Aging Well: News & Insights for Seniors and Caregivers
- Workforce culture improvements prioritized to boost retention and create positive work environments.
- Rising wages and compensation remain significant budget pressures, with inflation limiting further pay increases.
- Expanded internal training and upskilling aim to fill skilled roles and improve long-term staff capabilities.
- High turnover, reliance on agency staffing, and immigration policy disruptions threaten long-term workforce viability.
Improving culture, increasing wages and offering training are the three most-cited strategies for addressing staffing shortages in senior living, according to a new Ziegler CFO Hotline Survey.
The survey, released Thursday, showed respondents have shifted from short-term tactics to shore up their workforces to long-term strategies to sustain it. To address shortages, 80.5% of respondents noted they are focusing on positive workforce culture, 75% indicated they are increasing wages and bonuses and 49.2% identified internal training or upskilling efforts.
The emphasis on culture and training could be indicative of retention being more than pay increases, the survey’s authors wrote, but it could also reflect that operators may have a limited capacity to continue raising wages after doing so for years following the height of the pandemic.
While workforce conditions have generally improved, turnover and retention are still problems the industry is facing, and utilizing temporary agency staffing is still used as a stopgap measure for 48.4% of respondents. Registered nurses, dining staff and certified nursing assistants reported the highest turnover rates from 40.8%, 40% and 39% respectively. Turnover is varying by region as well, with Midwest respondents reporting the highest average turnover rate at 41.9% with the Northeast at the lowest at 30.5%.
“Workforce shortages have turned around, and finding staff is materially easier than it was three years ago,” one respondent wrote. “Inflation is now the primary worry as it pertains to required wage increases to keep our staff secure.”
Agency usage varies by organization type, with 35.6% of single-site operators responding utilizing agencies to fill direct care vacancies compared with 13.6% of multi-site organizations.
Compensation remains a significant portion of operating budgets, with an average of 56.2% across all of the survey’s respondents, though there is not significant variance compared to Ziegler’s 2025 survey with an average of 56.1%.
“It’s a numbers game that’s only going to get more challenging. Few workers, higher wages and higher service expectations by the residents add up to a perfect storm,” one respondent to the survey wrote.
One-quarter of respondents noted there had been an impact from immigration policy changes, mostly in the form of workforce disruptions from changes to work authorization, visa availability and temporary protected status. The immediate impacts were “the loss of existing employees, delays in recruiting international workers, a smaller pool of available candidates, and increased administrative complexity surrounding employment authorization,” the survey’s authors wrote.
One respondent noted arrival dates for registered nurses from overseas resulted in at least a year delay in their employment, with another citing staff leaving out of fear.
“We have been forced to let go of multiple team members due to changes in immigration,” one respondent wrote. “Our team members, who come from dozens of countries around the world, are concerned for their status and the status of their loved ones. We are deeply committed to supporting our team members.”
The survey also indicated the conversation surrounding staffing has shifted from filling open positions to concerns about the long-term viability of the workforce.
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