Aged care industry HCM pain points
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Aged Care pain points
Staffing Issues:
Talent attraction:
To put it plainly, there aren’t enough workers in aged care to provide the services required. The global pandemic exacerbated existing challenges. Many people left the industry altogether either during or after COVID-19, never to return. The workforce is also aging, and not enough fresh graduates are joining the profession.
Labour shortages are an issue for service providers globally. For example:
UK
27% - that’s how much the number of social care workers needs to grow by 2035 to meet increasing demand and improve services. This means the workforce needs to increase by 480,000 people to fill vital roles across the approximately 15,000 care homes in England and Wales.
20% - that’s the increase required in direct-care staffing needed to reach ‘acceptable’ staffing levels across the country. This means Australia needs at least 41,000 more direct-care workers right now just to achieve acceptable levels of staffing. To reach ‘best practice’ levels, a 49% increase is required – that’s at least 101,000 more workers.
33,000 – that’s how many caregivers are currently employed in the Aged Care industry, yet between 12,000 and 20,000 more residents will need aged care by 2026. Demand for workers is expected to increase by between 50% and 75% (FTEs) by 2026, raising concerns about the talent pipeline.
Talent retention:
Stress and burnout, poor remuneration and “too much paperwork” are commonly cited as the reasons for leaving the Aged Care industry altogether.
Again, this is a global issue. In Australia, for example, 40% of workers intend to leave the residential Aged Care industry within the next three years and 65% intend to leave within the next five. Almost half (48.3%) of all workers in the sector with less than one year of experience plan to quit by 2024, raising questions about the pipeline of new workers and reinforcing the need for career pathways.
How Humanforce can help improve talent attraction and retention
Studies have shown how critical the employee experience (EX) is for talent attraction, engagement and retention. A great EX also has a positive impact on customer experience (CX). Here’s how Humanforce can help:
Onboarding. A great EX starts with great onboarding. Humanforce’s Onboarding & Offboarding solution can tailor onboarding and offboarding workflows according to your organisation’s needs. This can be based on each employee’s location, role, department and experience. In addition, pre-boarding can be done, enabling essential employee information (personal details, bank details, etc.) to be collected digitally before the first day on the job.
Assessing employee sentiment: How do you know what your employees care most about? Ask them! Humanforce’s Employee Engagement solution allows you to customise survey forms, collect feedback, measure and improve engagement across your business.
Communication and connection: Aged Care workers need easy, on-demand access to their rosters and personal information: the Humanforce Work App helps keep people informed, connected and engaged with their organisation. The app allows employees to check rosters, bid on shifts, confirm shifts and swap shifts. It also allows employees to receive messages on-the-go and for managers to view real-time attendance data, make roster adjustments and approve requests from anywhere.
Labour costs and agency usage
In an inflationary environment, all organisations in all sectors are struggling to contain labour costs. While ‘doing more with less’ might seem an effective way to keep labour budgets in check, it can actually result in cost blowouts.
For example, the work burden falls to remaining staff, which in turn increases the risk of employee burnout and turnover. Alternatively, staff may be asked to work overtime or take on additional shifts with penalty rates, which also increases costs.
To plug gaps in shifts that can’t be filled by their own employees, many organisations in the sector rely on agency staff from third-party agencies. To once again cite Australia as an example, research shows that approximately 9% of all registered nurses, enrolled nurses and personal care workers in residential aged care facilities are external contractors.
These workers are often working for multiple employers. As they may be working intermittently, they may not have the time or inclination to build meaningful relationships with residents, which can be distressing and undermine the continuity of care.
Of course, agency staff usage also increases labour costs. 2023 research from aged care accountancy firm StewartBrown revealed that spending on agency staff had more than doubled in the past year, equating to approximately $1.1 billion over the course of a year. This needs to be considered when the same report revealed that 64% of aged care homes in Australia are operating at a loss.
How Humanforce can help reduce labour costs and reliance on agency staff
Keen to keep labour costs down and improve the rostering creation experience for managers? Humanforce’s Rostering & Scheduling solution shows staffing costs as a roster is being created, in real time. It also improves visibility of agency staff usage and can help identify trends which may translate into specific recruitment initiatives. For example, looking to find people who can work Wednesdays and Thursdays because agency usage is consistent on these days.
Designed to fast-track and simplify the way workforces come together, our latest feature, Roster Manager, is a single rostering interface that allows operations and roster managers to complete all their rostering needs with a few clicks. It offers three different views of a roster, allowing users to view their data in a way that best suits them.
Key features include:
Roster Alerts: Generated rosters will clearly highlight any compliance warning to observe or action. Users can surface working hour exceptions, overtime warnings, and qualification limitations to optimise their roster and enhance compliance.
Shift Fill: Users can directly fill shifts and offer vacant shifts to workers. Shifts can be filled several ways, with options to select their most trusted or highest performing employees, or easily access the data required to fill shifts based on operational needs (e.g. specific qualifications or costs).
