Healthcare Company Empowers Employees to Deliver Exceptional Care for Aging in Place

isolved helps modernize HR processes and leadership development, enabling employees to better support members and align with organizational goals.

Joseph Conner, Interim CEO/President, and Mary Beth Quirk, HR/Finance Admin, of Friends LifeCare Partners share how isolved helped streamline HR operations and leadership initiatives to enhance care and support for employees and members alike.

You may not know this but about ten thousand people reach the age of sixty five every day and for the majority of them they look to age in their homes or age in place.

About forty years ago individuals in the Philadelphia area that were involved in a local regional hospital as well as a retirement community called Folkways got together and developed a concept of a retirement community without walls. What they did was they surveyed individuals to see what their needs were, what their wants were, and they came up with the product of Friends Life Care Partners, which is essentially the ability to remain in your home. And Friends Life Care Partners coordinates all the care in your home. These individuals felt that that was a better option because about ninety five percent of individuals who retire don't want to go to a retirement community. So that was the impetus of creating Friends Life Care Partners.

I, was very close with my grandfather who passed away when he was ninety six and we were able to keep him at home that entire time. That's what we do here is we keep people aging in place. And if you think about it, your home is your sanctuary. And most of us feel most comfortable at home. So, being able to do that for other people, I think, is a real gift. And, and I really identify with that mission.

I come from a family that really takes aging in place very seriously.

My mom is now seventy nine years old. We are now at that time of having that conversation about the care that she's gonna wanna have. So to work for an employer that makes sure that every person in our community is gonna be able to age how they want to.

It is a privilege to age.

It's something that will happen to all of us hopefully.

And our home is our safe space. Our home is our peace. So I do really identify with that mission to to keep people aging in place as long as possible.

We provide, in the Quaker terms, a safe space for individuals to provide their their input to any situation that they're working in. So I have a leadership team that is about nine individuals in the organization.

And the goal of that those meetings is to provide a space to where everybody has an equal say in that in that meeting. And we bring it in bring everybody in for a specific topic. The latest one we had was ageism. So we have an organization that has four generations working together, working with generations that are even older than the generations that work for us. So an ageism topic and how ageism affects the work of our organization both internally and with our membership was something I felt was really important for us to to discuss and really have input from all the all the participants and all the employees of the organization.

We wanna make sure that our members are given the best care possible because when they sign out to work with Friends Life Care Partners, they are entrusting the c their care to us for the rest of their lives. So it's really critical that we make sure that we are up to date in the latest technologies, the best practices for our employees so that we can service our members, through all the ups and downs of the aging process.

And I see it in the office in the fact that no matter your job title, everyone treats each other equally. That's huge. I think that's very different than some other employers I've worked with. And what it means for our members, ageism is a problem, and we we treat everyone equally. So that's how I see us doing it in our work with members.

Working for a nonprofit is very personal.

So we wanna make sure that we are doing programs that not only are enhancing our member experience, but our employee experience as well. We want our employees to feel that they are servicing their members in the best way possible and that they are providing the best care that they can to make their job more fulfilling.

So how do we balance the individual goals of employees with the long term goals of the organization?

We have a relationship with an organization called Friends Service Alliance, which is the industry's association.

So we have most of our leadership organization to be able to work from the same language, work from the same core concepts of leadership leadership style.

ISolve supports our company's HR efforts, because we are able to use it as a full HRIS.

One of the things I've been able to do is research all of the offerings that isolved has and then slowly build in the components that I felt would best support the company. I wanna ensure that our employees are taken care of. Being able to do my job successfully means that they can rely on me while they're taking care of others to make sure that everything with their job is handled and something they don't have to worry about.

We were in the office a hundred percent of the time pre pandemic, and we had a shift as every organization had. We had a shift to a remote status.

So I think that was the impetus for us to really look at technologies and provide different resources for our employees to be to remain engaged.

And the the technology tools that we put in place including, ISOB's share and perform was a big tool for us to be able to keep our employees engaged and keep them focused on our performance as well as giving them feedback.

I think it's a great attitude to be able to see how my contributions are directly affecting how the company is doing with their goals, how they're doing financially, how it's impacting our members.

Those are all very important so that I can see where I fit into the company. I think that really motivates me because I wanna see that what I'm doing has some sort of impact.

Some of the things that I've done over the years is implement time off through our system.

I have, integrated our benefits into the system, so open enrollment runs through there. And then last year, I was able to utilize the system for their, expense management. So that has been a huge help in taking away a lot of our spreadsheets, a lot of our back and forth email so that we are able to have one centralized location for any of our employees' HR needs.

