Why workforce management technology is essential for 24/7 Healthcare providers

Through the lens of a Healthcare operations manager

Why is having the right rostering & scheduling software so vital to Healthcare organisations? 

It’s important to stand in the shoes of Healthcare manager in charge of operations and rostering, even just for a moment. These individuals are responsible for planning, creating, approving, monitoring, and reporting on rosters. Picture this scene: 

It’s 11pm on a Saturday evening. Exhausted from not only coordinating workloads and ensuring staff have undertaken their duties, but also from the never-ending paperwork, you head back to your office and fill in records, reports, handover documents and finally, create rosters for the week. 

Suddenly, your phone chimes. It's a Registered Nurse (RN) advising you that they’ve been in an accident and cannot make their shift starting in 1 hour. In a panic, you realise you now need to find somebody to cover the shift — but it’s late notice. Not only do you need to stay back for a couple of hours until the next starter, but you’ll need to rearrange the roster to accommodate the sudden change of plans. As you're using spreadsheets to create and update rosters, it means making phone calls to anyone who might be available...

Workforce management (WFM) is an ongoing challenge for Healthcare managers 

This vignette isn’t far off what many Healthcare managers experience on a regular basis. As populations age, medical technology improves at rapid pace, and preventative care becomes the new cure, the demand for healthcare services, facilities, and personnel continues to increase. 

Additionally, Healthcare workforces across the globe were ravaged by the pandemic, which not only saw their numbers depleted, but also their morale. This decline only compounded an existing global skills shortage. In fact, the World Health Organisation has predicted a shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030.  

Not only are these workers in short supply, but they are also often burnt out. High-stress environments, long hours, frequent overtime, confronting scenarios, and difficult patients continue to drive Healthcare staff out of the industry. 

To navigate through, it often falls to Healthcare managers to optimise the use of existing staff with careful rostering and scheduling that balances the needs (and health) of workers with compliance issues and providing the best care possible. That’s only possible with modern WFM technology solutions.

But first — why Humanforce? 

We are veterans in WFM technology. Humanforce was one of the first software businesses in Australia to specialise in rostering and time & attendance solutions. For 23 years, we have made the lives of managers and frontline (‘deskless’) workers easier through our WFM software suite — and continue to do so today. This is what we can do for Healthcare providers globally.

Rostering & Scheduling is the ideal WFM solution for Healthcare organisations 

Why do they need it in the first place?  

Many Healthcare organisations offer 24/7 care. Therefore, shift work is popular for the flexibility and coverage it provides, especially within hospitals. However, poorly managed rosters often lead to inefficiencies that not only impact staff wellbeing, but the quality of care being delivered to patients. 

Moreover, burnout is a key driver of high employee turnover in the Healthcare sector, especially among frontline medical staff such as nurses and emergency doctors. As such, preventing burnout should be treated as a top priority — and a critical step is ensuring well-forecasted, balanced rosters. For example, too few staff can lead to increased workloads and overtime, reducing the overall quality of care. Too many staff, and the organisation risks overspending on labour costs. 

Hospitals lack rostering prowess, which is unsustainable going forward 

Our previous article highlighted how hospitals, in particular, struggle with the creation of fair and efficient rosters. A diversity of workers is partially to blame, with managers having to account for roles ranging from administrative workers to highly skilled surgeons, to janitorial staff, and so on. 

However, a root cause is the fact that many hospitals continue to lean on outdated legacy software systems and even manual processes, despite facing critical challenges:  

• Balancing patient safety with worker wellbeing. The ongoing challenge of forecasting enough staff to meet demand, while ensuring they work a safe number of hours with adequate breaks 

• Meeting compliance obligations. In context, this means ensuring staff are qualified and able to work their rostered hours, and in adequate supply to meet patient-to-carer ratios 

• Integration struggles. It’s often challenging to find software that integrates with their legacy payroll, security, and HR software stack 

This is unsustainable in the long run. Hospital and Healthcare organisations must adopt more efficient WFM practices to keep their employees as engaged as possible — or risk a catastrophic skills shortage for decades to come.

What Rostering & Scheduling can do for your organisation

Humanforce’s Rostering & Scheduling solution is a modern, AI-powered scheduling solution that elevates workforce planning for Healthcare organisations. Managers can create optimised, cost-effective, award-compliant rosters with just a few clicks. 

Using sophisticated AI, rosters can be auto populated with suitably qualified and available talent who have specified their work preferences. It can even help forecast how many workers will be required based on historical data. Managers can auto-generate rosters based on previous work patterns. This is especially handy if your workforce relies on a rotating roster. Even better, labour costs are shown directly in the roster as it is being created, ensuring that managers can stay within budget. 

Managers can switch to multi-view rostering for a top-down view of employee schedules and projected labour costs, giving them a greater understanding of employee capacity and wellbeing, as well as overall labour expenditure. And this is all doable with intuitive, click-and-drag controls and automated alerts for rostering conflicts. 

Returning to the scenario at the top of this article, managers benefit from the shift offer feature, which enables them to send out shift offers to available, qualified workers via SMS or the Humanforce Work App, This is an efficient, quicker way to fill urgent, unplanned roster gaps – all without having to make countless phone calls.  

And of course, workers benefit too. They can use the app to check their roster, utilise the shift bidding feature to take on additional work if desired, request leave, and communicate more effectively with managers and colleagues.  

Offering greater autonomy and flexibility around rostering goes a long way towards enhancing the employee experience (EX) as it enables people to more effectively balance work with their life priorities. A great EX leads to positive business outcomes: people are generally happier, more productive, and more likely to provide better customer service – which in Healthcare equates to better care outcomes. They are also likely to stay longer. Indeed, a Harvard Business Review study of young hourly workers across multiple industries found that 83% of them would be more likely to stay in their current job if they had more control over their work schedules.

As an all-in-one human capital management (HCM) solution, Humanforce also has a HR suite, including Compliance Management, to more effectively manage qualifications, certifications, visas, vaccinations, and more with automated expiry reminders and alerts. 

This is just a snapshot of Rostering & Scheduling and what it can do for your organisation. To find out more, visit the product page or talk to one of our experts today.

About Humanforce 

Humanforce is the all-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, the US, 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 solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.