Not long ago, Jack wrote of Villa Vie Residences. This is a follow-up.
By Jack Cumming
Imagine getting a notice that your residence agreement was cancelled due to behavior impacting community morale. This is what happened to one 68-year-old solo-aging woman after she sold her home and business to move onto the Villa Vie Odyssey cruise ship.
Don’t Complain
It turned out that she had complained in a prospective-residents-only WhatsApp group about occupancy delays and the relocation of her unit from what she had chosen to another. The management wrote her that they had received over a dozen complaints from other residents about her “continuous complaints and negativity.”
“This behavior,” she was told, “has significantly impacted the morale and well-being of other [residents].”
Instead of listening to her or trying to assuage her concerns for the betterment of the undertaking, the management choose to inform her, “Given the overwhelming feedback, we must cancel your contract permanently to uphold the well-being and satisfaction of our community.”
Broken Trust
We’ll spare you the aftermath, though the parallels with the trust relationships in senior living are evident. Click here and here for the story of how this is playing out through social media. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like a wise move for a business that is already drawing media criticism. To listen to her tell her side of the story, click here.
To bring you up to date, in case you missed this earlier article, with Villa Vie Residences, people are able to buy a cabin on a ship that can be theirs for at least 15 years or the life of the ship, if longer. Imagine having a home with other adventurers as the ship circumnavigates the earth. “Ownership” is evidenced by fractional shares in the ship, the Villa Vie Odyssey. Shorter-term leases without ownership are also available. It’s a lot like a floating CCRC.
Like many CCRCs, the ship is already 31 years old, and that has caused challenges in getting it fully certificated so that residents can sleep and live onboard. Unexpected difficulties have delayed residency for several months, and wannabe residents are getting understandably antsy. Nevertheless, most public conversation by residents has been positive. Until now.
Senior Living Parallels
Most senior living enterprises give priority to resident welfare and work assiduously to respond constructively to resident concerns as they arise. Some managers, though — especially those who are isolated in a central office — can be insensitive to resident concerns.
For instance, to cite a recent occurrence, a central office functionary may demand that a community room be set aside for a week in support of a staff training session. For residents, whose events are thus preemptively canceled, it can seem similar to the feeling a person renting a house might feel if a landlord were to announce that the tenant had to relinquish the kids’ bedroom for a week. That would not be tolerated in a tenant’s home, and hauteur should not be tolerated in senior living.
Inverting the Pyramid
In many senior housing corporations, there is a power pyramid, with the central office at the top, local managers and staff intermediate, and residents at the bottom. It’s time to reverse that honor-shame hierarchy. Residents should be treated with the respect that their position and their life experience deserve.
The means to accomplish such a reversal of respect is possible. Ideally, the organizations would initiate the reversal themselves. That would be consistent with the common claim of maintaining not-for-profit principles or, for many for-profits the implication that the owners can be trusted to treat residents like family.
There is also a role for investment bankers, development and refurbishing advisers, and others to help organizations through the cultural transformation that such a just reform would require. It’s likely, too, that change to emphasize trust and resident empowerment could revivify the industry and become the path toward growth and profit.
The benefits of congregate senior living are obvious. As age brings loss, friends are there to sustain you, and staff are available to help. The only drawback is the humiliating, fearful subordination to the dictates of insensitive, sometimes self-serving higher-ups. That is unnecessary, and the sooner the power hierarchy is shifted, the sooner senior living will regain its compelling appeal.
High time someone had the guts to do this. Customer Service doesn’t mean rolling over and accepting every negative comment and complaint. Community living means all must accept at least a certain civil level of subjugating personal preference and expression to the overall benefit of the neighbors. If there were that many resident complaints, then I’m certain the person wasn’t willing to “deliver the mail to the right post office box” and leave it there. I’ve been in this business for 25 years and we all know that some folks are just not built for congregate living. It’s a sales person’s responsibility to weed these folks out and help them find a solution for their future that won’t be a drag for others; but sometimes there is so much eagerness to make the sale that an enormous level of disrespect and demand is overlooked during the sales process.
Well said. Not everyone fits in, and there needs to be a mechanism to help them find their happy home. Thank you, Bill, for understanding all the nuances of this tricky situation.