Church Farm Care
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Key takeaways
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See how Church Farm Care is closing the gap on agency costs and carer response times, increasing productivity, and transforming the way they operate using Humanforce.
Watch their story to learn more.
Advanced Care Services
Church Farm Care Group employs over 500 staff across four care homes in Nottinghamshire, UK, specialising in the complex care needs of people with dementia, including respite care, day care, and nursing and palliative care.
Church Farm homes are designed to look and feel intimate and create a feeling of home and security.
Rather than being called ‘residents’, the people under care are called ‘family members’. “This is their home and we are all family,” says Sarah Power, Deputy Manager at Church Farm Care Group.
Church Farm Care Group believes that its employees are the company’s greatest assets, with the recruitment process focused on finding people with specific personal qualities such as being genuine, fun-loving, and having life experience regardless of age.
Challenges
The key talent challenge facing Church Farm Care Group was the fact that most workforce management-related tasks, such as the creation of rotas and schedules, and tracking time and attendance, were handled manually.
For example, Power says managers and administrators had to hand-write rotas from scratch every time. They would be checked by a second person, and then they would be printed out and displayed around the homes.
Employees had no other way of knowing about their shifts apart from checking the printed rota. The risk of human error was high, and rota changes were difficult.
“Things weren't always right. You have to make lots of changes throughout the month, so there was a lot of paperwork and then of course you've got the issues of GDPR, so you had to be careful about who would have access to files,” Power says.
Steve Dunn, the organisation’s Group Financial Controller, acknowledges that creating rotas for any healthcare business is a “massive challenge”, but doing this task manually was a huge drain on resources.
He also says the organisation lacked real-time intelligence about where and when staff were working. This made workforce planning challenging and hampered efforts to keep labour costs in check.
The lack of visibility and functionality for employees to swap and adjust work preferences meant that often rota gaps had to be filled with agency staff – an expensive and inefficient way of running the business.
The solution: Why Humanforce?
The organisation’s management team recognised there was an urgent need to digitise workforce management processes, not only to improve the experience for carers but also to enhance the care and support provided to residents.
“I think with any healthcare business, any change can often be quite daunting,” says Dunn. “It did take Church Farm Care a bit of convincing to move digitally, but now we’ve done it and the business really has transformed from an operational perspective.”
Alongside Humanforce’s workforce data intelligence solution, Workforce Analytics, which aids data-led decision making, Church Farm Care Group is utilising Humanforce’s best-in-one human capital management (HCM) suite to improve operational efficiency and the employee experience. Here’s how:
Rotas and Schedules
Solutions such as Rostering & Scheduling, are used by Church Farm Care Group to ensure people are in the right place at the right time. “I use it on a daily basis,” says Power. “It’s a really good system that supports us with managing our staff.”
Power uses Humanforce to create rotas, to ensure that the skill mix is right for each shift, and that everyone is using their annual leave.
“As a manager, I use it mainly to make sure that everybody has arrived to do their shifts. If a shift needs covering at short notice I use the bidding system, which ensures that we can cover a shift really quickly with our own staff so that we get continuity of care.”
Thanks to the use of rota templates, rotas don’t need to be created from scratch; they can easily be replicated day to day, week to week or month to month and adjusted to account for demand, staff preferences, annual leave and sickness.
“You're able to look at the rota to check staffing levels for forthcoming rotas quickly rather than having to go through a lot of paperwork or a lot of different screens,” Power says. “So, it does save a lot of time and you feel like you're in control of your staffing levels. Before we digitised, it was quite difficult to track that.”
Time & Attendance and Humanforce Work App
Church Farm Care Group also uses Humanforce’s Time & Attendance solution, using a combination of the Humanforce Work App and touch screen kiosks within each home, so that staff can easily clock in and out. “Most staff use the app on their phone to clock in and out, which is good because they can go straight to their allocated areas of work,” says Power.
Managers can also use the shift offer feature on the app, which enables workers to bid on any available shifts. It offers staff a level of flexibility and autonomy so that work can more effectively be integrated with life.
“It's all on the app,” says Dunn. “You can bid for shifts if you want to pick up additional shifts in the month. So, it can provide a financial benefit for the staff too, because if they if they want to earn more, they have that immediate visibility and they can pick up additional shifts.”
