Building Culture Through Language

So I really am excited for our conversation today as we talked maybe a month or so ago about really the experience at Parker and how language is something that you guys really start from a team member's day one there.

Why did you guys decide to focus on language and really look at it from the very beginning of someone's experience with Parker Health Group?

I think that Parker has always, they started their Eden journey around 1998.

So language was always something that was being used in all of the communities and the different programs and services.

However, I think what we discovered was after going through the pandemic, that there was a lot of institutional creep that started to make its head seen.

And we started using language that wasn't what we considered Parker language.

And that's when we decided that we really needed to rededicate and redouble down on what our person-centered journey was.

would look like and really commit to what that would look like going forward in the future.

We had a lot of managers at that time who left.

We had a lot of new managers who weren't given the same opportunities to really learn about person-directed living.

So we decided right after the pandemic to rededicate ourselves to making sure that everyone was on the same page.

Wonderful.

Okay.

And you kind of alluded to really with the pandemic, but what were you hoping when you think about, you noticed the language, you said it wasn't Parker, right? That kind of change, that shift that happened during the pandemic.

What were you hoping to influence or change by really looking at that language again now after the pandemic?

Well, I think, you know, Parker as an organization is over 100 years old.

And so it started as one small nursing home, and we've seen how the organization has grown and evolved.

And we've always seen our language as something that really drives our person-directed journey and saw those changes from early on when we first started making language changes.

You know, neither Pam nor I were here back then, so we actually did a little asking around sort of what were some of the first things that Parker did.

And one of the first things that Parker did was to change going from being in the wings, living in a wing, working in a wing, to being in neighborhoods and small homes and involving the elders who lived in those neighborhoods and the care partners and what they would be called and sort of seeing how those kinds of transformations made a difference for the people who lived in those neighborhoods and also the people who were working in those neighborhoods.

And to see what the power of words, right? We talk about that all the time.

Certainly Eden talks about that all the time and we do at Prep Group too, the power that language has and how we feel and how we show up and the intentionality that we have and how our language can reflect it and also influence it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Even when I think about the word unit or you said wings and automatically I was thinking of a bird, right? Like we don't have to think of it in a place where someone's living, right? And if I'm living on a wing or I'm living in a unit, that automatically feels institutional versus neighborhood or such.

So when you guys decided to really kind of take hold of this again, right, which I love that it was something that you all noticed as a team that, you know what, we've probably slipped back a little bit into some patterns.