The share of nursing home leaders “seriously considering quitting” their jobs has fallen just below the 50% mark for the first time since the early pandemic, according to new results from the 2023 McKnight’s Mood of the Market survey.
That’s down from nearly 55% last year, but still far above the 44% recorded a handful of months into the pandemic in 2020 and even farther above the 37% in 2019.
The fact that 47% of administrators and 54% of nursing directors said they were considering leaving their current jobs should still not be viewed as good news, experts told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
“That should be an industry wake-up call that half of the people in administration or DONs are continuously considering quitting their job,” even though they find them highly meaningful, warned Cara Silletto, president and chief retention officer of workforce firm Magnet Culture.
Those who stay despite those thoughts may bring their frustrations to the workplace too.
“The reasons they don’t quit their job, even though they think about it or even want to? Some of them are too busy to look for another job. Some of them are making so much money that they don’t want to go get another administrator or DON job because they know it’s going to be the same thing there. And if they switch to any other industry they probably can’t make as much money right out the gate. So the devil you know is better than the devil, you don’t.”
Others are glomming onto changes in the broader healthcare sector and looking for ways to make their jobs work for them, said Katie Piperata, workforce architect at recruiting firm MedBest.
“I think people are kind of building what they want now,” she told McKnight’s. “I have never seen so many people coming to me and asking for interim work, which means, ‘I want to quit my full-time job and just work when I want to on small assignments.’ It fits that gig mentality.”
In Piperata’s experience, fewer people want to leave the industry altogether than during the flood of COVID’s first year.
And while it appears true that fewer nursing home managers may be leaving over the disease itself, many still say the pandemic and the conditions it led to have made them more likely to exit the profession.
This year, 36% said that COVID has “definitely” or “probably”made them more likely to leave, down from 43% in 2022. COVID’s influence appears most pronounced among administrators, who were less likely to say “no way” to leaving, and more likely to say “definitely” than their DON counterparts.
Overall, 82% of respondents said they thought their contributions at work were valued by colleagues “a great deal” or “a moderate amount.” That measure of satisfaction is on par with 2022 results, which also totaled 82%.
Quitting or dropping out of the race?
One area where numbers slipped was on the advancement side.
Last year, nearly 20% of respondents rated their opportunities for advancement as “excellent.” This year, that share dropped to less than 16%. The share who saw advancement options as “poor,” meanwhile, climbed about 3% to past 18%.
Piperata said that may simply be because there are fewer opportunities for nurse leaders and administrators to advance outside of their buildings, with many regional chain or national operators cutting regional staff to compensate for rising costs.
“Now that we have more staff and staffing is becoming less of an issue, hopefully, corporations that are managing these buildings will start adding back in some of the FTEs that they’ve cut over the last couple years,” she said.
Others may not like the requirements that come with the advancement opportunities they do have.
“A lot of workers today and frontline supervisors, they see what the managers and directors have to go through and they say, ‘You couldn’t pay me enough to do that to work those hours and to put up with all those people and to put up with the corporate office breathing down my neck,’” Silletto said.
Another reason many may still be considering quitting or leaving the profession? The constant workload that remains far above pre-pandemic levels.
Just over 19% of all respondents said they’re “very much so, yes” asked to do too much at work. That sentiment was highest among nurse leaders at 22%.
Another 36.5% said they were “generally” asked to do too much, which is actually a decline from the 2022 rate of 40%.
Workloads continue to crush
Overall, nurse leaders this year were 10 percentage points more likely to report being some level of overworked than their peers in administration.
That kind of sustained frustration must reach the ears of owners and operators who make financial decisions around staffing levels, Silletto said. Thinking that 60-hour workweeks will continue to be acceptable to a generation of workers, even building leaders, who value work differently, will only lead to more long-term problems, she added.
“I would venture to say that the ‘quiet quitting’ phenomenon that happened last year, with directors of different departments saying, ‘enough’ after having been through the pandemic, they said, ‘I am going to do my job, but I am not gonna kill myself anymore here. I’m just not gonna do that,’” Silletto said. “A lot of people finally realized that the workloads were unmanageable and unsustainable.”
This is the third article in a four-part series revealing the findings of the 2023 McKnight’s Mood of the Market survey. The first on job satisfaction appeared Aug. 31, followed by the second on flexibility demands on Sept. 6. Check back next week for the final installment on wage and inflation pressures.
