The pressure on agencies to meet summer home care staffing shortages is rising along with the temperatures amid persistent recruitment and retention challenges.
The same caregivers who deliver care for others are also tasked with finding care for their loved ones, such as kids who are out of school for summer break. As a result, caregivers often need more scheduling flexibility for childcare coverage at the same time they are also taking family vacations. Fortunately for home care agency owners, there are ways to help manage and even increase team capacity.
Top tips to manage home care staffing shortages:
- Creative recruiting: Stay-at-home parents with older children or more independent dependents may be seeking additional income and available for temporary work. Homecare agency owners can leverage this opportunity by implementing creative recruiting strategies, such as reaching out to local communities, schools, and parenting groups to advertise seasonal job openings. Emphasizing the flexibility and rewarding nature of caregiving roles to attract individuals who are passionate about making a difference.
- Streamlining operations and reducing manual processes: By optimizing workflows, agencies and caregivers can increase team capacity to allocate more time to caregiving and alleviate the strain caused by staffing shortages. Automated billing and compliance software, like Pavillio, can help. For example, Pavillio automates more than 70% of everyday billing and compliance operations – such as one-click billing and 99% of all claims submitted via the platform paid the first time. And with new features, such as Session-Based Care (SharedCare), integrated care teams are now able to track their time with a single entry when caring for multiple clients at a time, making it easier for billing than needing to have multiple timesheets. Learn more about Session-Based Care here in our recent blog post.
- Merit bonuses and time-off benefits: We recently conducted an informal LinkedIn and Twitter poll asking agencies how they are working to retain employees, especially for those who may seek to make a summer job change. More than 80% of home care agencies reported granting monetary bonuses to recognize employees as well as giving more time off. Another opportunity is to tap into your employees to refer qualified candidates and offer incentives for successful referrals. Create a referral program that rewards employees for recommending new hires who meet certain criteria and stay with the agency for a specified period. This approach not only strengthens your recruitment efforts but also boosts employee morale and engagement.
- Investing in reporting and analytics: Making the shift from manually managed spreadsheets to centralized data platforms can be a game changer for agencies seeking to gain greater transparency, reduce errors and get more time back. Automated home care billing and compliance platform Pavillio offers a centralized dashboard to help with forecasting and tracking claims and payment status. You can learn more about our new Agency Financials product feature in a recent blog post. Other tools specific to data integration, such as PowerBI and Tableau, can help take data from your key sources and platforms to track and forecast overall performance across all areas of the agency.
We know the challenges of home care staffing are incredibly complex. There is no magic bullet. However, by focusing on employee and caregiver needs and optimizing workflows and operations with smart data and automation, home care agencies can make incremental gains against staffing challenges.
Interested in learning more about how to maximize Pavillio? Check out our recent webinars or get started with a demo to see how we can work for you.