Another thing that is really great is utilizing the People Heroes community.

One of the things I love about that is that I can go in with a question of something I might wanna implement and get feedback from real customers to state this is how they are utilizing the system and then decide if that's gonna be best for us or not. Each department has a different way of celebrating their employees.

For example, our finance department is very big on making sure that we celebrate birthdays and milestone anniversaries.

Another example is our care coordination staff. Anytime that we have something like occupational therapist month, we wanna celebrate our occupational therapists on staff. And each member of our care coordination brings a special skill set, whether it be social worker, it may be, they are a registered nurse. We wanna celebrate the skills that they bring to the table, and we always wanna make sure those are shouted out. What we've been able to do is take the conversation that we used to just be having and implement it in a real world way and see what that conversation is, and we can refer back to it over time.

So we're able to look at the needs of the business, make that a goal for the year, and then have that trickle down and see how each individual is contributing to that goal every single year. Now sometimes it's up to the department themselves. They'll talk to an employee, see what might be best for them, and then they'll work on, something for the upcoming year.

Sometimes it's, again, the employee going to the supervisor and stating that this would be the best opportunity, and here are the ways that I wanna achieve it.

Our current population boomer generation is looking to do versus what the Gen X needs are is, is gonna be drastically different. From an H tech standpoint, as well as, you know, what their wants and desires will be, I think our next generation that is gonna be our membership is really looking to age vibrantly.

And what I mean by age vibrantly is they wanna they wanna enjoy their life, and they wanna be remote, moving around the world, and what can Friends Life Care provide to them while they're doing this? And then once they need care, we'll be there for them. But understanding what their wants and needs are over the next ten, fifteen years for this new generation that we'll be dealing with is gonna be tantamount to our success.

Modernizing HR to Support Employee and Member Well-Being

“You may not know this, but about 10,000 people reach the age of 65 every day, and for the majority of them, they look to age in their homes,” says Joseph Conner, Interim CEO/President of Friends LifeCare Partners. Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the company helps those individuals age in place through its innovative “retirement community without walls” model.

Serving a population with complex needs, the organization is deeply committed to providing high-quality, compassionate care. However, outdated human resources (HR) processes hindered their ability to keep up with growth and evolving workforce demands. With a mix of paper-based and manual systems, they struggled to efficiently manage HR tasks, create meaningful leadership development opportunities and provide employees with resources.

"We want to make sure that our members are given the best care possible. It's really critical that we make sure that we are up to date in the latest technologies,the best practices for our employees."

— Mary Beth Quirk, HR/Finance Admin

Moving Off Paper Processes

Friends LifeCare Partners initially came to isolved for assistance with payroll and found positive results, saving an estimated average of 10 hours per month when compared to their previous, manual processes. They expanded their use of isolved People Cloud™ to intelligently connect their HR efforts across the employee journey. Since doing so, they’ve been able to move away from paper records—not only improving workflows but also the security of sensitive employee data.

Another perk Friends LifeCare Partners found moving to isolved is the self-service functionality, which empowers employees to manage their own time off requests. This offers a modern employee experience, while also saving the Friends LifeCare Partners team another estimated 5-10 hours per employee, per month on processing requests and managing attendance.

“isolved supports our company’s HR efforts because we’re able to use it as a full human resource information system (HRIS),” says Quirk. “One of the things I’ve been able to do is research all of the offerings that isolved has and then slowly build in the components that I think will best support the company.”

Elevating Experience with isolved

By implementing isolved, Friends LifeCare Partners revamped its HR capabilities, creating a more cohesive and supportive environment for employees and leadership. They’ve been able to solve critical challenges while also opening up new opportunities. Here are some of the results they’ve seen:

Streamlined HR processes, improving operational efficiency with a unified human capital management (HCM) system.
Aligned employee well-being with organizational goals, enabling staff to focus on delivering top-tier care for members.
Better security for employee data, since the organization moved away from storing sensitive data via paper files.
Time saved on processing payroll, time off and attendance requests, with employees having the ability to self-serve.

These improvements have allowed the organization to modernize its HR operations while staying true to its mission of helping individuals age in place with dignity and comfort.

“I want to ensure that our employees are taken care of. I think it’s a great attitude to be able to see how my contributions are directly affecting how the company is doing with their goals, how they are doing financially, how it’s impacting our members,” says Quirk. “Being able to do my job successfully means that they are able to rely on me while they are taking care of others to make sure that everything with their job is handled and something they don’t have to worry about.”