Your Agency Bill Is an Engagement Problem

Most senior living operators treat agency as a staffing shortfall to be managed with hiring and coverage tools. That framing misses the real story. Agency spend is a lagging indicator of a deeper issue: employee engagement and retention. When staff disengage, they leave, and every departure creates a coverage gap that creates agency opportunity. Chasing the bill without addressing why people leave in the first place guarantees the cycle repeats.

This session brings together an operator's ground-level view and a workforce analytics perspective to reframe how leaders think about agency reliance. Annette Greely, President/CEO of American Baptist Homes of the Midwest, will share how her organization cut agency usage by more than 75% while improving retention and resident satisfaction, not through technology solutions or vendor negotiations, but through culture, communication, and consistent frontline leadership. Matt Strange, Chief Operating Officer of Procare HR, will walk through the workforce metrics that reveal where engagement is breaking down before it shows up as an agency invoice, and how operators can use that data to intervene earlier.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for connecting agency spend to engagement drivers, a set of leading indicators that predict staffing instability before it becomes a budget problem, and real examples of interventions that moved the needle at the community level. This session is built for executives and operators who are tired of treating agency labor as a rate problem and are ready to treat it as the retention and engagement problem it actually is.