In conversation with… SeneCura

In ancient times, achieving a certain age was considered to be the stage where wisdom and old age were attained. Being also the stage of life where people need care. Nowadays while the world preaches stay young and enjoy while you can, as if it were the only true life, there are companies like Senecura that take care of those who are not young anymore but deserve a full life too.

This Austrian enterprise was founded in 1998 and has turned into the leading provider of nursing and healthcare services in the private sector. Dr Markus Schwarz, COO at Senecura explains that their core mission is to provide a home for residents who need specific care or rehabilitation needs. They provide an environment as close as possible to a family home to our residents.

(Q) But what about your employees…

(A) Our employees have a very special mission to fulfill – to bring their personal touch and emotional energy to transform a professional facility into a loving home for elderly people. We try to build small communities that resemble the homes of many people.

(Q) Is their work for them as a second home?

(A) Well, home also has a connotation of withdrawal and separation from professional life. We also must respect and encourage the needs of our employees to distance themselves from so many feelings and emotional relations (including frequent losses of beloved residents), they develop during work. So, in this case, the workplace cannot always be a home for everybody and has to separate itself sometimes actively from the employee’s home.

(Q) Do you carry out any kind of initiatives to make the employee feel at ease in the company? To somehow develop a bond, a feeling of belonging?

(A) Our main goal is to keep the communication and confidence in the different teams. Changes in the team structure and team leadership are always periods of instability and reorientation for all the team members. Therefore, the most important aspect for making employees feel comfortable at their workplace is extensive leadership training for the team leaders, to encourage communication among staff members as well as a spirit of mutual aid.

We strongly believe that these interpersonal factors are the most important ingredients of employee satisfaction and therefore the possibility for employees to perform their best services by being at ease with their professional environment.

(Q) Do you have a way of measuring the satisfaction of your employees? How would you know if their jobs make them happy? Do you think there is any relation with their own homes?

(A) We continuously measure employee satisfaction with a monthly survey that measures not only satisfaction in the job and the work environment but also with the team leadership. Over 60% of our employees show a very good satisfaction and bonding with their workplace.

Happiness, however, is a completely different issue, since happiness is not something you can simply provide, but needs to be earned. In our profession of taking care of people in need, happiness is usually very close around the corner, since the best way towards happiness is to care for other people. The main reason for unhappiness in the job of our caretakers is to not being able to provide enough time and care to our residents.

Usually, being happy is a way of living the present by caring for others. I therefore do not see a strong connection between happiness at home and in the workplace. That being said, of course, the opposite is definitely true, where an unhappy home will also make life at work more difficult.

(Q) Do you think that workers with a happy or stable home are more efficient in their jobs? What are the differences you can perceive?

(A) The main factor for efficiency in the job is in my experience the sense of purpose in one’s life. Wherever people see a purpose, they will try to perform the best they can. In essence, as soon as people see the purpose in what they do, they will start to excel into excellence and transform the tasks they have assigned into fulfilling activities for themselves and others. With this purpose in mind, all activities will be performed with excellence, which in the long run gives the most efficient results.

(Q) How important do you think home is for people working at Senecura?

(A) Reflecting on the various employees in our nursing homes and their diverse backgrounds (we employ over 13.000 people from over 70 different nationalities) having a home and providing a home to others is a very important factor for them. However, especially if you think about the needs of the elderly people in our home, which are many times fragile and vulnerable, a home should not turn into a static protective realm that conserves the past but needs to be a platform for the dynamics of life in all its human forms.

In our nursing homes, we want to make sure that life can continue for our residents and provide a fresh taste of life for all our residents daily.
The same is true for the homes of our employees, which are on the one hand needed as a place to withdraw from the sometimes-exhausting work but are also places where life has to move on to provide new stories and experiences for the small communities we are trying to build.

Stable Homes

This title is a tautology. The term home already implies the concept of stability. Just as it is assumed that a home is a place where people develop healthily because they have a safe, strong and intimate family environment.

Curiously, however, something is not right when more and more schools are setting up mental health services for children and adolescents; and according to the World Health Organisation, in 2021 one in seven young people aged 10 to 19 suffered from a mental disorder, with depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders being the main causes.

Looking back, I was re-reading one of the chapters of the first book ‘The Home: Multidisciplinary Reflections‘ that we published in 2017 with Edward Elgar Publishers, in which Dr Sir Harry Burns warned about the impact of the home on children.

In his chapter ‘The impact of the home environment on children’s health and cognitive and social development’ Prof. Burns pointed to a stable home and strong family support as key mechanisms to combat the serious health problems that children with unstable homes face in adulthood.

