Many businesses manually schedule shifts, which can both take a lot of administrative time for both those doing the scheduling and employees seeking open shifts. And if you run a home care agency, the scheduling process can be tedious – when a caregiver is unavailable at the last minute, you’ll have to start individually calling your other caregivers to see if they can cover the shift. As a home care agency leader, streamlining your employee scheduling can make your job easier and keep caregivers satisfied.
Hireology recently partnered with WellSky Personal Care, the leading web-based and mobile operating platform for home care agencies, to help home care agencies more effectively attract and hire employees, and seamlessly move from candidate to employee. Through the WellSky Personal Care platform, home care agencies can streamline scheduling and fill open shifts in minutes, among other capabilities. Below, we’ve outlined several key benefits of partnering with a platform like WellSky Personal Care to make your caregiver scheduling more efficient.
Decrease Scheduling Time
Rather than playing phone tag with a long list of caregivers, partnering with a home care scheduling software provider enables you to share open shifts – and empowers caregivers to accept these shifts – in minutes. Through a provider like WellSky Personal Care, open shift opportunities are sent to one or several caregivers either via email or text. Then, the first caregiver to accept the shift automatically gets scheduled. WellSky Personal Care data found that this technology helps home care agencies decrease scheduling time by 80 percent. In addition to saving time, your team can reduce errors that you otherwise would have faced by scheduling via paper forms.
Ensure Shifts Are Always Covered
Your home care agency never knows when a caregiver might call out of a shift. But this doesn’t mean you should be left scrambling to find a replacement. By having the option to reach out to several caregivers at once with the available shift, you can fill last-minute openings in no time. This will help you have a great reputation among clients, who would otherwise be left without a caregiver when they need one.
Match the Right Caregivers with Your Clients
With more efficient scheduling, not only can you rest assured knowing all shifts are covered, but you can also match each of your clients with the right caregiver based on a variety of criteria. These criteria include distance, certification, availability and more.
Once the right caregiver is matched with your client, you can further set the caregiver up for success by making sure the information they need. A home care operating platform like WellSky Personal Care has a mobile app, which empowers caregivers to do their best work. The app ensures caregivers have everything they need for upcoming shifts including client information, maps, directions and shift tasks at their fingertips.
Boost Employee Engagement
If your employees end up waiting around for shifts to manually get scheduled, they can get frustrated and might even end up seeking work elsewhere. But more streamlined scheduling enable caregivers to manage their own time – and accept shifts as they open up.
Beyond shift flexibility, improved scheduling can help caregivers cut back on administrative tasks, helping them stay engaged and focused on offering top-notch client care. For example, without a solution like WellSky Personal Care, many caregivers either have to phone the home care agency or manually write down shifts to log their time. With integrated time logs through WellSky Personal Care, caregivers can dedicate time back to caring for clients – and your team can reduce errors when it comes time to pay caregivers. Ultimately, more efficient scheduling can improve your agency’s ratings with both satisfied caregivers and clients.
In addition to all the benefits outlined above, streamlining your caregiver scheduling and time tracking can make new employee onboarding much more seamless. Rather than having caregivers get up to speed on complicated scheduling paperwork, your team can easily train caregivers on the scheduling software and they’ll be accepting shifts in no time. For additional tips on employee onboarding, read our resource, “The Digital Onboarding Playbook.”
