How we keep staff for years (and why that's the whole ballgame)

Here's an industry secret that shouldn't be one: when you tour an assisted living community, the single most predictive question you can ask has nothing to do with the chandelier in the lobby. It's "how long have your people worked here?"

Caregiver turnover across senior living routinely runs 50% a year and worse. Think about what that means inside a building. The aide who knows your mother takes her coffee black and her pills with applesauce quits in March. Her replacement learns those things from a binder, if the binder is current, and quits in November. Every departure resets the accumulated knowledge of a human being back to paperwork.

Care quality isn't a policy. It's what accumulated knowledge does at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The number we're proudest of

OPS Living is Great Place to Work certified for 2025 and 2026. In the certification survey, 76% of our employees rated OPS a great place to work. The U.S. average across companies is 57%.

I'll be straight about why we lead with an employee statistic on a website built for families: because it's the statistic that becomes your parent's daily experience. Star ratings measure what families see. Employee retention decides it.

What actually keeps caregivers

Nothing on this list is revolutionary, which is sort of the point. The industry knows what keeps people and mostly declines to pay for it.

Owners who know their names. My partner Angela and I are licensed administrators, and we're in our buildings. When the person who owns the company has done your job and shows up where you do it, "management" stops being an abstraction that sends memos.

Staffing that doesn't burn people. Chronic short-staffing is the industry's quiet default, and it's a doom loop: overworked aides quit, which overworks the rest. Breaking the loop costs money in the short run and saves the company in every run after that.

A career, not a shift. Aides become med techs, med techs move toward nursing, activity assistants become directors. People stay where they're becoming something.

Being heard fast. In a six-community company, a caregiver's problem reaches an owner in one step. Nobody grinds against a broken process for a year because headquarters is in another state. Headquarters is in the hallway.

What it looks like from a family's side

Consistency, mostly, which sounds boring until you've lived without it. The same faces at breakfast. An aide who notices your father is quieter than yesterday, because she knows precisely how talkative yesterday was. Care plans that live in people, backed by paperwork, instead of the reverse.

Families feel it fastest in the small accommodations nobody wrote down: the resident who wants her tea before her shower, not after. Sixty of those unwritten preferences walk out the door with every departing caregiver. Retention is how a building keeps its memory.

Ask everyone this, including us

On any tour, ask how long the executive director has been in the building, then the nurses, then the aides. Then, if you can, ask an aide directly whether she'd recommend working there.

We'll answer at all six of our communities, and if you're a caregiver reading this instead of a family: 76% of your would-be coworkers say this is a great place to work. Come find out why. We're hiring the kind of people who stay.