Taking a technology-led approach to aged care staff shortages

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world, staff shortages had become more and more commonplace. Most industries are impacted, but perhaps none more so than aged care. The pandemic demonstrated the impact of staff shortages in the aged care sector, providing an insight into the significant issues that employers have faced – and continue to face – to this day.

According to an article in The Guardian, aged care providers estimate about a quarter of all shifts – or the equivalent of 140,000 shifts a week – are going unfilled. As the world’s population ages, this crisis will only escalate.

How can aged care employers tackle staff shortages?

Evidence shows that a positive employee experience (EX) results in better experiences for all stakeholders, particularly aged care residents, and the importance of finding innovative ways of designing and implementing better experiences for all is growing clearer.

Here are two key ways employers can make a difference:

Improving scheduling

A survey of 520 casual workers found that three in four workers would be open to an employer using technology to manage shift availability, rostering, payroll and work time management. 

When workers are not given the shifts they prefer or do not receive the amount of work they require due to manual rostering issues, morale suffers. This affects employee engagement and the quality of care employees provide. As a result, better scheduling has the potential to improve not just wage ratios and care facility profitability, but also workforce satisfaction and overall care standards.

Humanforce’s workforce management technology means managers have real-time information about where their team members are and can manage unexpected absences easily and efficiently with eligible and available replacements. Changes are automatically reflected in reporting and timesheets.

Humanforce also allows employees to arrange and accept shifts – including short-notice shifts. For example, Rockpool Residential Aged Care, located in Morayfield QLD, leverages rostering functionality in Humanforce to ensure accurate and error-free scheduling for their employees’ shifts. This allows employees to bid on shifts from their mobile devices, decreasing the workload in filling vacant shifts and unplanned leave.

Tackling financial stress

Linked to scheduling issues is the impact of financial stress on aged care employees. For a workforce that’s usually able to take extra shifts across multiple providers, the ‘single site’ measures imposed by the industry have meant some workers are financially worse off. Some providers have given their staff wage top-ups to reduce the financial impacts of these measures, while another approach is giving staff access to their earned wages (sometimes known as flexible pay), so they can be immediately compensated for shifts.

Humanforce Thrive is a financial wellbeing platform that offers flexible pay alongside pay tracking, automated savings, cashback rewards, and money coaching.

Using Thrive as part of the Humanforce workforce management suite, workers can pick up a shift they weren’t planning on doing and then access that money straight away. That kind of scenario is unexpected additional compensation, so they’re not even touching the money they’ll get at the end of the month through payroll. That can mean employees who have monthly regular income don’t need to get a second job for an extra cash injection; instead, they’re creating that through the app.

Humanforce’s human capital management (HCM) suite can make scheduling and pay as simple as possible for stretched aged care providers. Get in touch below to find out how!

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.