He referred to a report published in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics that provided evidence showing a clear link between the circumstances in which children live and the risk of serious health problems in adulthood (Garner and Shonkoff, 2012).

Circumstances that can jeopardise children’s future health include: chaotic and unstable homes, neglect, abuse, domestic violence, parental addictions, heart disease, cancer and mental illnesses such as depression (Shonkoff et al., 2009).

Households most likely to expose children to these adverse circumstances tend to be at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. The relationship between poverty and ill-health is one of the least addressed but most important issues in public health. These children are deprived of vital opportunities from childhood onwards.

Research is needed to anticipate the early symptoms and provide prevention or defense mechanisms on many issues that are a key challenge for today’s society.

Spring Ready

As we come out of the shortest month of the year those of us in the Northern Hemisphere start to notice that the days are – finally – getting longer and the mornings lighter. These winter months are the ones where we spend more time in our homes and we are entering a period traditionally dedicated to “spring cleaning.” Perhaps in the past, as people had spent so long at home during the winter, a thorough- going clean was needed and energy levels had risen enough to take on more major housework. This fascinating article from the archive of Johnson and Johnson explains the more significant health benefits of the annual cleaning campaign.

I am not sure that spring cleaning is quite what it used to be before so many easy-care materials and more minimalist interiors, but the urge to shake off the winter and get things fresh and bright for spring remains a healthy impulse.

The topic of housework or the care of the home can too easily be side-lined as superficial and yet it can have a significant impact of individual and family well-being. In our work with the International Center for Work and Family we found that positive shared attitudes to housework had a direct link to positive parent/child relationships, in terms of the time parents spent engaging with their children.  Recent research conducted by the Institute for Family Studies shows how division of labour in household tasks can help prevent division of marriage partners. Rosemary L. Hopcraft explains,  “Studies suggest that in the U.S., when husbands and wives divide household labor more evenly, marriages tend to be more stable.”

These impacts are often over-looked and yet there is increasing evidence that mutual caring for a shared environment improves relationships and levels of personal and emotional care-giving.  In their paper Housework, Health, and Well-Being in Older Adults , authors Jacqueline Rodriguez- Stanley et al  look at the ways in which attitudes to the shared work of the home have life-long consequences.

All this, and not to mention the mental health benefits of these activities and their results. “Though it’s mostly a physical act, most people don’t realize that they are actually refreshing and renewing their mental spaces, too,” claims Bridget DeFiccio LPC, Senior Vice President of Integrated Health at Acenda.

Lots of motivation to get ready for spring!

Happiness: how we relate

A few days ago, we had the opportunity to present ‘Happiness and Domestic Life’ at the European University Miguel de Cervantes in the Spanish city of Valladolid. Three of their professors are authors of one of the chapters of the book and invited us to talk about Home and Happiness at their University.

Professor Raquel Martínez, PhD in Psychology and specialist in Positive Psychology, explained from this discipline that a person’s happiness or well-being is studied through different indicators that are proposed by different models, such as: self-acceptance, purpose in life, autonomy, personal growth, mastery of the environment, the ability to commit to oneself… But there is one that is repeated and that has to do with relationships.

Undoubtedly, how we relate to others is fundamental when it comes to assessing whether we are happy or not… Prof. Martínez stated that our future depends on how we learnt to build relationships at home. We will know how to relate, better or worse, depending on how we develop our attachment as children. Attachment is the affective bond that is formed in the first year of life thanks to our interaction with our caregivers or attachment figures. When attachment figures are unconditional and attend to the child’s needs, the child generates the expectation of being worthy of being loved and will build future relationships with security.

Professor Celia Martín, PhD in Business Organisation from the University of Valladolid and an expert in Human Resources, looked for parallels between the company and the home, understanding both as two key spheres in a person’s life and in which it would be essential for our happiness to achieve a positive natural transfer, i.e. that one nurtures the other and vice versa. Both cores are places of development for the person at different stages of life, both have very similar structures on a small and large scale. Moreover, nowadays, the boundaries of separation are becoming increasingly difficult to establish, so it would be great to transfer this human component from the home to the workplace.

On the other hand, one of the motivations that employees often value when choosing a company or staying with it is the personal relationships with their colleagues, superiors and the rest of the working environment. How are these relationships within the human group within a company? Is there communication, do we take care of each other, how is the support?