Filtering and Grouping: Users can surface their desired rostering information and navigate directly into the detail they need with a range of dynamic viewing and grouping options, such as Area, Shift Definition, Employment Type, Event, Location, Department, and more.
Roster stability and flexibility
Unpredictable or irregular shifts can have a major impact on aged care workers and the people in their care. It has resulted in a push for what’s been branded ‘roster justice’ in industries such as Retail, Hospitality and all the care sectors.
Dr Gemma Beale, from Flinders University’s Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, told The Guardian that the phrase ‘roster justice’ refers to what is known in academia as “the problem of work-time insecurity”.
“Work-time security is about your access of hours of work, the control over hours worked and the predictability and consistency of working hours over time,” Dr Beale said.
“The greater the fluctuation in your work-time security, the more precarious your job is. It’s about whether you can reasonably predict whether you will be working week to week and whether that’s consistent week to week.”
Research from Harvard Business Review shows that 83% of hourly workers say they would be more likely to stay in their current job if they had more control over their schedules.
Inefficient rostering can also impact organisational performance. What does this mean? It likely means more overtime rates being paid. It means there’s more risks associated with tired workers impacting the care outcomes for residents. It also means that a general lack of flexibility can result in more no-shows for scheduled shifts, leaving managers scrambling to fill roster gaps and communicate changes to workers.
How Humanforce can help to optimise rostering
Humanforce can help in two key ways:
Our Rostering & Scheduling solution takes all your staff preferences, leave, availability and qualifications into consideration when building out rosters, reducing the reliance on agency staff and the likelihood of multiple team members being unavailable on a given date. Our templates allow for the creation of a base roster with a standard pattern of shifts, and shift bidding empowers staff to take control of their schedules. Automated alerts ensure that workers are alerted of roster changes well ahead of time.
Humanforce’s Leave Management functionality helps managers to confidently plan workforce resourcing needs and efficiently manage absence. They can track sick leave and approve paid time off, such as annual leave and parental leave. This ensures that absences are manageable and compliant, and the leave application and approval process is fast and efficient.
Compliance and regulations
Compliance is a ‘necessary evil’ for organisations operating in the Aged Care industry; however, compliance is more than a box ticking exercise. It can ensure society’s most vulnerable people are well cared for. However, compliance comes at a price. Whether it’s tracking mandatory care minutes, ensuring qualifications are up-to-date, juggling rosters, or producing reports for government authorities, the compliance burden often falls upon already-stretched frontline workers and managers.
How Humanforce can help with compliance
Here’s how Humanforce can help:
As a 24/7 shift work industry, a range of conditions apply within awards and employment agreements (EA) including shift penalties, shifts over midnight and minimum rest periods. Our Awards & Compliance solution is powered by an Award Interpretation Engine (sometimes referred to as a pay conditions engine). Complex conditions are automated to ensure payment of employees is accurate. In addition, Humanforce displays the award/EA interpretation directly in the roster, highlighting overtime and providing accurate expected labour costs so managers can stay in control.
Humanforce Workforce Analytics helps HR leaders and site managers make better decisions with robust analytics and reporting that transforms your Humanforce data into actionable insights. This allows users to view key datapoints in real-time to ensure your organisation remains compliant with industry regulations and government legislation.
While the key metrics in Workforce Analytics – such as absenteeism, tardiness and labour costs – will always be accessible, aged care providers in Australia also benefit from Humanforce’s AN-ACC Real-Time Dashboard.
This unique feature provides:
Real-time visibility of adherence to care minute targets, based on time rostered and time worked
The ability to nominate which roles contribute to care minutes, and nominate the extent to which each role contributes to care through percentage allocations
Self-service file uploads for care minute targets and occupancy rates
The ability to view resident care minutes and Registered Nurse (RN) care minutes against schedule in a single report to maintain star rating for facilities
The ability to identify excessive and insufficient resourcing to ensure cost-effective compliance
Flexibility to utilise API and integrate per residence per day (PRPD) data from external sources
The ability to exclude leave time and training hours
Additional industry challenges
The talent-related pain points outlined above cannot be taken in isolation. There are additional challenges facing organisations in this sector. Governance and compliance remain key challenges, as do funding issues – many organisations in this sector globally operate at a loss.
For example, in Australia, the 2021 Royal Commission made 148 recommendations designed to ultimately improve care outcomes in the sector. These recommendations included the creation of a new rights-based Act, funding based on need, and much stronger regulation and transparency.
Read more about the AN-ACC funding model and ongoing reforms on the Department of Health’s information page.
The strength of any organisation – but especially those in Aged Care - lies in its people. Navigating the many talent-related challenges in the sector with the aid of innovative HR and workforce management technology can give you the edge in a competitive, highly regulated industry.
About Humanforce
Humanforce is the best-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses.
To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.
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