With turnover costing senior living organizations more than $1 million annually, investing in professional development is “crucial” for nurturing talent and fostering a culture of engagement and well-being, according to the experts behind a new report.
“Navigating the Nexus: Addressing Workforce Challenges in Senior Living” looks at results of a survey of Argentum members conducted by Holleran Consulting in late 2023 and early 2024. The report reveals the high costs of turnover and the importance of professional development to reduce it, as well as ways to improve retention and support recruitment.
“If we want to keep our employees here, and if we want to spend the money in the appropriate way, we need to then be working on professional growth for our employees,” Holleran Director of Senior Living Research Katelyn McCauley said in a statement.
Turnover costs can top $1 million
One of the key findings of the report is that most senior living organizations spend less than $200,000 annually on recruitment and training, but turnover costs can top $1 million or 2 million per year. Those “hard costs” include advertising for, interviewing, hiring and onboarding new employees.
Turnover also has “soft costs,” according to McCauley, including dips in employee morale due to the temporary need to shoulder more work, which affects residents.
“When you’re talking about residents, they create relationships with these employees, and these families create relationships with these employees,” McCauley said. “That starts making the community a home instead of a place where Mom lives.”
Effective recruitment strategies not only address immediate staffing needs but also contribute to the “long-term vitality” and success of senior living communities, according to the report.
Untapped workforce recruitment resources
State and federal programs are available to help senior living providers with workforce recruitment, but survey respondents indicated underutilization of those resources. According to the report, companies leave “hundreds of millions of dollars” in federal and state tax credits and employment-related incentives undiscovered and unclaimed.
Most respondents said they used community colleges, community-based workforce organizations and Job Corps workforce resources. Fewer respondents turned to American Job Centers, which has a partnership with Argentum that offers financial incentives to organizations that employ candidates from the program. Other less-used resources were federal and state grants and foreign-born service organizations.
With immigrants making up a significant portion of the senior living workforce, Argentum published the Foreign-Born Workers Resource Guide to help connect foreign-born workers and their families with organizations and service providers at the national and state levels.
“There are communities that have begun to utilize their resources to hire foreign-born workers,” McCauley said. “This not only increases diversity, it also provides residents with the opportunity to use their skills to tutor the employees to receive their citizenship.”
Professional development is essential
According to the survey respondents, the most effective ways to retain staff are by offering leadership development for supervisors, establishing reasonable workloads, recognizing employees and offering competitive wages.
A bad relationship with a supervisor was the top reason cited by employees who left a job, according to respondents. Noncompetitive salaries or wages, a lack of work-life balance, a lack of growth or opportunity for advancement, and a poor organizational culture were among other reasons employees gave for leaving a community.
The survey found that many organizations aren’t investing enough in leadership development. More than half of the respondents said that leadership development was important, but more than one in three said their organizations did not invest enough in that area.
“We know what is going to keep our employees and make them happy, but we’re not spending our money that way,” McCauley said. “When you are talking about professional growth — executive coaching, intersnips, apprenticeships, whatever that may be — there’s not always a [return on investment] right away. It takes time to see, but that’s an investment in your employees, which then will be a positive investment for the organization.”
Senior living is getting back to recruiting for ‘fit’
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, senior living providers could choose their employees based on the best fit for a community’s culture. McCauley said she’s seeing operators make a shift “back to that place where we were, of making sure that the employees that we’re hiring aren’t just a number — they really are the best for those positions, even if it does take longer.”
Recruitment practices — including employee referrals, college and other training programs, and development and apprenticeship programs — show evidence of a positive transition in the senior living industry, McCauley said.
The report is based on survey responses from chief operating officers, human resource leaders, executive directors and operations leaders.
