Woodland Pond at New Paltz Certified as a Great Place to Work® For Third Straight Year!
New Paltz, NY – Great Place to Work Institute and its senior care partner Activated Insights have honored Woodland Pond at New Paltz (“Woodland Pond”) with certification as a Great Place to Work® for 2024-2025, the third straight year Woodland Pond has sought and has achieved this acclaimed certification.
“We are incredibly proud of this accomplishment, a true demonstration of our identity as the employer of choice in the Hudson Valley,” says Michelle Gramoglia, Woodland Pond President and CEO. “Not only did we accomplish this for the third straight year, but our employee trust index rose by four percentage points from the 2023-2024 certification.”
The Great Place to Work® certification process involved surveying 100% of employees from across all departments and evaluating more than sixty elements of staff members’ experience as an employee of Woodland Pond. These elements include employee pride in the organization’s community impact, belief that their work makes a difference, and feeling their work has special meaning.
“We make the choice each year to invest in this evaluation process, ensuring that we have access to relevant feedback from our more than three hundred staff members. This is the very best way for us to ensure we are listening to what our staff needs from us in order to feel valued as our employees,” Gramoglia adds. Past years’ survey responses have resulted in Woodland Pond tripling its 403b match and increasing the premium on overtime from time and a half to double time, among other enhancements.
There are five broad categories assessed by the Great Place to Work® survey. Of these five, Woodland Pond was recognized by staff to be the highest performing as relates to “Fairness.” Among the highest positive sentiments among staff, from the more than sixty elements of employment at Woodland Pond measured:
➢95% of staff say, “People here are treated fairly regardless of their sexual orientation,”
➢95% of staff say, “This is a physically safe place to work,”
➢94% of staff say, “People here are treated fairly regardless of their race,”
➢92% of staff say, “When you join the company, you are made to feel welcome,”
➢91% of staff say, “People here are treated fairly regardless of their gender,”
“To know that we have cultivated such a feeling of acceptance and belongingness is just so validating,” says Brigitte Blum, Woodland Pond’s Director of Human Resources, “this is something that we hear time and time again sets Woodland Pond apart, and these results reinforce to us that we are on the right path for our employees, our most valuable resource.”
Gramoglia shares, “In addition to gaining such valuable insight about our employees’ experience, we also receive comparative data telling us that we have outperformed not only our prior year results, but vastly exceeded our peers in the industry. Eighty-eight percent of our employees report ‘taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work.’ The industry average is seventy-three percent of employees; this is an impressive nine percentage point favorable distinction based on Woodland Pond’s employee experience!”
To learn more about becoming an employee at Woodland Pond at New Paltz: https://woodlandpondnp.org/careers/
ABOUT ACTIVATED INSIGHTS AND GREAT PLACE TO WORK
Activated Insights is the senior care affiliate of Great Place to Work, the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through its aging services certification program, Activated Insights helps Great Place to Work recognize outstanding workplace cultures in the aging services industry and produce the annual Fortune “Best Workplaces for Aging Services™” as well as other Great Place to Work Best Workplaces lists for Millennials, Women, Diversity, Small & Medium Companies, and various regions. Through its employee engagement platform, Activated Insights helps clients create great workplaces that outpace peers on key business metrics like revenue growth, profitability, and retention.
ABOUT WOODLAND POND
Woodland Pond at New Paltz, located in New Paltz, N.Y., is a not-for-profit, upscale continuing care retirement community (“CCRC”) and tailors exclusively to those aged sixty-two and older. Nestled beneath the shoulder of the breathtaking Shawangunk Ridge, the community opened in 2009 and remains the only CCRC in the mid-Hudson Valley. Woodland Pond offers an eight-three acre campus that includes a professionally staffed Health Center and a Community Center with an art studio, fitness center, heated indoor swimming pool, salon, Dedrick’s at the Pond (on campus drug store and gift shop), a branch of Sawyer Savings Bank, complimentary EV charging stations, a full library, woodworking shop, game room, free computer access, a smart classroom, and much more.
As a true CCRC, Woodland Pond at New Paltz offers independent living with a choice of private cottages and apartment, resident services, and amenities. All the apartments and cottages are now either fully reserved and/or occupied, with growing waiting lists. Under Woodland Pond’s Lifecare guarantee program, residents are provided privileged admission to assisted living, memory care, and the skilled nursing center. Woodland Pond at New Paltz caters to a diverse group of accomplished individuals with a variety of interests and a zest for life. For more details, please visit: http://woodlandpondnp.org.