The Work App is also used to communicate with staff. “You can directly message staff and you can send it out to all staff, so it saves sending emails or text messages, and printing rotas,” says Olissa Tatters-Smith, who works in administration at Church Farm.
Results
Labour force cost reductions
Power has been especially impressed with the shift bidding functionality, as this has had a tangible impact on the bottom line.
“I really like the bid system because staff can pick up shifts so easily. They know that if they pick up a shift, they’re working with people they know, and it offers continuity of care,” she says.
“It has reduced the cost of using agency staff and it's providing better care because it is our own staff who are picking up the shortfalls. Our agency costs have gone down by about 98%.”
Process efficiencies
The time taken to create rotas has dropped dramatically since the adoption of Humanforce.
“We can template rosters, so we'll just have continuous rosters that we can upload months in advance, and there's minimal changes required from the management and administration team,” says Dunn.
Power says that in the past, on an average day, it would take three to four hours to ensure rotas were in order. Since implementing Humanforce, that time has reduced dramatically. “Today we’d spend maybe half an hour to an hour a day undertaking those tasks,” she says.
When a rota change was made prior to Humanforce, there would be issues around communicating that change to the team, so people would still show up to work even if they weren’t scheduled. “Using Humanforce, that process takes a few seconds for managers and it’s instantly communicated to the team. The admin staff now have around 30-40% more time to concentrate on other tasks,” Power says.
These time savings extend to tasks like leave management. “If somebody has phoned in sick for or is unable to make their shift, we're able to, in a split second, make shift offers to our team, and rather than it being a couple of hours of ringing people it's done in just a few minutes,” Power says.
She adds that the automation of these tasks gives time back to busy managers. “It’s already on there, it’s in the system. So rather than me having to say ‘someone’s picked up the shift, can you add it to the rota?’, it automatically does it for you, so everyone knows who’s on the shift that day.”
Staff satisfaction
From an administrator’s perspective, Tatters-Smith says Humanforce “is a really easy system to use”. On the home page, she can see an overview where outstanding leave requests are shown, as well as any unauthorised timesheets or shift change requests. There are also prompts about work visa expiry dates, which “helps ensure compliance”, she says.
This functionality also makes it easier for managers. “If a manager walked in and wanted to know who was in, they can log straight in and it will show you who’s working, what time they clocked in, what time they’re finishing, and who’s due to arrive for a later shift,” says Tatters-Smith.
Dunn says that for the carers at Church Farm Care Group, it takes a click of a button to clock in and out. “It allows us to maximise that time with the residents and ensure they can live the best life they can. Our staff don’t have to spend time on administrative tasks and they can focus on the job they love.”
Dunn believes employee engagement in the business has increased and attributes this partly to the enhanced communication and the increased visibility of rotas available via the Humanforce Work App.
He adds: “By helping us to be operationally efficient, Humanforce helps us to retain staff simply because we are on the pulse with everything that’s happening in our business.”
Data and reporting
It’s no surprise that in his finance role, Dunn has benefitted from easy access to people data and the reporting tools available within Humanforce’s Workforce Analytics solution.
“Within my role, a key time saving has been on the reporting process. I can now send reports out on a Monday for the business to see, whereas before it would have been a monthly report,” he says.
“Real-time analytics allows us to look minute by minute at what's happening in our business, which gives us great control and allows us to make any changes necessary promptly,” Dunn adds.
Transparency is key. As a deputy manager, Power is provided with an overview of where staff are at any given time. This helps to ensure the right mix of skills are in place – a critical element when it comes to compliance and having the right number of nurses on shifts.
“Working in a company with so many staff and so many different shift patterns, it can be time consuming to get the skill mix right to ensure that the right qualified staff are in place,” Power says. “Previously that could take hours over a few days. Now we can upload it so that everybody can see what they’re doing really quickly, and then we are able to focus our time on other things, such as providing care.”
Optimised human resources
Dunn says there’s also a strategic element as the management team can be more proactive in its workforce planning.
“The single biggest benefit for me is responsiveness,” he says. “Managing staff costs as a care home provider is key. We know exactly where we are each day. We can be proactive in our planning and our on-the-ground daily activities. We can plan around holidays. We can see if we need agency staff. We can see these scenarios and take action before they happen.”