Best practices in retirement village operations management

Enhance your retirement living operations with these top tips on best practices.

Ensuring smooth retirement village operations management is both complex and demanding, and it requires significant experience, a vast array of skills and access to contemporary management systems. Whether it's managing resident wellbeing or safety, ensuring operational excellence, nurturing a sense of community or anything in between, there is a litany of areas to consider and oversee. In this article, we will explore best practice tips to manage retirement living operations.  

What is included in operations management in a retirement village? 

Retirement village operations management lies at the heart of ensuring a great experience for anyone living in a retirement village and it brings together a blend of skills in both effective coordination and forging personal relationships. Successful retirement village operations management means providing a seamlessly enjoyable experience for village residents.  

It might be managing the maintenance of the village, managing the day-to-day tasks of village staff, ensuring transparent communications between residents and staff, organising events and activities to build a sense of community and more. It covers every facet of what it takes to run a successful retirement village.  

Retirement Village Operations Management Best Practices

When considering what it takes to manage retirement living operations and to provide outstanding services to residents, nurturing a happier community in your village, there are some best practices to keep in mind that will contribute to the smooth operations of retirement villages and the satisfaction and overall experience of residents.

So, let’s take a look at them below... 

Managing village facilities and amenities

The quality and availability of retirement village amenities and facilities play a crucial role in the overall quality of life of residents, so managers should ensure that these areas are always maintained to the highest standard and are always geared towards meeting the residents’ needs and individual preferences. With Person Centred Software’s Maintenance and Asset Management feature, you can monitor all assets and maintenance jobs across your retirement villages, improving communications between staff and maintenance teams and allowing you to raise and manage jobs more efficiently. 

Keeping resident experience at the forefront of the management of amenities and facilities is crucial, so it’s a good idea to regularly consult residents and gather their feedback on what they like and dislike but also to monitor their preferences which may change over time. This can be achieved to the greatest effect by using the Feedback & Quality Management feature, which ensures processes of feedback and acknowledgement that are both confidential and transparent. With this feature, you can conduct surveys to gather feedback from residents on how they want to improve the village.  

Understanding the needs of the residents in the retirement village is also essential to ensuring accessibility and inclusivity when managing amenities. Whether it’s including accessible pathways, ramps, elevators or offering a variety of amenities and facilities that cater to different interests and preferences, this will go a long way to providing a village environment that offers a smooth resident experience.

Fostering an inclusive community 

It's important to create a welcoming and inclusive community for people living in retirement villages – fostering a sense of belonging and connection in a positive and supportive environment can be achieved by organising activities and events that are geared towards resident hobbies and interests that encourage interaction, friendship and connection between staff and residents. A great way of doing this is through Person Centred Software’s Lifestyle Management feature, which provides activity calendars, village news feeds, digital newsletters to let residents know of upcoming activities and events and many more features to enhance your community’s lifestyle and wellbeing.  

Being inclusive of different cultural backgrounds and physical abilities will further help to create an inclusive environment, where the residents feel that they are part of a supportive and caring community.  

Financial responsibility 

This is arguably the most important aspect of retirement village operations management as without good financial management, every other attempt at ensuring best operational practice will be hindered from the get-go. Retirement village managers and operators should have a good understanding of the financial needs of their operations and be able to develop and implement sustainable budgets that support the needs of the community over the long term.  

Some best practice ideas for financial responsibility to manage retirement village operations is conducting regular financial review discussions with resident committees, and regularly reviewing expenses verses projections, to ensure that the retirement village can operate successfully.

Effective communication

Being able to effectively communicate information, address concerns and foster a sense of community in retirement villages is essential to sustained resident wellbeing. Residents should be kept informed on any changes or improvements being made as well as upcoming events and community news. This can be achieved by using a Communications Management tool, like a messaging platform designed to improve communications between staff, residents and loved ones.  

Effective communication is also another important aspect of providing an inclusive and supportive environment. It’s important that residents have a means by which they can voice their compliments, feedback, concerns or opinions on the operations of the retirement village; making sure that people living in retirement villages know their voices are being heard is essential to their sense of belonging and wellbeing. This too can be achieved by using the Feedback & Quality Management feature.

Safety, security and wellbeing 

Another crucial part of the residents’ sense of belonging and wellbeing is whether they feel safe and secure in their community, which should be one of the highest priorities for retirement village managers. This includes taking the appropriate measures and implementing protocols to protect residents from potential risks and hazards within the village, and managers are recommended to stay up to date with all the latest industry standards that relate to safety and security within the community. 

It’s important to conduct regular inspections and checks of the amenities and equipment to ensure that everything is being maintained properly. This includes monitoring the fire safety systems, the electrical and plumbing systems, removing any potential trip hazards from common areas and more. The preventative functionality of the Maintenance & Asset Management feature means that it’s easy for village managers to keep on top of the many maintenance activities and potential hazards mentioned above.  

Not only this, but residents need to feel that they are in a safe environment, so managers should implement entry protocols through things such as key registers, safety key lock boxes, to ensure that residents have the peace of mind they deserve and that they need to feel safe and secure.  

What does good retirement village operations management achieve?

At its core, a retirement village should be a safe, supportive and positive environment for people who are entering a new phase of their lives. It should provide comfort, joy, happiness and peace of mind for those living in retirement villages and allow them the opportunity to form new relationships and maintain a connection to existing ones. 

Through the retirement village operations management best practices mentioned above, you can provide an environment for residents for them to be able to live their best lives, ensuring their village experience goes smoothly above anything else.  

Retirement Village Management Software 

At Person Centred Software, we want to provide you with all the tools you need to ensure the best outcomes possible for the residents at your retirement village. We want to be a long-term partner to retirement living operators as we aim to help you improve the quality of life for people living and working in your retirement living villages.  

We do this by providing intuitive and user-friendly retirement living software that allows operators to enrich the resident experience in their villages. Just click here find out more about how our retirement living software can help you.