This post has been updated from an earlier version to clarify comments from Honor CEO Seth Sternberg
It’s only been six months since caregiving service startup Honor made its concierge service for professional caregivers available to San Francisco residents and only a month since it established a presence in Los Angeles. Now the company has moved to add benefits ranging from workers’ comp and paid sick leave to training. Fulltime employees get equity and health benefits, according to a company statement.
Last year, Honor set a goal of establishing a presence in 10 cities, although Honor CEO Seth Sternberg declined to provide specifics at the time beyond San Francisco where it first launched its service. In a phone interview Sternberg, he said the latest move was not prompted by hiring challenges.
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“When we started we were told the average carepro churn would be 60 percent to 100 percent annually because that is what is normal in this industry. In our experience, nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.
Sternberg noted that some reasons for such high churn is that care professionals are generally treated as unskilled labor, there’s a low tolerance for sick days and more than half, 56 percent, are on government assistance. He said his business has made a point of treating professional caregivers well and so it has had low staff turnover.
He said the idea is to make Honor an even more attractive company to work for, not only to keep the staff they have but also to make this profession more inviting and to help raise perceptions of what it means to be a professional caregiver. He acknowledged that in some cases the changes would increase costs for customers.
“We need to make [the job of] care professional more enticing than McDonald’s and right now it’s not and that needs to change for our society to function in the future.”
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He added: “We are a human services company, but our backbone is technology.
We are going to use tech to create more jobs that are better in this industry
When you can use tech to create great jobs, not destroy jobs and that’s pretty awesome.”
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