Elena Gordo and Ricardo Pindado, family delegates of the archbishopric of Valladolid, insisted that the home is the place where you are loved for who you are and where there is a keyword that does not understand percentages: dedication. Ricardo said that it is in the home that we learn to relate to each other, where we learn to give thanks, ask for forgiveness, respect others…

Finally, Prof. Joaquín Esteban PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca and PhD in Theory of Education from the University of Valladolid, reflected on the current concept of home… and compared the sedentary, restful, timeless home with the new ‘liquid homes’ we find today, in which everything is the fruit of speed, in which there is no timeline and it is more difficult to put down roots.

The ‘liquid home’ is what anthropologists call the “non-place”, modules of connections, but not prepared for nesting, for inhabiting. If we think of the house, a house is not a home, unless it is a lived-in house. But what is living? Is it biological inertia? The house has to be hospitable for the sacred essence of human life to be realised. But is it necessary to build to inhabit, or is inhabiting prior to building?

We shall soon be devoting a whole post to the contribution of philosopher Joaquin Estaban, to this important debate to discover an increasingly predominant reality that is worth exploring in depth.

In conversation with… Wonder Foundation

In 2024 we want to reach out to companies, no matter what type of company, the workplace where people spend as much or more time than at home and which therefore also influences their way of life.

We want to find out what initiatives companies take to make employees feel at ease in their workplace, and how they make sure that their work/family balance is real.

Today we talk to the CEO of Wonder Foundation Carmen Gonzalez. She leads a foundation that builds better futures for women and girls, providing them with education and training to lift them out of poverty for good. They are based in London but have work camps all over the world.

Angela (A): Are you in Wonder aware that the office is like a second home for your employees?

Carmen (C): We are aware that work is very important for our employees, the nature of our work, the conditions and also the environment: one that is safe (emotionally and physically) and uplifting. I don’t think people spend a lot of time in the office as most people work remotely or 3/5 days from home.

A: Do you carry out any initiatives to make the employee feel at ease in the company? To somehow develop a bond, a feeling of belonging?

C: We have our pipeline weekly where we share learnings, and good things as well as future plans and ask for help from each other. We have quarterly strategy reviews and bi-monthly learning days about aspects of our work.  We also have a great set of benefits (designed by our employees which includes family days – 3 extra holidays at Christmas, TOIL, 5 days paid leave for big life event and weddings) and a great maternity package (6 months full paid and 6 months 50%).

A: Do you think there is a high percentage of happy employees? Why do you think they are happy? From your department and your expertise what are the 4 conditions or requirements that make the employee happy?

C: Without sounding pretentious, I dare say all of them…  Trust is the reason, trust which includes honest feedback, development, ownership of their work and financial benefits.

A: Have you noticed whether, after the pandemic, there is a greater desire for teleworking, or has it returned to a pre-pandemic normality? What are the reasons of working from home?

C: Yes, people are very happy working from home, London is too big and working from home saves time and money and that time can be spent on jobs around the house that we all have to do or spending time with your children or parents. We have employees in the outer boroughs of central London, so it is more convenient for them to telecommute.

A: How important do you think home is for people working at Wonder Foundation?

C: I often and personally make sure chatting with all my employees and they can let me know if anything is worrying them etc…

CEO of My Home

Social networks are constantly generating debate and not always in the best way because, as we all know, many people hide behind false names to insult and generate controversy. Some time ago, I decided to do a major cleaning of profiles to follow only informative accounts, users who bring knowledge to the world and those with positive profiles that lift our spirits with interesting tips and suggestions.

At Home Renaissance Foundation we spread the word about our work through Twitter (now X) and Instagram. From time to time, I review the content of our followers and last week we experienced a beautiful moment on Instagram.

A person who had previously felt ashamed of choosing to take care of her family and running her home decided to come out in the open as she realised that there was nothing shameful about her work but rather she should have pride in it and that it could help other people in her situation to value themselves and their decision.

She believed that she was alone in a society that values professional work outside the home much more than the work we all do inside, but she was met with collective applause, with social congratulations and, of course, with our recognition.

We know that not everyone can afford or wishes to have one spouse managing the home exclusively, but our research indicates that managing the home is key to the development of all the members of the family. It is also essential for professional wellbeing and all that is learned when this work is carried out. The beauty is to realise that it doesn’t matter how this management is done, but that more and more households value its importance.

Magnanimity

On Monday when I was flying to London for our Annual General Meeting I read in a newsletter that it is necessary to leave behind those people who, on your way to achieving your goals, do not let you move forward, those who slow you down or slow down your progress. This argument was supported by an interview with Michelle Obama in which she compared her race to the White House to climbing Everest and in which she confirmed that they had to leave behind all those who they could not carry to the top…

Right from the start, something sounded wrong to me… just this summer I climbed a 3,000 with some friends and when my strength faltered, the leader would slow down the pace so that we could all keep going. It was repeated over and over again that in the mountain you never leave anyone stranded on the path.

