Advanced Care Services
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Key takeaways
Advanced Care Services
Advanced Care Services was established in 2007 with the goal of providing high quality domiciliary care to its customer base across Northern Ireland. Domiciliary care remains a core focus for the business, offering an alternative to a care home by providing care and support to those living in their own homes. This takes the form of two or three 15-30 minute ‘short calls’ per day to assist with medication and personal care needs.
The services offered by Advanced Care have evolved over time, and today the company’s 250+ highly skilled care assistants and support workers can also offer 3-4 hours of care per day to those individuals who desire or require a more flexible, bespoke service.
Brian Smyth, Director, Business Development at Advanced Care Services, has helped transform how the organisation delivers more than 6000 hours of care each week. He has also been instrumental in the implementation of Humanforce to aid with key aspects of workforce management.
Below, Smyth outlines the role Humanforce has played in delivering those services seamlessly and efficiently in a rapidly growing organisation.
Challenges
When he joined Advanced Care Services in January 2022, Smyth was instantly struck by one fundamental workforce management problem: The systems in place were very manual. For example, when rotas were completed, they were converted to a PDF, printed out and physically handed to staff.
“That’s not a scalable solution when you’re trying to grow a business,” he says. “In my opinion, modern organisations that thrive rely on systems that are efficient and digital, so printing and handing out slips of paper on a Thursday for the following week didn’t tick that box.”
In addition, the existing technology being used could not deliver what was required and was prone to errors.
“We were getting lots of input errors because you’d get down as far as Joanna [in the dropdown menu] and then accidentally click Sarah and no one would pick up on it because you had a list of 200 staff. Or someone would accidentally put in an 18-hour shift instead of 8 hours,” Smyth says.
The manual systems also resulted in a lack of flexibility, which in turn impacted how efficiently unforeseen or unplanned absences could be filled. For example, when a rota was created on a Thursday for the coming week, inevitably things would change: calls would be cancelled, staff would call in sick, and so on. That created workflow issues.
“We would say ‘OK, John is off sick tomorrow and he needs four or five pieces of work covered’,” Smyth says. “Using knowledge that we had stored mentally rather than in any system, we’d need to figure out who could cover for John. We might remember that Sandra doesn’t work on a Monday, so she’d be the first one called. Where’s her number? I’d find the number, phone her, and she can’t do it. Who’s next?”
Not only was that a time-consuming task, but it also meant that if the person organising the shifts was absent, so too was their knowledge. This created potential challenges around business continuity, not to mention compliance risks.
“We had to get this information out of people’s heads and into a system where it could be democratised so that everybody would have access to it,” Smyth says.
The solution: Why Humanforce?
Five Humanforce solutions and features in particular, appealed to Smyth.
1. Leave management
Top of the list was leave management. Previously, an Advanced Care staff member would call a manager and ask for time off. The manager would check a whiteboard list and see how many people had already requested leave. That number would determine whether the leave could be approved.
The leave application and approval process has been transformed. Today, a staff member can check their leave balance and apply for leave through the Humanforce Work App. Automated checks are done to map how many staff are available in that area of business and how many shifts are already covered, making it easier for managers to see what’s viable in one place.
“We can make informed decisions now,” says Smyth. “We don’t need to have this arbitrary rule of only four people off at a time, which never worked because those four people might have been in one area [of the business]. The app lets us be far more intelligent with the leave booking and approval process.”
2. Shift bidding
Humanforce’s shift bidding feature enables staff to bid on open shifts that suit their personal needs. Not only has this feature “probably halved” the amount of time managers spend filling rotas, but it has also shifted the narrative, Smyth suggests.
“Previously, asking staff to cover a shift was almost like asking for a favour,” he says. “With shift bidding it’s not a case of us asking them to help out; today, they are asking us if they can take on extra shifts.”
Another benefit is that the seamless integration of Humanforce’s shift bidding and leave management features means there’s less hands-on time needed for coordinators to fill shifts.
