Nanny Care Clients Are Unique in the Childcare Arena

Dealing with demanding clients is part of the job for nanny placement agencies.  However some clients go beyond difficult and are clients you can never please no matter how much time and energy you give them.  Those clients are a drain on you financially and emotionally and take the joy out of doing the work you love.  In this session, we’ll dive into how to recognize and invest in the clients whose needs, expectations, and personalities align with your business services and ethos.  As they say, you can’t please everyone.  It’s time to focus on parents you can successfully place a nanny with. 

We all know it’s a smart move for employers and nannies to develop a nanny contract before the nanny starts working to outline all the agreements they’ve and make sure their expectations are aligned.  But how do you encourage or facilitate that?  In this session, we’ll look at the nuances around all the contract terms you need to know to help both sides effectively negotiate.  Even if you don’t provide a contract or template, it’s still important for you to be able to confidently and comprehensively answer your clients questions and offer advice based on your agency’s standards.

Asking the right open ended questions can move a defensive, angry or stuck client from what seems like an unshakable position to a place of understanding and compromise. In this session, you’ll learn how to use one of the most powerful and transformative tools from my mediation practice, inquiry, to craft questions that can transform the way you work with challenging situations and conflicts with clients.

Agencies have a tough job.  Today’s quality caregivers require a competitive rate and standard (or more generous) benefits.  They want to feel they’re being paid what they’re worth and what the market supports.  Parents want those quality caregivers but they often want to pay a fair but lower rate and offer a limited benefit package.  When talking to a potential client or presenting a nanny to a current client, how do you overcome the push back from employers and bridge that gap?  In this session, you’ll learn tried and true strategies for breaking through the push back on legal pay, a higher wage, PTO, guaranteed hours, and other benefits and helping employers recognize why offering a competitive compensation package is in the best interest of their family. 

Before you can help an employer or caregiver find their right match, you (and they!) have to have a clear understanding of their must haves, their absolutely don’t wants, and all the things in the middle they’re flexible on.  Unfortunately, a lot of parents and nannies aren’t clear about what they want and need so they change their minds frequently during the process, they’re never quite happy with a match, and they don’t fully commitment to a placement.  In this session, you’ll learn how to provide a framework to help even the most indecisive client make clear decisions about what they want and need so you can effectively make a successful placement. 

In most businesses, feedback is based on objective performance standards and comes from direct observations.  In the nanny business, feedback on how a nanny is interviewing is usually based on subjective behaviors and you can only go on the information provided by families that are often unconsciously biased.  When you have a great candidate who isn’t getting great reviews from the families they’ve meet with, what do you do?  Coaching the nanny around interview skills is the fastest and most effective way to help them showcase all they bring to the table.  In this session, I’ll share my most effective coaching tips and strategies that can help your nannies get more comfortable and bring their best to every interview. 

A key ingredient in being a successful placement agency is supporting your clients throughout their placement.  An important part of that is helping them work through bumps in the road that inevitability comes up in the employment relationship.  Some of these bumps are simple misunderstandings and others are more serious conflicts that threaten the success of the placement.  This session will help you handle both.  You’ll learn key conflict coaching and facilitation skills including staying neutral so parties own the process and solution, helping clients understand the circumstances that led to the situation or conflict, share their feelings and perspectives in neutral language, see the situation from the other person’s perspective, and come up with a plan of action for moving forward that works for both sides. 

The ability of your staff to provide excellent client service in a big factor in the success or failure of your agency.  In this session, you’ll see how to use directed role plays to hone the skills of your staff around issues that are important to both your family and nanny clients.   Work alone?  Grab a friend for some role plays to help you hone your skills.