CHANGE AGENT
Lori Alford Sees Change as a Trigger for Senior Living Innovation, Progress
By Tom Gresham
surface-level change. For an organization to progress, she said, more comprehensive change is necessary. “That saying ‘What got you here will not
L
get you there’ is very true,” Alford said. “I think sometimes when we sit in the C-suite, we feel like we kind of earned our stripes to get there and we have a lot of knowledge, but at the rate that society changes we have to constantly change. It’s easy to say, ‘I've done this in another company, and it really worked and here are the policies and proce-
42 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE MAY/JUNE 2023
ori Alford, co-founder and chief operating officer of Avanti Senior Living, prizes change and not just
dures for it.’ They could be years and years old, and you can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, I'm gonna tweak it.’” Alford said there simply are pivotal mo-
ments when things need to be redefined and rethought. It’s difficult in those moments not to lean on what has worked before. “You have to be able to set all of that
aside, and say, ‘We’re gonna have a clean canvas and start from scratch and reinvent ourselves,’” she said.
Workforce Demands Spur New Methods For Avanti, a recent focus has been on how to adapt to best meet the needs of its work-
force – a particularly pressing and critical matter in light of the current labor shortage in the senior living industry and elsewhere. Among Alford’s primary interests has
been updating onboarding and training to align with the evolving preferences and behaviors of a new generation of team members. “We have to understand that the way
we trained and learned isn’t going to work today,” Alford said. “And it certainly isn’t going to work tomorrow.” Alford said training and onboarding
practices in senior living can tend to be “archaic.” With children in high school,
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