Aiming to foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion in its ranks, AccentCare has developed an annual program to study the demographics of its workforce.
The hospice and post-acute care provider recently unveiled a study of its nearly 30,000 active employees in an effort to both understand and improve driving forces that create a culture of inclusion, belonging and uniqueness for staff and patients alike, according to Rafael Fantauzzi, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer at AccentCare.
“Data is a critical part of our journey to become a more inclusive organization,” Fantauzzi told Hospice News. “We established a five-year strategic plan that would help us build the infrastructure and tactics necessary to become a more inclusive organization, internally for our workforce, but also for our customers and our patients. It’s important that we are inclusive as we make sure we’re providing quality care.”
Dallas-headquartered AccentCare is a portfolio company of the private equity firm Advent International, offering hospice, palliative care, personal care, non-medical services, home health, care management and high-acuity home care.
AccentCare’s journey towards greater inclusivity started to take shape in 2020, with Fantauzzi being brought on in 2021 to help drive its equity and diversity efforts, he said. That year, AccentCare began collecting voluntary information that employees shared internally around gender and ethnicity in order to understand “where the company stands,” and where it needs to improve, Fantauzzi said.
The company decided to make the data publicly available to foster transparency and trust among its staff and patients, he added.
“What this unveiled behind the scenes is the scope of our total workforce composition,” Fantauzzi said. “We are collecting this data to understand how the labor market looks for the type of jobs that we’re in the health care industry. It gives us first a way to benchmark ourselves to see if we’re representing the markets in which we operate.”
AccentCare operates more than 260 locations in 30 states, caring for 210,000 patients and families annually. The company is utilizing the workforce demographic data to help shape its future strategic recruitment efforts, primarily to grasp and what the future pipeline of labor will look like, according to Fantauzzi.
Women represented the bulk of AccentCare’s workforce last year, with 88.4% identifying as female, according to the study. Males made up 11.6% of staff, while non-gender specific individuals made up the remaining 0.03%.
Generationally, baby boomers made up nearly a quarter (22.9%) of the company’s employees in 2022, while Generations X, Y and Millennials represented 69.2%.
About 33.5% of the AccentCare’s workforce identified as African American, with caucasians and Latinos accounting for 31.4% and 28.3% respectively.
“We will use data to focus some of our strategic attraction to make sure we are providing jobs and economic stability in our underserved communities,” he told Hospice News.
Future plans will include an annual workforce demographic study that will help measure the company’s inclusivity progress using a DEI index. Currently this index rests at 74%, with AccentCare reaching for a score of 80% on internal diversity, equity and inclusion benchmarks.
“That diversity, equity and inclusion index is a key performance indicator as an organization on how we are doing on inclusion,” Fantauzzi said. “Diversity and inclusivity provides a healthy environment for staff to thrive, and that helps our retention and attraction of high-quality talent. It’s super crucial that our patients also see that we are an inclusive company.”