Aged care workforce management: How to set your people up to succeed and care for them too

Our ageing population has created a highly competitive industry, with aged care providers vying to look after the health and wellbeing of older Australians.

One major problem facing Australia’s aged care sector is ensuring there are enough employees with the right skills to provide quality and safe care. As PwC Australia suggested in 2022, the Royal Commission’s final report about the aged care sector emphasised the key role of our aged care workforce. It also recognised that recruiting, retaining and developing a workforce capable of delivering the quality aged care Australian consumers expect is a complex task.

Moreover, skills shortages are rife and only going to increase. In 2022, aged and disabled personal care workers and registered nurses topped the National Skills Commission’s list of jobs projected to grow the most by 2025 – with combined demand expected to lift by 40%. 

To rise to the task of delivering the level of quality care consumers and the Australian government require, service providers need to set their aged care workers up for successful and sustainable careers in this rapidly growing industry.

Whether you’re a homecare or residential aged care provider, workforce management technology can help you attract and retain talent, deliver quality aged care, meet federal government requirements and improve your operational efficiency.

How workforce management tools make life easier for aged care workers

To succeed in business, residential aged care providers need to deliver high quality care. Clearly, this necessitates having enough staff to cover at least all the minimum daily tasks to keep aged care homes performing well. To gain a competitive edge, however, your employees need to be highly engaged and motivated to truly support the health and wellbeing of aged care residents. Here are two ways to do that.

1. Improve aged care staff morale and customer service

Quality workforce management platforms can make delivering your employee value proposition (EVP) efficient and easy. They can convey important values like collaboration and autonomy in a way that was impossible with paper-based solutions. 

The Humanforce Work App, for example, supports seamless communication with your teams, giving them a sense of belonging and value irrespective of their location. It also transforms workers’ devices into secure, contactless clocking kiosks and enables them to access timesheets and payslips from anywhere, fostering a greater sense of control and autonomy.

2. Offer employee scheduling flexibility

Consistently high turnover in this sector underscores the importance of work-life balance, with employees increasingly seeking greater flexibility around their working lives. Workforce management tools, like Humanforce’s easy to use rostering software, give your aged care workforce more control over their schedules. Your workers can input their availability and work preferences, block out times they’re unavailable, and bid for unfilled shifts. This gives your teams the flexibility they want while ensuring your shifts are covered and reducing reliance on agency staff.

Additionally, using workforce management software for aged care makes building demand-based rosters easier by giving you oversight of staff requirements, leave, availability and aged care qualifications. Capacity and demand-based warnings also help you maintain correct staffing levels to ensure your people aren’t overstretched. 

These features add up to a better experience for your aged care workers and the older Australians they’re caring for.

Improve your aged care workforce strategy

Significantly, the Royal Commission found over half of Australia’s aged care residents were living in care facilities deemed to have unacceptable staffing levels. As a result, the Australian government set minimum staff time standards for residential aged care, which become mandatory in October 2023.

Aged care workforce planning is therefore crucial if providers are to maintain Aged Care Quality Standards, including the standards for human resources and personal and clinical care.

Seamless policy framework ensures easier compliance

As part of the ongoing plan to deliver better care for older Australians, the Aged Care Workforce Strategy outlined 14 actions the industry needs to take to “change attitudes to caring, attract and retain a skilled aged care workforce, and ensure the workforce can meet aged care needs now and into the future”. 

Among other things, these include:

• Addressing workforce competency gaps

• Implementing new workforce attraction and retention strategies (which the PwC Australia report highlighted as a key action providers can take to support the future of our aged care workforce)

• Developing an updated workforce relations framework that better reflects the changing nature of work

Humanforce’s Workforce Management suite can support your workforce planning process. For example, error-free scheduling helps keep your clinical FTE rates on track and helps ensure you’re providing high-quality levels of care. Automated award interpretation simplifies maintaining compliance requirements while reducing the potential of human error.

Queensland’s Rockpool Residential Aged Care, for example, uses Humanforce to efficiently organise staff documents before and throughout their employment, making onboarding easier while helping to fulfill compliance obligations.

Easy integration with your existing systems

When it comes to choosing workforce management software that aged care providers can implement effectively, it’s important to consider integrations with your existing software. The Humanforce human capital management (HCM) suite offers seamless integration with many of the aged care sector’s standard systems, including over 100 payroll partners. The Humanforce API means we can work with your existing technology to ensure a smooth integration that leads to enhanced data security, reduced double-handling and improved productivity.

The time and energy liberated from performing routine tasks can be used to work on higher value activities, such as workforce development and quality aged care planning.

Centralised administrative capabilities for easy use

Moreover, Humanforce provides a custom dashboard builder that makes it easy to discover insights and visualisations that can transform your business, while also enhancing compliance. 

With simple drag and drop functionality, you can create a centralised data hub that focuses on what’s important to your organisation, with visualisations that highlight key insights in a meaningful way.

Humanforce has always been committed to helping our aged care customers meet their legislated minimum staff time requirements through our Workforce Analytics solution.

Humanforce Workforce Analytics allows you to view key datapoints in real-time to ensure your organisation remains compliant under the AN-ACC reforms, including:

• Your compliance with minimum staff time requirements

• Care minutes compliance reporting to maintain star rating for facilities

• Residential care minutes and RN care minutes against schedule in a single report

• Highlighting under- and over-staffing based on care requirements and scheduled hours

Our AN-ACC Real-Time Dashboard, found within Humanforce Workforce Analytics, adds greater functionality and helps providers analyse specific data to ensure they are meeting care minute reporting obligations.

For example, users benefit from:

• 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 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

Enhance aged care quality and workforce planning

We know that to understand what’s truly going on with your workforce, it’s vital to have visibility over your aged care workforce and how their day to day is going, without micromanaging them and reducing employee job satisfaction.

Look for key aged care workforce management platforms which have powerful reporting capabilities, allowing you to easily analyse and interpret your most critical aged care workforce data. The actionable insights uncovered will help you identify and resolve any workforce issues before they cause ongoing problems for residents.

Visibility tools also allow you to recognise and reward great work, resulting in improved staff performance, efficient management and quality outcomes. This will then have a ripple effect through the business, sending signals that staff are looked after and recognised for their efforts, which in turn can only positively impact elderly residents.

Efficient, paperless record-keeping for Australia’s aged care providers

Humanforce has been intuitively designed for organisations that support the health and wellbeing of older Australians. 

In summary, aged care workforce management software can help you to:

• Attract and retain motivated and engaged aged care employees

• Enhance employee engagement and staff morale, with positive flow-on effects for care delivery

• Maintain compliance with the Aged Care Quality Standards

• Gain greater visibility over what’s happening in your organisation

• Easily discover actionable insights to improve your efficiencies and care delivery.

Our innovative digital system helps you deliver quality aged care while building a successful and sustainable business. Get in touch below to find out more.

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 solutions can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.