When Chaos Rules, Care Suffers

A few years ago, a corporate relocation client of ours was promoted and immediately transferred from Minneapolis to New York City. His employer denied him a home-finding trip, so while the apartment he rented fit his requirements for location and budget, he’d had to ship his belongings before securing the space. When the truck arrived, he had far too much stuff for a tiny New York apartment, and what he ended up with looked for all intents and purposes like a storage unit with a kitchen.

That scenario, as I came to learn, isn’t unique to corporate relocation.

An 85-year-old retired academic I knew in Dallas moved from a large apartment into a smaller unit in an assisted living community. A scholar by vocation, decades’ worth of books, journals, and files made the move with her, and when her furniture and cartons were delivered, the situation was reminiscent of that of the guy in Manhattan. There was a path from the door to the bed and not much else, only in her case, the books and files were also covered in dust.

Housekeeping had no way to clean the rooms properly. There was no clear path through the space, no surfaces accessible, and the dust from decades of accumulated paper created a health concern that compounded over time. Staff delivering meals or checking in had to navigate around furniture that was never meant to fit there, and since the woman used a walker, it seemed that a fall wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when.

She knew this wasn’t right, but that awareness solved nothing. She was embarrassed by the space, reluctant to have staff in it, and slower to engage with the community around her.

With a project manager coordinating the sequence, the work of the organizers, movers, and the disposal vendors would’ve happened efficiently and in a logical sequence, and the woman would’ve arrived in a space that was fully functional, with room to move and surfaces that could be utilized properly.

This illustrates the difference between a residence that supports care delivery and one that complicates it. The care burden in that room remains higher than it needs to be to this day, and this outcome was in fact my inspiration for offering project management for seniors in transition.

Bottom line: Residents who don’t acclimate don’t thrive, and residents who don’t thrive increase demand on staff.

In corporate relocation, smart companies learn that a transferee who arrives in a dysfunctional living situation becomes a distracted, resentful employee, which shapes their relationship with the employer long after the boxes are unpacked. Senior living operates on the same dynamic, only with higher stakes. After all, the resident isn’t going home at the end of the day.