Why hospital rostering software designed for deskless shift workers is vital
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In major public hospitals, private hospitals and regional hospitals across the country, it’s always been challenging to roster deskless shift workers.
There are 2.7 billion deskless workers in the world, which is over 80% of the workforce.
In terms of employee numbers, of the top 8 global deskless industries, healthcare comes third. Hospitals are full of shift workers, who until fairly recently, tended to be overlooked when it came to rostering software.
This article will canvas modern solutions for this problem and explore the benefits of having specialised software designed for deskless workers.
What is hospital rostering software?
Hospital rostering software helps to generate and automate the creation of fair and equitable staff schedules. It includes functions to:
Communicate schedule changes to staff
Process leave and shift swaps
Send timesheets to payroll
Monitor time worked and overtime
Provide data and insights for analysis
Integrate with existing hospital software.
Some of the welcome benefits of good rostering software include a reduction of scheduling problems and better management of resources, which ultimately boosts employee morale and improves patient care.
The challenge for hospitals in making fair and efficient rosters
The complexity of hospitals has worked against efficient rosters. They have to manage a supremely diverse range of workers, from the unskilled to the most highly skilled surgeons. Many hospitals have hung onto manual processes because they are the only systems they know, however inefficient.
These are some of the challenges they face:
Patient safety – ensuring that doctors and nurses work a safe number of hours with required rest periods
Compliance – making sure all staff are qualified to do their rostered work
Integration – struggling to find rostering software that integrates with their legacy payroll, security and HR software systems.
It’s easy to identify the most common problems with using a manual or paper-based system for rostering deskless workers in hospitals:
Greater risk of potentially fatal human error
Reduced efficiency
Low potential to use data in business intelligence or metric tracking
Time wasting and frustrating for staff.
The benefits of hospital rostering software for deskless workers
On the other hand, purposefully designed medical rostering software, created in consultation with hospitals, has a plethora of benefits.
Remotely accessible schedules
In a manual system, turning over the rostering to everyone would invite chaos. But with a modern, automated system, introducing a level of ‘self-rostering’ within intelligent parameters has many benefits.
Staff can select their own shifts or time preferences from remotely accessible schedules. The software ensures minimum and maximum shift selections to fit hospital policy and compliance rules. It can highlight any gaps in the schedule, issue reminders, publish the roster and harvest the data for reporting and analysis.
Increase scheduling effectiveness
It’s much easier to administer a roster efficiently, saving hours and achieving ideal staffing levels. Rosters can be made in minutes, balancing nurse-to-resident ratios.
You can schedule qualified staff across different roles, let employees apply for the shifts they prefer and find those last-minute replacements without having to call anyone. You can send rosters straight to your team’s phones and inboxes.
Minimise scheduling conflicts
Medical facilities can reduce conflicts in rosters when the software automatically identifies potential conflicts. For example, when personal leave is entered, it will flag any staff member rostered on during their leave.
Keep workers updated on shift changes
Unlike a paper-based roster, a digital roster is dynamic and is never out of date. That means it’s easy for workers to trust the roster. If it lives in the cloud, it can be accessible anywhere.
From major public hospitals to regional hospitals and private hospitals, all hospital sizes and types will find it easy to send emails and text messages to all staff to update them on shift changes that may affect them.
Deploy a mobile, modern solution
With deskless workers, it makes sense to adopt a mobile solution. Roster solutions for mobile apps let staff see rosters, set times of unavailability, make leave requests, manage swaps and track their hours.
Track labour for more efficient management
Efficient rosters can track the timesheets of nursing staff, emergency departments and agency staff. Capturing the times they begin and end shifts on a built-in timeclock and timesheets adds accuracy to logged hours. The result is a factual account of staff payroll costs.
Automate and facilitate complex tasks
You can reduce admin when you allow managers to work within predefined budget allocations and optimise rosters to suit. The whole cycle of workforce administration can be automated, from staff induction through rostering and payroll. You can reduce overtime, absenteeism and other costs.
Automate labour and overtime calculations
A clever system automates employee attendance, absenteeism, overtime, flexitime balances, rostering and holiday leave. Configure it with your unique pay rules and policies to ensure accuracy and compliance.
Facilitate optimum staff management
Whether working across multiple locations, budget tracking or making a scalable system suitable for a complex hospital, flexible software improves your management of staff. You reduce costs and gain efficiencies while they enjoy the best possible experience of seamless schedules.
Increased employee satisfaction
Staff get behind innovations that empower them with more autonomy to control of their schedules with availability and work preferences. You can also use shift bidding to reduce reliance on agency staff while opening up shift options to all staff. Better rosters build a more engaged workforce.
Implementing rostering software for deskless shift workers
Humanforce’s intelligent rostering software helps you create compliant, cost-effective rosters in minutes. It’s easy to build demand-based rosters that take all your staff requirements, leave, availability and qualifications into consideration automatically, thus giving you more time to focus on other matters.
With templates that streamline manual processing, multi-function views for simplicity, and capacity warnings, the system also integrates with HCM, payroll processors, POS systems and industry management providers.
The result is an end-to-end solution that can track hours, reduce costs, optimise rosters and increase staff satisfaction.
Conclusion
Hospital roster software designed specifically for deskless workers can help you automate complex scheduling, be equitable and fair, drive efficiencies, reduce costs, ensure compliance, at the same time as delivering effective patient care.
Humanforce solutions
Humanforce is a leading provider of shift-based workforce management solutions that simplify onboarding, scheduling, time and attendance, employee engagement and communication.
Customers in more than 23 countries use Humanforce to optimise costs, realise compliance confidence, empower their team and drive growth.
Humanforce was founded in Sydney in 2002, and today has offices across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK.