3 ways to reduce staff turnover in Aged Care (using HR tech)

The Aged Care industry continues to grapple with staff-related challenges, particularly in terms of burnout and high voluntary staff turnover. With no signs of these trends slowing down, it’s time for HR players in the industry to reconvene, look at the bigger picture, and ask themselves how they can retain talent for the long term. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how HR tech can assist your Aged Care home in reducing staff turnover and boosting the overall employee experience (EX) for your staff.

Why is staff turnover so high in Aged Care?

An aging population means ever-increasing demand 

According to the WHO, 22% of the world’s population will be over 60 years old by 2050. Also, by that time, the number of people aged 80 and over is expected to triple. Until then, the demand for Aged Care facilities, workers, and services is going to grow exponentially.  

A tired workforce 

Unsurprisingly, this has placed excess pressure on Aged Care systems — and workers are bearing the brunt of it. The work is often physically, mentally and emotionally intense. Many workers are burnt out and are leaving the sector en masse — up to 139,000 workers are expected to leave the Australian Aged Care industry by 2026 

Aside from high levels of stress and often unfavourable working hours, Aged Care workers are seldom offered a career path or any form of professional development beyond compliance-related training. Without an incentive for development or progression, it can be hard to show up and give 110% each day. 

Strict compliance and reporting requirements 

Compliance and regulatory obligations add an extra layer of responsibility for Aged Care workers, both in terms of everyday workload and administrative duties. Much of these obligations in Australia arose from 2018 Royal Commission into Aged Care — including the new Aged Care Act — a total overhaul of the previous legislation, which comes into play on 1 July 2025.  

For the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC). This framework aimed to link funding to the actual costs of providing care, as well as provide proof of the provider’s commitment to meeting minimum requirements. Aged Care homes are now required to provide:   

• Quarterly reports on ‘care minutes’. Each resident must receive at least 215 minutes of care, daily, with at least 44 minutes coming from a registered nurse (RN)  

• Monthly reports on the 24/7 registered nurse (RN) responsibility, including:  

• Each time there was no RN on-site and duty for 30 minutes of more  

• The reason for the absence of an on-site and on duty RN  

• The alternative arrangements that were made to ensure clinical care needs were met during the time that an RN was not on-site and on duty 

RN shortages are already prevalent, with Australia facing a shortage of 70,000 nurses by 2035. Aged Care RNs are already doing too much — but with an aging workforce and lack of new talent entering the industry, there’s little sign of relief on the way.

Humanforce can help you reduce your Aged Care home’s staff turnover with HR solutions

When it comes to reducing staff turnover, there is no silver bullet. However, with the help of HR tech, Aged Care managers can improve the overall EX for their workers to not only reduce staff turnover, but boost engagement and performance.  

It’s worth noting that Humanforce offers a full suite of human capital management (HCM) software. In addition to the HR solutions outlined below, Humanforce provides solutions for Workforce Management (including Rostering & Scheduling and Time & Attendance), Talent Acquisition, Benefits and Payroll.

Employee Engagement 

Happier employees are generally more engaged and provide better customer service – and in this industry, that equates to better care outcomes for residents. The best way to discover what your employees truly care about? Ask them directly. 

Humanforce’s Employee Engagement solution allows you to customise survey forms, collect feedback, measure and improve engagement across your business. Managers can set up 1:1 check-ins, provide recognition and feedback at any time, and measure eNPS scores.  

These functions facilitate key touchpoints in forming the manager-employee relationship, allowing the manager to identify aspects of the employee’s role that could be driving them to attrition. For example, a staff member who shares a good relationship with their manager may feel comfortable enough to share with them that they’re experiencing personal issues, which may have been hard to spot otherwise. The manager can then make arrangements to alleviate their workload until they have moved past whatever it is they’re dealing with.

Performance Management 

In Aged Care, it can be difficult to offer professional development through mentoring and training — the heavy workloads leave little time for all parties to work with. Fortunately, Humanforce’s Performance Management solution grants managers the tools to keep tabs on their worker’s overall progress, with the hope of transforming these insights into development exercises. 

With this solution, managers can effortlessly track and assess individual and team performance across business functions. It offers the ability to set objectives and key results (OKRs) and cascadable goals, which can then be tracked and updated as needed over time. Real time performance data helps in formulating accurate performance reviews, while helping to identify gaps in skills and training needs. 

Keeping the hefty legislated reporting requirements in mind, Performance Management can help managers track, in real-time, how well their staff are meeting their targets. This can help you discern whether their workload is suitable, or if you require additional staff to bolster patient-to-carer ratios, for example. In doing so, you ensure compliance and prevent burnout at the same time.

People Analytics 

With People Analytics, Aged Care managers have greater visibility over their employees’ individual and collective performance through detailed data insights. Some key features include: 

• Workforce Headcount: Consolidate all personnel information for easy workforce planning, mapping, and reporting needs. Pulls through all current employee and job information from each record.  

• Movements and Change: A chance to look at how quickly or slowly things are changing in the workforce. Pulls through all change events in your system (any time job or remuneration data is updated on a person’s record) 

• Remuneration speed: Looks at expected total remuneration spend and average labour cost trends and forecasts. Pulls through all remuneration data from all current job records.  

With these features, managers are able to dive deeper into employee trends, cross filtering between business unit, pay grade, tenure, and more. This helps uncover potential problems, opportunities, or hidden biases within the wider business.  Managers can also access insights into team dynamics with ease through role-level analytic access and summary tiles displaying key metrics. 

Finally, keyword cloud opens possibilities for greater sentiment analysis. Managers can then uncover the human factors that impact business performance and engagement, including overall employee attitudes. If negative sentiment is detected, for example, managers can pick this up and formulate strategies to try and retain dissatisfied workers.

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, 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.