Managing staff in any organisation can be demanding, but it’s doubly so in the health sector with varying skills required, multiple wage rates and 24/7 operation, it is certainly one of the harder industries to be involved in.
Adding to this is the pressure of funding.
Never before has the cost of care been so heavily scrutinised with pressure from all sides to provide higher levels of care yet save money at the same time.
The media of recent times has taken it upon themselves to highlight situations where operators are not meeting the levels of care and while some are justified I have yet to see a balanced article that informs the reader of the full story and how hard it is to meet the audited statutory requirements and how well the majority of industry actually achieve this with happy staff and clients.
That said there is always room for improvement
To get it right organisations must plan accordingly and put it the systems to manage training programs, recruitment policy, employee reviews and work flow planning that meets, not just the facility care requirements, but also the work / life balance of the employees.
Many operators have not understood that their existing systems just manage the process and not the overall business. Managers need to leverage each step to make the next step easier and faster with transparency. A good example of this is using rosters to auto authorise timesheets were the staff have come and gone correctly. This means that manager can just deal with the exceptions. Saves time and money and creates more accurate payroll processing.
Proper training programs are easy to audit, provide staff a goal to achieve and help them feel valued while improving their personal earnings with a clear return to the facility.
There are all manner of systems to help managers get it right, from recruitment, patient care, staff rostering and attendance; they are all designed to make it faster, smarter and free up management time.
Internationally New Zealand is behind other developed companies when it comes to investing in these types of systems. One of the key reasons our competitive productivity levels are slipping behind is the lack of investment in these types of systems.
It’s crazy to think a typical facility manger will be employed to manage a $1 to $1.5 million dollar wage budget and be expected to do so using manual paper timesheets and excel rosters. Then, when the wage costs go over budget as they inevitably do, they somehow have to reduce costs without any tools the rest of the world use as standard business practice.
This is why the focus often goes to cutting the number staff or their wage rates rather than investing in the systems that help managers get the efficiency and planning needed for the whole organisation to benefit.
So the key to getting Staff Management Right? Get the right systems in place to manage it.
