OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
The Culture of Kindness
Using its core values as a guide, Stellar Senior Living serves up kindness to staff and residents alike. By Kenya McCullum
states, has built a culture around kindness. In fact, a common theme throughout the organization is the idea that “it’s better to be kind than to be right.” To create this culture of kindness, Stellar has four core values that guide the way it operates – from the way staff is managed on a daily basis, to how res- idents are cared for. These values, service, inspiration, integrity, and joy are present in every part of the company – and the culi- nary services team is no exception. To find out how Stellar is using its four core values to serve up kindness to its staff and residents in unique ways, we spoke to Frances Showa, the company’s national director of culinary operations.
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How would you describe the four values that guide Stellar Senior Living’s culture? If you work for Stellar, you strongly believe in these four values: service, inspiration, integrity, and joy. We are all about service. Our associates know that number one is we are in service to our residents. And those of us at the corporate office know we are not only in service to the residents, we are in service to the associates, which I think is really important to always remember. The next is inspiration. We can find inspiration everywhere, so we are always asking our teams for ideas. It’s not just coming from corporate and then disseminated down; it's all collaboration. Integrity is really important, so doing
the right thing when no one is looking is something we talk about all the time. This one to me is very important because you've
tellar Senior Living, which provides memory care, assisted living, and independent living services in nine
heard of employees who are over and above achieving, doing the right thing, and then you've got the ones who are slackers. You lose great people when they see mediocre employees being tolerated. I would say that our high-functioning people are also pushing the lower-functioning ones because integrity's a big part of what we do. We’re holding the lives of elderly people in our hands every day, and we have to trust that our employees are doing the right thing all the time with nobody looking. And then our last value is joy. We’re joyful
people. We have a lot of fun. We celebrate everything. Every Monday, we have “stars of the week” and we celebrate and honor anybody – frontline staff, you name it, any- body in our communities could be a star of the week. I think the best part of that is that usually the executive director will bring those stars into the office and they’re able to talk right away with the senior leaders of our company. How many companies do that? How many companies know the names of their frontline employees and know the names of their residents?
At a recent Argentum Executive Roundtable, you mentioned that Stellar is using a robot to serve residents and alleviate the stress of kitchen staff. What has been the result of this? We're doing two things: We're using Servie the Robot and we're using a POS system. We started with the serving robots because it’s so much easier for a server to take a plate and put it on the robot and send it back to the dish room than have that person running back and forth themselves. It’s the same with the food; the server’s not there
36 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022
at the window. The cook is able to put the food on the plate, cover the plate, press a button, and send the robot to the ta- ble. Then the server sees their food going straight to the table and is able to walk over and immediate- ly serve it. How cool is that? Then when you combine that with the
Frances Showa
National director of culinary operations Stellar Senior Living
POS system, it’s even better because now I don't have servers taking five orders at once and then just dumping it all on the cooks. Now I have a server able to, in a timely fashion, take an order and move to the next table. In the meantime, that order’s going to the cook who then can fix the order and put it on the robot. It goes out by the time the server’s taken the last order. The beauty of it is that I don’t need to
have the servers in the back of the house at all; they can be in the front of the house now. The server stays in the dining room
Every Monday, we have “stars of the week” and we celebrate and honor anybody – frontline staff, you name it, anybody in our communities could be a star of the week.
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