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Senior Star was down to 30 open positions across the company as of a few weeks ago. That’s a notable statistic, considering that the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based provider — like so many senior living operators — has faced severe labor challenges in the last few years.
In fact, roughly 30% of its frontline workforce turned over following the implementation of mandatory vaccination for Covid-19, COO Shadoworee Betts told me recently.
In addition to my conversation with Betts, I’ve seen other recent indications that the tide is turning on labor.
Operators expressed optimism about staffing in the most recent NIC Executive Survey Insights, with the results released last week.
Over the last 18 months, 90% to 99% of respondents to the monthly survey reported experiencing staffing shortages. That fell to 82% in June.
“While this represents a considerable portion of senior housing and care communities undergoing a staffing shortage, seeing improvement in this metric is noteworthy,” NIC Senior Principal Ryan Brooks wrote.
And continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) and assisted living facilities added 2.1 million jobs in June 2023 on a seasonally adjusted basis, continuing a trend of job gains throughout 2023 and increasing from 1.7 million jobs added in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, prominent news outlets are trumpeting a shift in labor market dynamics. One example: “The Great Resignation is Over” was the title of The Daily podcast of The New York Times on July 12.
In this week’s exclusive, members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze these recent trends and stats and offer key takeaways, including:
- Economic trends dovetail with providers’ actions to drive workforce improvements
- Ongoing labor unrest points to continued volatility
- Great Resignation might end but workers are not returning to pre-pandemic mindset
‘Really promising’ labor trends
Senior Star’s Betts is not the only leader to share a bullish outlook on labor with me in the last few weeks. Health Dimensions Group CEO Erin Shvetzoff Hennessey expressed similar sentiments.
“Most of our markets are getting better; we’ve been able to eliminate agency pretty significantly,” she said. “I think that’s been really promising; it just seems a little more stable than it has over the last few years … the labor market seems to be calming down a little bit.”
Her observations are borne out by the NIC Executive Survey Insights findings. Between April 2023 and June 2023, there was a big increase in the number of providers that reported only 0% to 5% of full-time positions open.
Furthermore, for the past two months, attracting staff and combating turnover no longer have ranked as the top challenge facing operators (rising expenses now occupies the top spot).
Such gains in labor appear to be part of a broader trend of greater workforce stability across the economy, after tens of millions of people left their jobs during the Great Resignation of the last two years.
“At the peak, 4.5 million Americans a month were quitting their jobs, but now it is coming down, and it has gotten pretty close to where it was before the pandemic,” New York Times reporter Ben Casselman said on The Daily podcast. “So I think we can safely say that the Great Resignation, whatever it was, is over.”
Economists and pundits are putting forward various explanations as to why the Great Resignation has ended, including the end of “social supports” like enhanced unemployment, higher labor force participation, fewer job openings, and workers’ fear of leaving their jobs before a potential recession.
And then there’s the fact that workers — particularly in low-wage jobs — might be less inclined to leave their positions because their pay and working conditions have improved, University of Massachusetts Professor Arindrajit Dube told Casselman.
Certainly, it’s safe to say that such improvements are also contributing to the improved labor situation in senior living, with Senior Star being a prime example.
It’s not as if the company was an underperformer with regard to its workforce satisfaction in the past — far from it. Senior Star consistently appeared as one the most highly ranked companies on Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Aging Services list, going back to pre-Covid days. But through the pandemic and the Great Resignation, the company’s leaders recognized that they needed to adapt quickly and comprehensively to keep up with a rapidly changing labor market.
Senior Star added an option for workers to receive daily pay, implemented flexible scheduling technology (through a process involving worker feedback), and created a task force to focus on recruitment.
“We looked at everything to be competitive,” Betts said, citing wages and benefits, as well as processes and practices such as how new hires are onboarded. The company added some artificial intelligence capabilities for applicant tracking, invested in HR coordinators, and doubled-down on some of the best practices that have worked well historically. For example, Senior Star’s interview process starts with a “culture screening,” which involves a series of questions focused on an applicant’s values rather than job skills.
Senior Star has also hired Anna Williams as CFO, adding to a diverse, all-female executive team.
“I think that people are looking for a place where they can authentically perform and be themselves every single day,” Betts told me. “And I think that’s what Senior Star does, without coming out with a program that says, we’re doing DEIB; I think people naturally feel and are drawn to the culture of really trying to do your best every single day and give back.”
Ongoing labor unrest and workers’ new perspective
Of course, not every senior living provider went into the Great Resignation being one of the top organizations on the Fortune list, and not every provider has pursued such comprehensive labor-related changes as Senior Star has over the last two years. I believe that such providers cannot afford to be complacent, regardless of whether labor pressures are easing. That’s because even if the Great Resignation is over, labor markets are far from tranquil.
Union activity is fast and furious, with the Hollywood writers and actors strikes as the most dramatic (pardon the pun) examples. Meanwhile, a looming strike of UPS workers could become “one of the largest labor actions in U.S. history,” as Tobias Burns put it in The Hill.
Closer to the senior living industry, there is the situation in the skilled nursing sector. The AFL-CIO and other labor groups are advocating for a federal standard for minimum staffing levels in nursing homes, even as provider groups push back, saying that an unfunded mandate simply would be impossible to meet with current workforce shortages.
CMS is expected to float a staffing mandate imminently, and should it be enacted, more union organizing could follow. That’s because a federal staffing requirement could “remove a bone of contention in labor negotiations” and even “kickstart” collective bargaining efforts, Arielle Dreher wrote recently for Axios.
Meanwhile, there have been a series of recent nursing home worker strikes across the country, including in Hawaii, Los Angeles and New York. Workers are protesting what they describe as understaffing and inadequate pay, among other issues.
There are parallels between the situation in the nursing home sector and the labor unrest at UPS, notably the discrepancy between how hard the frontline work is and how paltry the pay, especially when compared with corporate profits and executive compensation.
UPS’ full-time drivers and part-time workers do “backbreaking work every day to make this company $100 billion a year” while earning “poverty wages,” a Teamsters spokesperson told The Hill.
Nursing home companies are not making $100 billion a year, but there is increasing scrutiny over the private ownership groups in the space and how they are allocating revenue and profits. One owner misused $83 million in taxpayer money, including to invest in Israeli airline El Al, New York Attorney General Letitia James recently alleged.
Senior living providers may have raised wages and enhanced benefits and taken a slew of other actions in recent years, but the work obviously has not yet created a stable and satisfied workforce that will form the basis of industry expansion as the boomers age.
And even those providers that have taken many steps to meet labor challenges and respond to worker expectations should be evaluating whether they need to go further, because even if workers have less leverage in today’s economy than last year’s, they have recognized the value that they contribute to their employers and the economy as a whole, and the power that they wield because of that — and I believe that this is especially true of those workers, including in senior living, who were deemed “essential” during the height of Covid-19.
As Casselman put it on The Daily:
“I talk to a lot of low-wage workers. And a lot of them tell me that this period has changed the way they think about their work and their role in the workplace.”
Companies featured in this article:
Health Dimensions Group, New York Times, NIC, Senior Star, UPS
