Senior living providers are adapting staffing strategies in 2026 to enhance flexibility and offer a career ladder while matching labor costs to resident care needs.
During a recent Senior Housing News webinar, leaders with The Aspenwood Company, Kendal Corporation and Viva Senior Living described a 2026 staffing environment shaped by increased resident acuity, high demand contrasted by a small number of younger staff and the need for greater flexibility in scheduling and benefit offerings.
At the same time, critical staffing shortages in licensed care positions continue to challenge operators and their ability to meet acuity needs as older adults wait longer to access senior living services in a needs-based manner.
Today, providers are responding by bringing recruitment, retention, scheduling and workforce analysis into a cohesive strategy to help improve workforce planning during a period of strong senior living demand.
Workforce challenges shift from hiring to finding opportunities to be precise
Houston-based senior living provider The Aspenwood Company has shifted from filling roles quickly to finding people who are likely to stay in their roles long-term.
To help improve retention, Aspenwood focuses on establishing leadership and career development opportunities for staff, combined with employee engagement and training, according to President Heather Tussing.
“One of the biggest changes that we’ve done is thinking about not just filling the position, but filling the position with the right individual,” Tussing said.
Norwood, New Jersey-based Viva Senior Living approaches staffing challenges by matching resident acuity to costs while avoiding overtime or agency staffing usage, according to CEO Chris Metternich.
Residents today enter communities with more chronic health conditions than before the Covid-19 pandemic, making clinical care services a vital part of a community’s value proposition, Metternich noted. Viva evaluates staffing needs based on resident acuity before translating those needs into an assessment of hours per day per resident across all departments of a community.
“The term complexity is the challenge today,” Metternich said. “Instead of flooding the zone with as many employees as possible, this approach allows us to staff more accurately.”
Viva, which has grown rapidly since 2024, has kept overtime use below 5% across all communities and has not relied on agency staffing.
Today, senior living providers compete for talent as demand picks up and creates more move-ins. Kendal and its affiliated communities focus staffing efforts on creating flexibility in scheduling, fostering career growth and prioritizing stable community leadership teams, all while meeting competitive pay and benefit demands employees need today, according to Senior Director of Human Resources Deb McCardell.
“What’s different today is that these challenges are more interconnected, I think, than they’ve ever been,” McCardell said.
Retention relies on personalization, promoting senior living career options
Retention of employees relies on helping frontline and leadership staff connect and communicate, while offering training opportunities to advance their careers, McCardell added.
Retention is “much less about the perks” and more reliant on creating strong bonds between community staff and leadership. This challenged the Newark, Delaware-based senior living provider to rethink its employee experience by offering competitive pay and benefits alongside on-the-job training for future leadership advancement.
Career development at Kendal starts with community leadership engaging with frontline employees to understand where they want to grow and identifying practical training and development steps needed to move up the organizational chart, McCardell said.
“Competitive pay matters, but it’s been my experience through employee engagement that it’s rarely the sole reason someone stays or leaves,” McCardell added.
To improve recruitment, Aspenwood creates personalized video messages to communicate with candidates while showing them what community life could be like if they choose to take an open position at a community. Partnerships with the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership and the University of North Texas have helped raise the provider’s profile with younger prospective employees, Tussing said.
New Aspenwood team members are given a “blue carpet” welcome, aligning with the company’s branding in lieu of a traditional red carpet, alongside an orientation process with department leaders. Check-ins with new employees happen at multiple points between 30 and 90 days of a staff member starting at an Aspenwood community, allowing the company to get direct feedback, identify patterns and act quickly before turnover occurs, Tussing said.
“We want to make sure that everybody has a very thorough onboarding experience. We want to ensure that in our orientation, our director-level team members, every single one is involved in it at some point,” Tussing added.
Small gestures like personalized, handwritten cards for birthdays or major life events help connect with staff, which “costs nothing to personalize the experience” for team members.
Internal promotions are a priority for Viva, and all eight of its regional teams are led by individuals who were promoted from within various communities, Metternich said. Potential promotion opportunities are shared internally and help show staff that long-term careers in senior living are possible.
While developing leaders can be more intensive than seeking to recruit outside staff, Metternich said these internal opportunities show staff what is possible, treating career advancement like senior living prospect lead generation by tracking where candidates enter the organization and monitoring their growth along the way.
Data, scheduling and flexibility critical in 2026
As providers hone recruitment and retention efforts, creating flexibility in scheduling is gaining importance and popularity among operators.
Without flexibility in scheduling, Metternich said providers risk running into overtime use that can lead to burnout of high-performing employees and make it harder for new hires to get settled into their roles. When Viva takes on a new community under management, the company analyzes open shifts, available employees and resident needs before recalibrating work schedules.
Aspenwood relies on a pool of part-time and as-needed employees in markets where the operator has multiple communities. Community leaders are able to post open shifts for workers already trained in Aspenwood’s standards and culture. This helps give the company flexibility and cover needs as they arise at communities without needing to add agency staffing, Tussing said.
Maintaining staffing is done through weekly labor-monitoring calls with communities that have exceeded budgeted hours or missed performance targets.
“Being really proactive with that stops it before it becomes a practice,” Tussing said.
Kendal relies on workforce data and subsequent analysis to help leaders identify patterns, improve onboarding, support managers and identify areas where to invest in additional training before turnover evolves into a persistent issue at a community, McCardell said.
“The goal isn’t more data,” McCardell said. “It’s making better decisions that help employees succeed and feel supported in their work using the data that we currently have.”
Employee culture is the “quickest” aspect of a community to derail and “the hardest” element to rebuild if disruptions occur, she added.
Viva is in the process of developing an AI-supported staff reporting system that combines resident leveling, comorbidities and other operational inputs to recommend staffing hours and positions needed at a given community. This is intended to turn the “art of scheduling” into “more of a science,” while shortening the time needed to assess a new community, Metternich said.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, providers expect workforce playbooks to become more proactive, focusing on employee feedback, internal leadership development and workforce data.
“Some of the best solutions come directly from the employees themselves,” McCardell said. “When people feel heard, valued and see that their feedback leads to action… you strengthen that engagement. You strengthen that trust.”
Getting employee feedback will be critical to understanding workforce needs and gauging worker buy-in related to the rollout of new technology to address staffing challenges, Metternich said.
“We can be overtly hurting our staff if we’re not getting feedback from the tools we’re putting in,” Metternich said.
Taking proactive measures to identify potential pressure points in operations will be critical to providers solving staffing problems in the future, Tussing said.
“Being really proactive with that stops it before it becomes a practice,” Tussing said.
Companies featured in this article:
Kendal Corporation, The Aspenwood Company, Viva Senior Living
