How workforce management software for aged care improves resident care quality

Delivering aged care services can sometimes feel like fighting the mythical Greek hydra: no matter how many problems you defeat, another is always waiting to pop up and demand your attention. 

For instance, not only must your organisation balance the competing demands of profitability and service delivery, but ongoing skills shortages make staff attraction and retention a challenge.

But while there are plenty of tools you can draw on in your never-ending quest for operational excellence, adopting a workforce management software for aged care isn’t always a top priority. That’s a mistake. As we’ll explore in this article, implementing such a system can play a critical role not just in minimising labour costs and enhancing compliance, but in producing the degree of employee satisfaction required to deliver world-class care in the competitive aged care environment.

Systemic challenges of aged care in Australia

Demand for aged care services in Australia is growing. According to a November 2019 report by the Australian Government Aged Care Financing Authority, Attributes for Sustainable Aged Care: A Funding and Financing Perspective, projections based just on historical average staffing levels indicate that the aged care workforce will have to triple by 2050 to meet the demands of an ageing Australian population.

Unfortunately, meeting this demand won’t be easy. As the organisation’s July 2020 report, Eighth Report on the Funding and Financing of the Aged Care Sector, found: “There is significant variation in the financial performance of aged care providers, however the overall trend, particularly in the residential care sector, is not sustainable.”

The report continued: “An increasing number of residential care providers are making a loss, and it appears that a growing number of smaller providers are facing significant financial difficulties and are seeking to leave the industry.”

The Financing Authority attributes these challenges to several factors:

• A legacy of a highly regulated system

• Funding pressures

• Low community status (and, at times, esteem)

• Incentives that do not reward innovation

• Elements of ageism in aged care

• Challenges attracting management and leadership skills compared with better resourced and more dynamic industries

Internal operational issues facing aged care providers

However, it isn’t only systemic issues that are impacting providers’ ability to deliver services without compromising care quality.

For example, consider that some aged care providers have wage ratios as high as 70%, despite labour being one of their most manageable expenses. Outdated, inefficient manual systems contribute to these high wage ratios. As an example, creating rosters from scratch each week adds to the admin burden of rostering and payroll, and it introduces a high potential for errors – including both employer-side compliance issues and worker-side scheduling frustrations, such as unnecessary overtime.

When workers are forced into excessive overtime, are not given the shifts they prefer, or do not receive the amount of work they require due to manual rostering issues, morale suffers - and this, in turn, affects the quality of care they provide. As a result, better scheduling has the potential to improve not just wage ratios and centre profitability, but also workforce satisfaction and overall care standards.

How does workforce management software for aged care work?

Implementing a holistic workforce management software suite like Humanforce for aged care offers providers a number of benefits.

Reduced administrative burden

As hinted at earlier, managing labour with an automated system can minimise administrative burden by replacing or automating several different manual admin procedures or functions.

Take as an example the Humanforce feature that allows HR leaders and frontline managers to approve payroll by exception. With manual payroll processing, timesheets must be approved – and any deviations from approved schedules must be investigated – by hand. With approval by exception, payroll managers can automatically approve timesheets that meet expected work times, focusing their manual review effort only on those that fall outside of expectations.

Rules-based rostering

Rules-based rostering is another Humanforce workforce management software feature that improves both operational efficiency and employee satisfaction.

Once set up, rules-based rostering and ‘smart rosters’ allow HR managers to avoid potential scheduling conflicts based on staff availability, scheduled leave, vacations, hours worked, and other internal rules. Rosters created that violate these standards automatically alert managers so that potential issues can be resolved before they result in understaffed or overstaffed shifts, as well as frustrated workers.

Mitigate compliance risks

Compliance is critical at aged care organisations, which is why Humanforce’s workforce management solution includes:

• Automated skill profile and skill ratio tracking across shifts

• Alerts when schedules don’t meet standards

• Tracking of employee qualifications, permits, leave entitlements, and type of employment to help avoid compliance penalties

• Data insights to reduce overtime and increase productivity

The vast swaths of data collected by a workforce management software for aged care like Humanforce allows organisations to monitor staffing efficiency through in-built reports.

Not only can these insights allow organisations to reduce overtime expenditures and increase their overall productivity, they can also prove useful as forecasting tools for improving budget planning. This can be especially impactful for organisations with multiple care residences, as workers and resources can be allocated across different locations, based on specific needs.

Reporting confidence

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

How workers benefit from workforce management software

Beyond the advantages to the organisation, implementing a workforce management software for aged care offers workers several benefits.

With such a system in place, workers enjoy:

• Reduced stress, thanks to improved visibility into scheduling and fewer errors occurring

• Lower potential for interpersonal conflicts centred around rostering issues

• Lower turnover and more accurate hiring processes, thanks to streamlined systems and a clearer awareness of the organisation’s staffing needs

• Quicker and easier onboarding

• Greater rostering flexibility and autonomy with the ability to handle shift swaps and leave requests on their own (via the Humanforce Work App)

Remember, aged care workers are often casual workers who may be juggling multiple jobs or competing demands. The more your organisation can do to simplify their work lives, the happier they’ll be.

Ultimately, when you remove work-related stress and other distractions, you free your staff up to focus on providing world-class care. Implementing a modern, tailored workforce management software for aged care doesn’t just improve profitability and productivity. The full impact trickles down to your staff and your residents, creating the kind of sustainable operation needed to thrive in the challenging years ahead.

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.