Top Senior Living Housekeeping Benchmarks You Need to Know

-- by Grace Flack --

Housekeeping plays a critical role in senior living communities. From cleanliness and infection control to waste management, this department ensures that residents live in a comfortable and sanitary environment.

With changes in the industry like a new generation of residents, more engaged residents and high turnover in housekeeping departments, it’s now more important than ever to measure the performance of your team and understand where you stand amongst other communities.

When you know where you stand within your community and throughout the industry, you can make better decisions about where to improve and stay competitive with your housekeeping services.

The following are a collection of housekeeping benchmarks we've compiled from research including 300+ of our housekeeping clients. These are statistics that are important for you to know to gauge your team's performance and efficiency.

Assignments

Do you have set cleaning assignments or do you rotate assignments?

In our research, we found that this varies by care level.

· Independent Living (IL): Likely to use the same staff each visit

· Assisted Living (AL): Use a mixture of both set staff and rotating assignments

· Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF): Likely to use rotating assignments

While rotating assignments can increase efficiency and ensure cross training, it may be harder to develop a staff to resident connection. There are pros and cons of each, so it's important to investigate what works best for your team.

Cleaning Frequency

How often are housekeeping departments like yours cleaning and what type of cleaning are they doing?

Here's what we found for housekeeping cleaning frequency:

· IL: 88% weekly, 12% bi-weekly

· AL: 35% daily standard clean, 35% daily light clean, 30% weekly

· SNF: 60% daily standard clean and 40% daily light clean plus a deep clean weekly or biweekly

Overall, 80% of communities reported doing some form of a deep clean, whether annual or semi-annual. These are typically scheduled for somewhere between 2.5-4 hours.

Staffing

What is the correct amount of housekeeping staff for your facility's number of resident units?

Here's our research on staffing per 100 resident units:

· Life Plan Communities/Continuing Care Retirement Communities (LPC/CCRC): 4-6.2 housekeeping staff

· IL: 4 housekeeping staff

· AL: 3 housekeeping staff

When it comes to staff turnover, we found the average turnover rate to be a 13% with a high of 30% and low of 1%. And for pay rates, our client base had an average of $10.64/hour pay rate with a high of $15 and low of $9.

Finding your sweet spot with staffing can help increase efficiency and ensure you're maximizing resources.

Rooms Cleaned

Do you know your average number of rooms cleaned per day? This can be an important benchmark to measure where you are today and what's possible for your team in the future.

· IL: 5 rooms/day and average of 78 minutes/room

· AL: 15 rooms/day and average of 20 minutes/room

· SNF: 18 rooms/day and average of 15 minutes/room

QA Programs

Quality assurance (or QA) programs can be very helpful in preparing you for inspections and ensuring that your high levels of service are being promoted across the board.

Here is what we found on the prevalence of QA programs:

· 60% of organizations reported a QA program

· 10% do not have a QA program

· 30% don't have a QA program, but they plan to in the near future

Of those with a QA program, 40% use software and the rest use Excel or pen and paper. Our data also shows 80% of those did QA weekly and 20% bi-weekly or monthly.

See even more senior living housekeeping benchmarks in this webinar.

Better benchmarking with technology

There are a lot of great statistics here, but with all your daily priorities, how do you find the time and resources to benchmark your performance and set goals for improvement?

Technology systems like a senior-living specific CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) can empower you to track and manage your daily operations and work data, then use those numbers to set benchmarks and achieve new goals.

In addition, housekeeping software (like the Housekeeping application for Dude Solutions' TheWorxHub) can provide the tools you need to optimize your daily housekeeping operations from scheduling to staffing to asset management. With our software, clients have seen a 10-15% increase in productivity, reduced risk of compliance citations and a 10-point increase in resident satisfaction.

Grace Flack is the Senior Marketing Writer at Dude Solutions and creates content specifically for their Healthcare and Senior Living markets. Dude Solutions, parent company of TheWorxHub, is a leading provider of operations management software to senior living organizations, including CCRCs, assisted living, independent living, skilled nursing and memory care. Learn more about Dude Solutions or schedule a demo online.