Hold On to Your Best: 4 Keys to Staff Retention in 2025

In some ways, 2025 is probably going to feel pretty familiar for senior living communities – particularly when it comes to staffing. Already a top challenge this year, there’s a good chance it will once again be among the most significant headwinds facing the industry in 2025. But even if this isn’t exactly breaking news, the question persists: What are you going to do about it?

Hiring will continue to be a big piece of the puzzle, but recruitment and onboarding tend to be expensive and time-consuming lifts. That’s why it will be just as important in 2025 to focus on the other component of a solid staffing strategy – holding on to your best people.

What’s important to remember about staff retention, however, is that it’s not always about throwing more money and benefits at the problem (which probably isn’t sustainable anyway). Sometimes it’s just a matter of helping employees get greater satisfaction from their work so they’ll have plenty of reasons to stick around.

Here are four great ways to boost staff retention by showing your employees how much you care.

Listen To What They’re Telling You

You can’t address your employees’ needs unless you know what they are. That’s why one of the keys to understanding why senior living staff like their jobs – or what could be driving them away – is to regularly check in with them.

A customizable, user-friendly staff feedback tool is the kind of senior living technology that can help you gauge staff morale and address potential needs before they become an issue. Ideally, this tool will allow you to check in at various checkpoints along their employee journey for feedback related to…

• Post-hire feedback after 0, 15, 30, 60, and 90 days.
• Exit surveys.
• Regular pulse checks on a quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis.

With robust reporting and AI-powered data analytics, you’ll be able to drill down into this feedback and develop a concrete action plan to tackle your employees’ biggest concerns.

Celebrate Their Successes

Everybody likes to be recognized for a job well done. And while an occasional pat on the back may not seem like the kind of thing that would really tip an employee’s decision to stay or go, it sure can help boost morale. The opposite is also true: without a baseline level of recognition, employees are twice as likely to quit within a year.

An employee recognition app can help you celebrate the amazing contributions your team provides – and help reduce turnover – by providing…

• Ongoing recognition, with shout-outs for good work from peers, family, and residents.
• Customizable badges to acknowledge various accomplishments and milestones.
• Competitions between employees, departments, or communities that can help build camaraderie and enhance a culture of teamwork.
• Rewards in the form of points that employees can collect to redeem for gift cards, swag, or job perks like extra PTO.

Who feels good about coming to work – and wants to keep coming back? Someone who feels like they’re appreciated.

Make Their Jobs Easier

Your employees didn’t choose to work in senior living because they love the drudgery of paperwork and mundane tasks. They want to make a difference in the lives of your residents. Help free them up to focus more on care and connection with senior living technology like…

• Centralized calendar software (with a mobile app) that allows employees to create and update events in a few clicks.

• ChatGPT-powered communications tools that can quickly craft everything from event announcements to updated visitor policies.

• Life enrichment planning AI that provides senior living staff with activity suggestions based on resident data.

By using senior living technology to give employees more time to spend with residents, you’ll be making life better for everyone involved.

Train Them Up

Nobody likes to feel lost, confused, or frustrated in a job. And working in a senior living community can be particularly stressful for new hires. That’s why it’s in everyone’s best interest to have great training and onboarding processes in place. Focus on structure, completeness, and convenience, which means…

• Setting clear milestones for progress to give new hires a better picture of what their career path looks like.
• Providing centralized access to company policies and best practices so everyone is on the same page.
• Pairing new employees with experienced staff (e.g., in a peer mentorship program) to offer guidance and answer questions during and after onboarding.
• Breaking down onboarding content into smaller, more manageable pieces, allowing new hires to absorb information at their own pace.

With a solid onboarding process in place, employees will feel more confident and more empowered in their work. And you – not to mention your residents – will reap the benefits of a more competent and knowledgeable senior living staff.

Hold On to Your Best Senior Living Staff

Here’s a great resolution for 2025: instead of thinking of staffing as a problem, think of it as an opportunity. And that opportunity is to make sure your best people – the ones who really know what makes your community tick and the ones with whom your residents have the most familiarity and comfort – stick around.

None of these suggestions can guarantee that happens, of course, but making the effort will give you a leg up on whatever competing options might be tempting your employees to leave. Go Icon can help – get in touch to discover even more ways that our senior living technology can help your community tackle its staffing challenges!