Why have we developed this desire to get to places first, to feel worthy of success without considering all those we meet along the way, and to take pride in the fact that we have to let go of those who “were not ready”?

Grow by making others grow. I like this claim better. This is suggested by Alexandre Havard, disseminator and creator of the Virtuous Leadership System. I strongly believe that this is natural in human beings because thanks to this we manage to develop. It is what is proper to the home. We grow thanks to the impulse of our parents, siblings, grandparents, who in turn grow with us. How long does a baby survive if we abandon it as soon as it is born? Indeed, it is not ready to climb the mountain, but we would never think of leaving it alone. If we learn to grow up together in our homes, what or who influences our lived experience to make us change our minds?

Havard says that there is a lack of magnanimous people in our society. Magnanimity, according to the dictionary, means clemency or benevolence, and which I would dare to translate into 21st-century language as empathy and consideration for others.

Migration Debate

There is a public debate in Spain these days about migration that is being treated rather superficially and lacks scientific and journalistic rigour. In a television talk show, a journalist commented that when ghettos are formed in cities and migrants do not integrate, violence and criminal action arise. A harsh statement.

When I heard this debate, the first thing I thought of was what research or scientific evidence this person was relying on to make such a vehement assertion. And I thought of neighbourhoods and areas in London or Brussels where Spaniards arrived, 60-70 years ago and where today their mayors celebrate the Spanishness of the area in their town halls with Spanish folklore and typical food.

Or I think of London’s Chinatown, which will soon be celebrating its New Year and to which Londoners and hundreds of tourists flock to enjoy Asian cuisine. I also think of the Arab quarter in Brussels where I used to go every Friday to buy fish in Brussels.

As we saw at the Experts Meeting in Washington, whose book is about to come out, migration has many causes, normally the escape from a country of origin that is not experiencing good times, where there is violence or hunger, and one leaves in search of a better life. It is a very difficult decision because you leave behind family and customs. And of course, problems, clashes, confrontations arise… but this is due to a clear lack of resources, understanding, humility and desire to serve or help on both sides. People in irregular situations are obviously much more vulnerable to discrimination and marginalisation.

Putting down roots in another place, although it is not easy, involves being friendly in the country that receives you and trying to understand what it is like in the place where you are arriving, because this, far from differentiating us, enriches us. Likewise, welcoming those who arrive intending to achieve a better life gives us an unfamiliar vision, but one that does not have to be negative in principle. It is not about saving anyone, but about trying to embrace those other realities that are looking for a new home and we can give it to them.

Nurturing Healthy Relationships

This post comes with the very best wishes for everything that matters to you in the coming year. For most of us, most of the time, it is our relationships which have this central place in our lives. Depending on our circumstances, these will be with our parents, our spouse, our children and grandchildren, our friends, our neighbours and our colleagues. All of the human connections which anchor and support us in our own lives.

We have all, hopefully, had very warm experiences of these connections over the Christmas period, but we do not need to look very far in our world to see times and places where things are less positive and less secure. The home offers a place of security and care at every stage of our lives – through the ups and the downs – and enables the nurturing of relationships within this privileged and intimate space. The home is in itself an anchor, grounding us and holding us steady in whatever each turning year holds.

The centrality of the home to our wider relationships informs HRF’s work with our research partner, the International Center for Work and Family (ICWF) at IESE Business School. Last year we published the first phase of our research programme with ICWF,  infographics outlining findings on the links between attitudes to the work of the home to parent/child relationships and employee well-being. We also shared timely work on the new phenomenon of “phubbing” (ignoring family members by giving priority to our mobile phones).  In the next phase of our partnership, we are busy preparing for a joint Expert Meeting at IESE Barcelona on 8-9 July 2024: Nurturing Healthy Relationships at Home and Work, supported by the Social Trends Institute (STI).

The focus of the meeting recognizes that nurture does not spontaneously occur in our lives, but is formed in the home and lived-out in how we relate to each other outside it, notably in our work attitudes and relationships. Understanding how the experience of home impacts on the work-sphere, and how positive and healthy relationships can be fostered on the basis of this understanding is at the heart of not only this meeting but our research strand with ICWF.

