Key Issues for Caregiver Workforce Management

In the current work climate, strategies for managing caregivers must take into account these challenges:

Staff Shortages

The healthcare labor crisis makes it harder to recruit and retain talented caregivers. Some employers are competing on employee benefits and pay rates; others are relying on their most talented caregivers picking up the slack. The ideal caregiver workforce management strategy will boost recruitment and retainment rates while simultaneously helping employers make the most of their working caregivers.

Absenteeism

Last-minute shift cancellations and no-shows can cause havoc for your home health organization. Your caregiver management strategy should help you reduce absenteeism and quickly find cover when required.

High Turnover

Losing your top talent can have a negative impact on your caregiving quality, workplace culture, and employees' morale. Employers need to prioritize retaining caregivers, whether through improving employee benefits such as flexible scheduling and enhanced family leave or offering opportunities for career growth.

Burnout from Caregiver Responsibilities

Caregiving can be a high-stress, emotionally taxing job that impacts caregivers' mental health and well-being. Many caregivers experience compassion fatigue at some point in their career. Without enough support, this can turn into caregiver burnout.

Caregiver burnout can lead to reduced care quality, a negative workplace culture, and poor mental health among workers. It exacerbates existing challenges, such as high turnover.

Burnout is a particularly high risk among caregivers who are also taking on a caregiving role at home. Many employee caregivers struggle to balance their professional caregiving responsibilities with providing care for an elderly parent or child with disability.

With more and more caregivers from the sandwich generation, the reality is that your caregiving workers often finish their caregiver shift only to go home to provide caregiving support for both dependents and aging loved ones. This can exacerbate fatigue, as working caregivers feel that they never switch off from their caregiving duties.

How to Effectively Manage Your Caregiver Workforce

While there are plenty of challenges for caregiver workforce management, the right strategies will help you reduce turnover, tackle burnout, and improve scheduling. They will enable you to better support your employee caregivers — whether you have a human resources department or not.

Employee Assistance Program

An employee assistance program can benefit your caregiving workers and back office team of non-caregivers alike. It will give them the tools to better manage their health conditions, compassion fatigue, or the emotionally taxing nature of caregiving.

Make sure your program meets your workers' needs. Encourage employees to share ideas on how your program can better support them, and don't be afraid to use community resources as well.

Better Work-Life Balance

When your caregivers have the work-life balance they need, it will reduce stress levels, improve their well-being, and create a better quality of life. Your employees will also be less likely to search for new or additional jobs, which means lower caregiver turnover for your business.

Many caregivers value flexible work options. Remote work isn't a possibility for caregivers, but you can offer other benefits. Give your workers control over their work hours by allowing them to set their availability and bid on additional shifts.

Empower your caregiver team to create a work schedule that fits around their other responsibilities and daily activities, whether that’s caring for an elderly parent or trying to manage studies, childcare, and other work. And, as they bid on shifts, you'll find it easier to find cover for no-shows and reduce absenteeism.

Access to Resources

When your caregivers experience less stress at work, your whole organization benefits. Your employees will be more motivated and better equipped to provide quality services. In turn, clients receive better care and costly human error rates fall.

You can support your caregivers by providing access to the resources and patient documentation they need. For example, a caregiver mobile app will enable your team to view care plans during home visits. This will reduce their stress levels and ensure that they feel supported at work.

Streamlined Administrative Tasks

A heavy administrative burden can increase stress and make your working caregivers' jobs less rewarding. Review your administrative processes to help your caregivers spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering care. This will both improve caregiver morale and enable your team to care for more patients in less time.

Use templates for nursing and progress notes so that caregivers can write them more quickly. Templates offer additional benefits such as improved quality standards and greater consistency.

Make use of intuitive caregiver platforms and modern technology, such as voice-to-text. A slow or bug-filled interface can exacerbate caregiver stress.

Improved Scheduling

We've already mentioned the benefits of flexible scheduling for reducing job stress and improving caregiver retention rates. By building more efficient and caregiver-friendly schedules, you can further support your employees.

Well-designed schedules will reduce the time your caregivers spend traveling. This can lower stress levels and enable your team to visit more clients per shift. Make sure the schedule also includes regular breaks and shifts of a reasonable length.

Software That Makes Managing Caregivers Easy

Better managing caregivers offers numerous benefits for home care agencies. You'll improve caregiving quality, reduce scheduling costs, tackle burnout, and lower turnover rates.

With ShiftCare's home health care software, you can empower your caregiving workers. They'll be able to set their preferred availability via the mobile app and bid on additional shifts. Updating patient notes is easy, thanks to templates and voice-to-text technology, and your employees can access documentation on the go thanks to the cloud-based storage system. And with push notifications and SMS messaging, it's easy to touch base with your employees to see if they need additional support.

Discover how home health software benefits your business and your employees alike. Try ShiftCare for free.