JoySpan (just done); Ken Stern’s Healthy to 100 (almost done); and In Stroke’s Shadow by Kyle Ruffin (a caregiver’s story my friend passed on).