The invited experts will join the distinguished academic leaders of the meeting: Professors Mireia Las Heras, Marc Grau and Yasin Rofcanin. We are delighted that HRF director Professor Marta Bertolaso is one of the confirmed participants for what is shaping up to be a significant agenda for work and home. More details to follow, but if you are a researcher in this field and would like to find out about attending the sessions, please get in touch with us at: info@homerenaissancefoundation.org

All in all HRF has a full and fruitful 2024 in prospect which we look forward to sharing with you, for the benefit of all our homes this year.

In conversation with…

We ended the year talking to another of our directors, this time Professor Mª Julia Prats, who came to HRF when this foundation was just an idea. She participated in that first conference in 2006 convinced that a think tank that studied and analysed the work of the home and the impact it has on the individual was essential in our society.

Mª Julia Prats is Professor holder of the Bertrán Foundation Chair of Entrepreneurship at IESE and Academic Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center. She was nominated Kauffman Emerging Scholar for her dissertation work and has published in international journals, has several books and other contributions. Mª Julia Prats is Doctor of Business Administration by Harvard University, Master of Business Administration by IESE Business School, and holds a Degree in Industrial Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalunya. She has taught at Wharton Business School, IPADE (Mexico), INALDE (Colombia) and University of Asia Pacific (Philippines), among others.

Angela (A): Julia, what would you say about HRF to a person who has never heard of this foundation before?
Julia (J): Home Renaissance Foundation is a think tank in which, with the help of academics from all over the world, we try to create a body of knowledge that allows us to define what home is, how to make a home, whether or not housework is a profession, how it is learned and how it is passed on to the next generations.

Furthermore, it is clear to us that our aim is to catalyse the academic knowledge from different areas that come together in a household and that by creating this body of knowledge the importance of homemaking will be recognised.

Á: You joined this project at its beginnings and you are still here, what has led you to remain linked to this think tank?
J: Without a doubt, the relevance of its objective. I think that in this world we need to better understand how to make a home and that a home is not really just four walls but has wide and important ramifications in people’s lives. Therefore, knowing how to make a home is something that the more we know and the better we know how to transmit it, the better it will be for society.

A: In an increasingly polarised society, what role do you think research plays?
J: The role of research is crucial in order to put first of all an argument that helps dialogue. In HRF we work on issues from a conceptual and an empirical point of view, which helps to have richer dialogues, discovering shades of grey and avoiding polarisations, looking for meeting points for the different issues. I think that as with everything, we are called to know, to know more, to get closer to that truth and, therefore, to do this kind of research. This means that we approach the phenomenon from all the possibilities that the different branches of science offer us.

A: You are a professor at IESE in entrepreneurship, it is one of your main areas of research, HRF started its journey by focusing on research and 17 years later has created a community of experts who have studied the home from different perspectives. What can be applied from the home to entrepreneurship and vice versa, what can we learn from entrepreneurship that we can apply in homes?
J: First of all, HRF is an example of entrepreneurship in itself: it started from scratch, it did not exist and now it has a very notable relevance, in many areas with serious, recognised publications and with a group of academics willing to continue working along these lines. We could speak of a consolidated think tank, although it has a long way to go to continue growing.

That said, if we think about entrepreneurship from a business point of view, entrepreneurs often say that their family is their best venture. I think this is the best answer to your question. Creating a family or building a home is similar to taking a project forward or creating something from scratch, in both cases you need the characteristics or elements of entrepreneurial behaviour: seizing the opportunity, designing it, growing it, formulating the needs of all audiences, making it financially viable, etc.

A: It has become clear that research is important, that it opens doors to dialogue and brings us closer to the truth of things, so how can we attract companies, which are more result-oriented, to invest in research?
J: When companies, i.e. the people who run them, think about how to do good in society, they obviously have many different paths, and there is a very interesting one, among others, which is precisely to help and support social initiatives that in some way promote a healthier society.

When I say social initiatives, I think for example of research initiatives because they have a very big social impact. The impact of good research can change a way of working, a way of thinking about an issue, it can bring solutions that had not been thought of before. This is very important… it is not about new ideas only, it is about generating new solutions based on a better knowledge of the phenomenon, solutions that are more robust and scalable. When you support research, you invest in long-term work. This does not feed the person who is hungry at the moment, but it does teach them how they can earn a living so they can eat in the future.

Investment in research is for those companies or people who have a medium/long-term vision and who are able to see that behind the research and the work of these academics are the ideas that will shape the way things are done in the near future. On the other hand, there is also a great responsibility among those who have the financial means to support this type of initiatives that make society healthier, that open up dialogue and that obtain new arguments that allow us to do things better than we have done them up to now.