Centered in any great senior living community is an even greater Activity Director. As an Activity Director, it is your job to enrich the lives of those residents whom you are engaging with every day. By working with Activity Directors all over the country, we have learned the biggest challenge is that there are simply not enough hours in the day. Often times, they find themselves acting as a one-man show wearing too many hats. This challenge can be addressed further in a recent Senior Housing Forum article in a post titled, “This Gives Activities Directors a Big Break.”
Below, read about 3 ways your Life Enrichment Team can save time so they can get back to doing what they do best, enriching resident lives.
Automated Calendaring and Menus
Prior to working with LifeShare, most of our partners experienced similar struggles. Activity Staff would spend hours of their day manually creating calendars and menus. Whether inputting individual events, adjusting document margins, or typing out daily menus, calendaring can easily be a nightmare. However, with the LifeShare calendaring tool, we have changed the lives of Activity Staff every month across the US.
LifeShare’s calendaring solution offers the ability to create recurring events. Do you normally have Bingo at 2:00 pm on Tuesdays? Input the event once and never have to do it again. Are you tired of manually creating your own calendar on Word? Publish a PDF of your monthly, weekly or daily activities calendar with one click.
Along with calendaring, LifeShare offers easy repeating menu imports. Upload your menu cycle once into our system and it will be automatically displayed throughout your community. With this feature, our partners have saved time creating individual menus.
Simplified Communication
Even with the technological evolution, Activity Directors have searched for more efficient ways to communicate with residents and families. The process of communicating events, schedules, and announcements can be tasking and difficult with so many different modes of communication. Fortunately, with Lifeshare, this information can be entered once and pushed to an entire community’s digital signage, mobile app, and calendars. Before LifeShare, our partners spent countless hours walking from room to room attempting to keep residents informed. With LifeShare, residents are notified through a familiar form of communication – the television.
Also included in our LifeShare ecosystem is a free Family Mobile App. With this tool, staff and family members of seniors can easily stay up-to-date and informed about what’s going in the community. They are able to check menus, activities, announcements, and even communicate with their loved ones through the app.
Activity Assistance
In addition to calendaring and communication tools, Activity Directors are always in search of new activity resources that can help them when they get in a jam. Life can be unpredictable with last minute cancellations and delays. LifeShare can be your activity savior, helping with new activities and providing filler events.
LifeShare’s activity resource provides flexibility to staff whether the activity is 5 minutes or an hour long. Included in this activity resource are games, podcasts, music, faith programming, and more. Many of the games within the LifeShare system offer various cognitive benefits (attention, memory, spatial processing, etc.) that can be turned into an extended group activity to produce socialization and teamwork.
Are you interested in finding out how LifeShare can enhance your community? Give us a call at 317.825.0320 or shoot us an email at info@lifesharetech.com to receive a free 30-day trial!