At the Senior Living Innovation Forum, Procare HR COO, Matt Strange, and Brett Landrum, Founder and CEO, opened their session with a challenging statistic the industry has quietly learned to live with: a 43.6% turnover rate.
"That's not a workforce crisis," Strange told attendees. "That's something that we've become complacent (about)." Their talk made the case that senior living's obsession with turnover and retention isn't just outdated, it's a metric that measures the wrong thing entirely.
To make the point land, they introduced two fictional but painfully familiar employees: Bob and Mary. Both have been at the same community for eight to 10 years. Both count as retention wins on paper. But Bob shows up late, skips real engagement with residents and coworkers, and treats the job as a paycheck of convenience.
Mary, meanwhile, is quietly burning out — she's picked up Bob's shifts a dozen times, dealing with a costly HR mix-up, and now facing a longer commute after a move.
"Are we the right employer for him?" Strange asked of Bob. The uncomfortable answer, in his view, is no — and yet a retention dashboard would count Bob as a success story every time. The real metric that matters, Landrum argued, borrowing from Netflix's culture playbook, is engagement density: how many of your people are actually engaged with the mission, their teammates, and the residents they serve — not just how long they stick around.
The technical core of the session was about where the signal for engagement actually lives. Satisfaction surveys, Landrum said, capture a single moment in time and are often shaped by whatever just happened — an open enrollment period, a policy reminder — rather than how someone really feels.
The far richer, underused source of truth is operational data communities already have: time clock records, CRM-logged HR interactions, payroll, and disciplinary notes.
Layered together with AI, those signals can surface patterns no manager would catch manually. One striking example: in a community Procare worked with, an employee who wasn't normally late but was late twice within a 90-day window had a 93% chance of leaving — a pattern tied not to laziness, but to real-life disruption like a car breaking down or a lost childcare arrangement. Catching that early opens a window for intervention long before a two-week notice.
The results Strange and Landrum shared were concrete. One client reduced voluntary "regrettable" turnover by 72% simply by identifying friction points early — including a case where night-shift staff felt unsafe walking to a parking lot that stayed dark until 11:30 p.m.
Another community found a correlation between meal timing, resident sentiment, and overnight care behavior, tied to a recurring menu item that caused discomfort. A third saved $150,000 in agency spend by focusing retention efforts on the right people rather than just filling headcount.
Landrum was careful to frame the goal correctly: healthy turnover paired with strong engagement, he argued, beats near-total retention paired with a disengaged workforce. The most dangerous group in most communities isn't the fast departures — it's the long-tenured, quietly checked-out employees who end up scaring away the engaged ones around them, a pattern the talk called the "death spiral."
Strange and Landrum closed with a reframe for daily operations. Instead of asking "how many open shifts do I have this week," leaders should be asking "which employees are at risk of disengaging this week, and why."
AI's role, they emphasized, isn't to replace human judgment, it's to interpret the data, surface root causes, and provide leaders with a manageable set of actions, so engagement gets treated with the same daily discipline as scheduling, not as an annual survey initiative.
The message for senior living operators is direct? Retention numbers can lie. Engagement density data doesn't.