Overcome Staffing Challenges:
How 5 Senior Living Communities Prepare for Tomorrow’s Workforce Today

“Juniper’s being proactive. We have a “15×20” program and we’ve already started raising our starting wages, substantially, across all of our buildings. We know we’re going to need to be creative in finding the dollars to fund that. Workforce issues are big issues in our industry, and they’ll continue to be. It’ll probably be the number one issue in the next couple of years.”

Our goal as an industry is to be a top-5 employer of choice. That may need to start at the middle school level, the high school level, community colleges, and undergraduate programs. In many cases, senior housing isn’t really well understood, and its incumbent upon us as industry leaders to tell our story about why this is such a compelling industry.

If you look at the fastest growing industries over the next 15 years, senior housing is going to be one of them, and there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity. Not only [in] management, finance, acquisitions and development, asset management, human resources, and accounting, but there are also opportunities on the community side where you can run a pretty sizable business. On the smaller side, you can build a 100-unit community for $25 million to $28 million dollars. It’s a lot of money. And if you’re running the community, it’s a nice business. It’s a lot of work, but if you have the right frame of mind and skill set you can excel.

For our professional development program, we invest a lot of money and we have a cool program in place whereby we’re selecting 20 people to participate in a professional development class. It runs over two years and we typically like to start two classes per year. It’s pretty intensive. It’s all about focusing in on knowing yourself, knowing your team, knowing your organization, and then knowing your market.

There are certain positions in our industry that are very challenging. In the higher-acuity settings, the caregivers have really difficult jobs. Some companies have really found opportunities for people to stay in the organization and grow, and that probably doesn’t happen as much as it should. The key is really finding and hiring the right person. They have to love people and they have to want to help. That’s really at the core of this business.