Mission statements are great. They are great for the person who wrote it to pat themselves on the back and say, “Look at what I did!”
While missions statements can be great, we don’t believe they don’t translate well in to what we do, day in and day out. How do our teams translate a mission statement in to their work every day?
We do believe that it is important to have a vision. A vision of what care should look like. A vision of how we work together. A vision of how we integrate ourselves in to our community.
As individuals, we do this every year. We sit down and decide what our New Year’s resolutions will be. This past year, I sat down with a few friends who are local business owners and decided that it was time for a change personally. We decided that while resolutions are great, what we really needed was guiding words. I spent hours thinking about what I wanted to do that would be different. What would help me focus my goals for this year? My personal choices were Community, Courage, and Consistency. Each of those words has kept me true to what I wanted to accomplish this year.
With that in mind, I sat down with our team in New Ulm to do this on a business level. As a group, what are our three guiding words going to be that define us and our goals for the year.
For us, it was easy to come up with our three. Below is what our team in New Ulm came up with.
1. Engage. Engage with our residents, their families, with each other and with our community. Our residents are part of our family, and we believe that with that comes a greater responsibility than just another number on the door. Our residents have become part of our family. We treat them as we would if they were part of our own family. It’s an incredible honor to take care of our residents. Their families trust us to care for their most prized possession in life – their loved one.
To do that effectively, we need to be engaged with our residents; their families, and within our community.
2. Together. We cannot do our jobs effectively without each other. It takes everyone to take the best care of the people who call Woodstone their home. It takes great care providers; it takes fantastic people to run our dining experience; it takes amazing nurses; it takes our maintenance team to keep the place looking like new; and it takes our management team to bring it all together, including keeping our morale up.
It also takes you. It takes involving families in to the care conversation. It takes wonderful volunteers who take time out of their busy lives to come and visit with our residents. It takes local pastors to stop by for a visit.
It takes all of us to provide the best possible care. We have an fabulous team in place and are always looking for great people. But the best part of doing this together, is that our family continues to grow.
3. Our third word was something the team came up with on their own. That word was Commitment. A commitment between the whole team to make Woodstone the best community that it can be. While we have a great looking community, what we take the most pride in, is what happens on the inside. Our team is a fabulous group of people. They dedicate themselves to their work. For most, this is not a job, it is a passion. As I have talked with quite a few of them over this past week, you can see it in their eyes. I’m proud to say that they work for Woodstone of New Ulm. They are the heart and soul of what makes this a great place to call home.
As the leaves begin to turn color, we can already start thinking about the colder weather that is on it’s way. With that will come new resolutions for each of us. We challenge you to change it up this year and think about your three guiding words for the year.
Engage – Together – Commit.
These are our three words, what will yours be?
Roman Bloemke, Chief Operations Officer, Woodstone Senior Living
