Australia’s aged care sector employs around 450,000 workers, with more than 70% in direct care roles. And according to analysis from CEDA, the sector is on track to face a shortage of over 110,000 workers by 2030 if current trajectory holds.

The demand side of that equation is non-negotiable. By 2033, nearly one in five Australians will be over 65. The Aged Care Act 2024 introduced 200 mandatory care minutes per resident per day. The 24/7 registered nurse coverage requirement is now in force. These aren’t optional, providers need more skilled staff, not fewer.

Meanwhile, the supply side is under serious pressure:

• • Burnout and post-COVID fatigue drove a wave of exits the sector hasn’t fully recovered from
  • The sector struggles to compete with hospital roles on pay, career progression, and perceived prestige
  • In regional and remote areas, housing affordability is now actively limiting who can even afford to live close enough to work
  • High administrative burden from compliance and reporting obligations is pushing experienced workers out

Ageing Australia’s workforce engagement forums in 2025, which brought together over 1,200 sector delegates from across the country, found the same four themes surfacing everywhere: attraction, retention, training, and sustainability. Not one of those forums came back saying the workforce challenge was under control.

Why Wages Alone Aren’t Enough

The Government’s $2.6 billion wage investment, including a 15% increase in minimum award wages for direct care workers, was a genuine and necessary step. One Melbourne facility reported a 15% improvement in nurse retention rates within six months of implementing the increases, alongside a 20% lift in job satisfaction scores.

But the same facility noted that ongoing staffing shortages still impacted care quality during peak periods, despite the wage improvement. And that’s the broader pattern: wages move the dial, but they don’t solve the whole problem.

The Aged Care Workforce Census tells you something interesting here. More than 80% of aged care workers say they love their jobs. They’re not leaving because they don’t care about the work. They’re leaving because the conditions around the work are unsustainable.

Heavy workloads. Not enough time with residents. Limited recognition. No clear path for progression. Feeling like their concerns go unheard. These aren’t pay issues. They’re culture and experience issues. And you can’t fix them with a wage increase alone.

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The Gap That Data Can Reveal

This is where employee experience data becomes your advantage. Carepage’s own data across aged care providers surfaces a finding that is both reassuring and revealing: 78% of aged care workers report positive wellbeing, but only 33% report low stress.

Read that again. Nearly four in five workers feel broadly positive about their work. But two thirds of them are experiencing elevated stress levels every day. That gap is between feeling engaged with the work and feeling ground down by the conditions, is where retention risk lives. And most providers have no systematic way to see it.

If you’re running annual staff surveys, you’re getting a point-in-time snapshot that’s already months out of date by the time you act on it. If you’re relying on exit interviews, you’re learning about problems after the person has already decided to leave. And if you’re waiting for managers to flag issues, you’re depending on the most stretched people in your building to also be detecting early warning signals in their team.

Always-on employee listening changes that. It means you catch the stress signal while there’s still time to respond not after someone has handed in their notice.

What the Most Retention-Effective Providers Are Doing Differently

The providers making real progress on workforce stability aren’t doing one big thing. They’re doing several smaller things consistently, and they have the data infrastructure to know which ones are working.

They measure the right things, not just the easy things.

Job satisfaction is important, but it’s a lagging indicator. eNPS, employee Net Promoter Score, a measure of whether staff would recommend your organisation as a place to work, is a faster-moving signal. Combine that with regular pulse surveys on specific themes (workload, recognition, communication, development), and you get a real-time picture rather than a rear-view mirror.

They close the feedback loop visibly.

Staff who complete surveys and never see any change stop completing surveys. The most retention-effective providers are deliberate about communicating back to their teams: “You told us X. Here’s what we did about it.” That loop from feedback to action to communication is what builds the psychological safety that makes people stay.

They track team-level patterns, not just facility averages.

A facility average can look fine while one wing is burning out. The providers who catch problems early are looking at team-level and shift-level data, not just aggregate scores. If the overnight team in Building B has been trending down for six weeks, that’s a conversation a manager needs to have before that team walks.

They link EX data to resident outcomes.

The most compelling business case for investing in employee experience isn’t a fuzzy one about culture. It’s a concrete one: facilities with higher staff engagement scores consistently outperform on resident satisfaction, quality indicator results, and compliance audit outcomes. When you can show your board that a 10-point improvement in eNPS is correlated with a measurable improvement in resident feedback, EX investment stops being a “nice to have” and becomes a strategic priority.

The Regulatory Angle You Can’t Ignore

Under the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, workforce management is no longer just an operational concern, it’s a compliance one.

Standard 7 (The Organisation) explicitly requires providers to demonstrate a safe, effective, and engaged workforce. That means the ACQSC isn’t just looking at care outcomes; they’re looking at whether your organisation has the systems to know how your workforce is doing and respond when things deteriorate.

If an auditor asks how you monitor staff wellbeing and your answer is “annual surveys and manager feedback,” that’s a weaker position than “we run quarterly pulse surveys, track eNPS monthly, and here’s how we responded to the issues our last survey surfaced.” Employee experience data isn’t just an HR tool anymore. It’s compliance evidence.

What Good EX Infrastructure Looks Like

For providers thinking about building or improving their employee listening capability, here’s what the baseline looks like:

eNPS measured at least quarterly. One question: “How likely are you to recommend this organisation as a place to work?” gives you a directional signal that’s fast to collect and easy to track over time.

Pulse surveys on rotating themes. Monthly or bi-monthly, 3–5 questions on specific themes: workload manageability, feeling recognised, communication from leadership, confidence in their ability to deliver good care. Short enough to get high response rates, specific enough to be actionable.

Team-level reporting. Results broken down by team, shift, and location so managers can see what’s happening in their specific context.

A closed-loop process. A defined process for how survey results are reviewed, what decisions get made, and how the response is communicated back to staff. Without this, even great data produces no retention improvement.

Integration with other care data. Connecting EX data with resident satisfaction scores and quality indicator results gives you the full picture and the business case for continued investment.

The Broader Retention Picture

Employee experience data is your most powerful retention tool, but it sits within a broader strategy. Simply put we can see that Career pathways matter. Workers who can see a path forward from personal care to enrolled nurse to registered nurse, with employer support for training