Leadership

Future-proofing your facility part one: the audit

It’s not possible to forecast the next Black Swan event heading our way. Another pandemic, for example, won’t announce itself in advance. However, you can leverage your knowledge of known healthcare challenges — an aging population, policy changes, funding troubles — to position your organization to not only survive but thrive in the coming years. The first step is knowing where you are today so you can build a total workforce that can withstand tomorrow.

External workers: Figuring out your who, what, where, why, when and how

During our user-research interviews, operators usually say something along the lines of “In a perfect world, there would be no agency.” Unfortunately, if workforce and demographic projections are accurate, that perfect world won’t arrive for a long time — if ever.

Graph showing the growth in population of individuals aged 80 to 84 years from 2012 to 2050

The good news is that you can control your reliance on external workers if you start to use them strategically. Before you can do that, however, you need to know how you’re using them now. Here are some questions you can ask to begin figuring that out. 

  • How many vendors or agencies are you using? If more than one, why? 
  • Do you have full visibility into your external-worker utilization? If not, which vendors can give it to you?  
  • Are you overusing premium shifts? If so, when? In which buildings or units? 
  • Are you able to optimize external-worker usage? 
  • Are you using external workers more frequently during different times of the year, month, week or day? 
  • What’s your external-worker usage like per building? 

We talk about how to put your answers into action in part two of this series, “Using External Workers Strategically.

Engagement: How does your team really feel?

Turnover isn’t just one of your most expensive workforce costs — it costs you in continuity (and, sometimes, even quality) of care. It also taxes your staff: Burnout rates in healthcare are notoriously high. If you don’t know how your team feels about working in your organization, whether on your direct care team or your administrative team, it’s time to find out.  

Here are some ways to gauge how your employees feel. 

  • Conduct regular surveys: Annual surveys simply don’t enable you to gather regular, actionable feedback. 
  • Arrange “stay” interviews — similar to exit interviews, which help you determine why people leave, stay interviews help you determine why people stay.
  • Enable employees to give frequent feedback, preferably at the end of each work day.  
  • Host peer-to-peer focus groups, monitored by a neutral third-party.
  • Enable employees to share feedback anonymously at any time.
  • Conduct new-hire surveys — in senior care, 40% of turnover occurs in the first 90 days. And 18% of new acute care nurses leave within the first year. 

Efficiency: Where are you wasting time? 

From outmoded scheduling products and communication bottlenecks to a lack of reporting capabilities and manual processes, there are many reasons why you and your team could be wasting valuable time. Wasted time equals wasted money, so it’s crucial to invest in technology and systems that reduce inefficiencies. Here are some questions that will help you identify opportunities for improvement in your scheduling, communication, recruitment/hiring, and reporting processes. 

Scheduling

  • Are any of your buildings using paper scheduling? If so, why?  
  • Is your scheduling software purpose-built for senior or acute care, or is it a generic product that serves a multitude of industries? 
  • How much time does it take your schedulers to build the schedule each week?
  • Is scheduling taking time away from caregiving or other administrative tasks?
  • How far in advance are you filling shifts? How quickly do you fill them?
  • Which scheduling tasks are manual? Can they be automated? 
  • Do all your buildings use the same scheduling system and processes? If not, find out what products are in use. Also aim to uncover which buildings are the most successful with their scheduling and why. 

Communication

  • What are your organization’s workforce communication methods, standards and norms?
  • What does the process of communicating an open shift look like in each building? 
  • How do people request time off?  
  • How does your organization handle call-offs?
  • How do employees communicate their feedback to their managers and other leaders? 

Recruitment and hiring 

  • Do you know where you need to hire (what type of role and unit) and when (which shifts)?
  • Can you post job openings across multiple boards?
  • Are new hires able to complete new-hire paperwork before they start? 
  • Are background checks integrated into the hiring process or separate? 

Reporting

  • Are your reporting systems siloed, or can you share data across buildings?
  • Can you segment all reporting data as needed?
  • Do you have the data you need for compliance reports?

After the audit: Now, the real work begins

Now that you’ve audited your usage of external workers, gained insight into your team’s engagement level, and identified inefficiencies in your organization, it’s time to start fixing any problems. The next part in the series will show you how to use external workers strategically, which is quite different from using them emergently, as you’ll see.

About ShiftKey

ShiftKey is a technology company committed to transforming access and integrity in the workforce. By leveraging data and a marketplace approach to connect independent licensed professionals with facilities with open workforce needs, ShiftKey is playing a vital role in advancing empowered work, stability and solutions for professionals, facilities and the people they serve. With 10,000 healthcare facilities and hundreds of thousands of independent licensed professionals on the platform, ShiftKey is the market leader in strategic workforce solutions, driving a more sustainable, inclusive and profitable workforce economy for the future.