3. Rota templates
Advanced Care Services was previously running week-to-week rotas, which were set up on a Monday or Tuesday and then sent out on a Wednesday or Thursday for the next Monday. It meant that people were only getting three days’ notice of their work schedules for the following week. In a post-pandemic world, and with a younger workforce, Smyth knows that offering more flexibility is critical to attract and retain staff.
“With Humanforce we can build templates and roll them out at our discretion, so four weeks, six weeks, or whatever suits,” he says. “People can plan their lives. For example, if they want to take St Patrick’s Day off in two weeks’ time, we don’t have to wait ‘till the 15th of the month; we can sort that out on the 7th of the month.”
4. Qualifications Management
Humanforce’s qualifications management feature keeps tabs on certifications, qualifications and licences, and sends reminders when it’s time to renew these.
Advanced Care Services primarily uses this feature for visa compliance. One of the company’s strategic objectives was to become a visa sponsor, which would enable them to offer skilled visas to care and support staff. Fulfilling that objective meant staying on top of compliance – and plenty of it.
“You need to have the person’s visa details on file, you need to know when that will expire, and you need to know the terms and conditions of that visa,” Smyth says. “For example, one of the conditions is that the staff member must earn a certain salary amount per year. To track that, we’ve taken the salary and divided it by the hourly rate. So, we know that if a person works, say, an average of 37 hours per week, they will have their minimum threshold for the visa compliance.”
The company also uses this feature to track who is licenced to drive a vehicle. “There are certain circumstances where a driver is 100% required,” says Smyth. “There are other situations where someone might do a 12-hour shift but they can walk there or get a taxi. We can track that in Humanforce.”
5. Tracking time & attendance with geofencing
With staff members constantly on-the-go, being able to accurately record time & attendance is crucial. “With Humanforce’s geofencing feature, I can reliably tell you that this person clocked on at X time, and at Y location,” Smyth says. “In care organisations in particular, one thing you cannot do is leave early. You cannot leave a vulnerable person at 8:30am if you’re scheduled to be there until 9:00am.”
The Humanforce dashboard enables managers to see instantly how many people are clocked on and where they are. Geofencing parameters can be set up so that staff can only clock in within, say, 100 metres of the designated location.
“That adds security and adds accountability,” Smyth says. “It gives us the ability to investigate any potential misconduct and it means our payroll is more accurate. We don’t want to be paying people or charging people for services not provided.”
Results
Smyth speaks highly of the partnership approach taken by Humanforce, and especially the planning and prep work that went into the implementation phase. “My experience with all the professionals I’ve worked with at Humanforce has been fantastic. They’ve been supportive, understanding, transparent, and have explained things very clearly.”
With Advanced Care Services’ move towards providing supportive living arrangements, there has been a dramatic increase in the scale of work undertaken. “A large contract for us under the traditional model would be 80 hours a week,” Smyth explains. “Based on recent meetings, we’re taking on two pieces of work and they are likely to be around 1600 hours a week between them. That’s a 20-fold increase and will involve a team of 40 or so full-time staff and team leaders.”
He adds that their previous workforce management system would not have been able to facilitate that volume of work, while also ensuring each team member was in the right place at the right time, with the right skills. Smyth explains:
“Within one team there isn’t necessarily one set of skills required. You might need a team leader, two or three people with a specific piece of training, such as MAPA or positive behaviour training, two people who are able to drive, and so on. You can set these different parameters as you’re building out the rota template to ensure these boxes are ticked.”
Having used Time Target, an earlier iteration of Humanforce, for five years in another company when he was based in New Zealand, Smyth has witnessed how Humanforce and its suite has evolved. “It was a great system, which is why I opted for Humanforce when I came back to Ireland,” he says. “The progress made since then is very clear and you can see that the feedback about how to enhance the suite has been taken onboard. Shift bidding and qualifications management are the best examples of that.”
That said, Smyth feels the full potential of the Humanforce suite has yet to be fully tapped into by Advanced Care Services, but he says that’s “exciting” because there’s potential to use more of the features and functionality in the future.
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