AdventHealth CEO Audrey Gregory Cautions Employers of Labor Crunch Ahead, and to Prize Workers Accordingly

A labor crunch is tightening the job market all over America from IT to education to retail, but more especially in restaurants, hotels, construction and healthcare, Audrey Gregory told a sold-out audience at today’s Flagler Tiger Bay Club monthly lunch. The way to manage through it is primarily to nurture and value existing employees, to further their education at the company’s expense, to move them up, and to pay them better.




“At AdventHealth we watch turnover a lot,” Gregory said toward the end of her 30-minute talk, “because we recognize this: It’s much better to keep the employees who are living your mission than to try to re-recruit over and over and over again. So by the way, when you leave here today, if you have really good employees, make sure that you’re showing them their value–not only in telling them how good they are, but can you please take the time and do the math, and pay your employees right?” It was the one time she got a round of applause in the middle of the talk.

After starting her career as a nurse and accumulating academic credentials, including a doctorate in global leadership, Gregory is now the executive vice president and chief executive officer of AdventHealth’s East Florida Division, which includes seven hospitals and 1,397 beds in Daytona Beach, DeLand, Orange City, New Smyrna Beach, Tavares, and Palm Coast (with two hospitals and 200 beds here; AdventHealth is Flagler County’s largest employer, with some 1,800 employees). But times have changed since she was a nurse. Gone are the days when it was expected of nurses to work overtime when necessary, to come in on their days off when necessary, to do whatever management asked regardless of family responsibilities or preferences.

“You do it because they told you to,” Gregory said of those seemingly bygone days. “You Buck it up and you go do it. Today, this is not how the workforce is at all, and you find that in your various industries.”

Mixing humor with self-deprecation (her children are still ashamed that she uses a Hotmail address) and mostly abstaining from judgments, Gregory offered up her own daughter as an example. “My daughter is a software engineer. She travels a lot. She likes balance in her life. If she’s tired, she goes home and rests.” Gregory paused between those sentences as if to let that sink in. The silences had a wryness to them, though moments earlier she had asked how many in her audience had employees, and many have. She was speaking to a knowing audience. “She doesn’t wait to retire to travel. She travels now, and you find that the thinking is different, and so when those two people are together on the same floor, what happens? There is absolute tension because they have different expectations from the work experience, and they will tell you: my daughter will tell you. She’ll say, Mom, I’m not waiting to retire to experience the world. I’m traveling now.”




Her daughter would let her know by text that she was in Greece.

Meanwhile the workforce is shrinking. Gregory referred to what she characterized as a “staggering statistic.” She said “about the same number of people are collecting unemployment now versus 1970, although our labor force is so much larger.” Gregory was off only marginally: 1970 ended with 5.1 million people collecting unemployment, compared to 6.9 million last December, a 35 percent difference, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was right about the labor force: it grew from 83.7 million in 1970 to 168.5 million last December, a 101 percent increase. But despite the droves of people who left the workforce after Covid, most of them baby boomers in Gregory’s description, the proportion of people in the labor force has actually grown since 1970, from 60.4 percent to 62.5 percent, though it peaked at between 67 and 68 percent during the boom years of the late 1990s, and has never returned to that level.

Today, the average age of nurses in the workforce is 52. “This means that the majority of nurses are about to be retiring en masse, and there won’t be enough to replace them. Now that is only one sector,” Gregory said. On the other hand, Gregory was complimentary of the partnerships between healthcare in general and AdventHealth in particular and colleges, universities and high schools, including AdventHealth’s partnership in Palm Coast with the University of North Florida and Jacksonville University, whose students work through the hospital’s simulation lab on their way to local jobs. AdventHealth has what it calls “designated education units” that take nurses in the last segment of their schooling, places them in units designated specifically for them, with a tenured nurse as a teacher, enabling them to work hand in han d with that nurse for a semester. Out of that unit, AdventHealth is hiring 100 percent of graduates, Gregory said.




So while there may be an employment crisis to manage, the ways to manage it are not elusive: Gregory was almost prescriptive in her summation, which seemed to reassure her audience.

“So I need you to assess: what does your organization feel like culturally?” she asked. “Is it a toxic work environment? Because I will tell you that the generation that follows me, they’re not really good at hanging out in a toxic work environment. If it’s toxic, they’re out. And so as you think about these workforce challenges, I want you to keep in mind that it will not happen unless you’re intentional about it. Now, the folks in Florida deserve to have good health care construction projects done. We need to make sure that when you go to a hotel, we have the right employees there. So all sectors deserve to have this work for challenges resolved. And it really starts and it ends with leadership.”