Already battling an industry-wide staffing crisis, HR admins in Aged Care cannot afford to waste unnecessary time on highly manual compliance monitoring processes.
Recent analysis conducted by UTS and reported in The Conversation found that Aged Care providers will need to increase total care staffing by around 12.4% by October this year if they intend to reach the Federal Government’s ambitious minimum staffing ratios.
At present, only 5% of nearly 1,200 surveyed aged care homes had the staffing levels required to meet these targets, and only 3% were above Labor’s proposed 2024 thresholds. A “perfect storm” of staffing issues includes an ongoing struggle to attract and retain workers to aged care, competition with other health/disability sectors with higher award rates, negative perceptions of the industry, and higher-than-usual attrition rates after the pressures of the Covid pandemic.
It’s clear that this is an industry under pressure, but it’s not just nursing staff who are feeling the pinch. HR administrators are becoming increasingly aware that they simply cannot afford to spend too much time on compliance monitoring when they should be focused on securing a staffing pipeline.
Frustration among time-poor HR admins
Cited’s research into perceptions of compliance monitoring among Aged Care HR business partners, HR advisors and HR managers revealed a level of frustration among professionals who know that there’s a better way of managing compliance. Some of the comments included:
- “There are weeks when compliance might be 80% of my week, but other times it might be 10-20% of my week. I wish I never had to touch the compliance part; it’s not all that fun.”
- “The most frustrating thing is definitely the reporting. It’s a lot of admin. It’s very difficult to get all qualitative information from the one system.”
Our research found that becoming more senior does not mean that an HR professional has graduated beyond such work; all levels of seniority are obliged to spend significant portions of time on repetitive, manual work.
- “[Getting documents from candidates] involves a lot of back and forth, and despite my new role as a business partner it’s still with me. It seems to drag on; it seems to be something I’ll never get rid of. There’s not a very streamlined easy way of recording the data.”
- “If we had a proper HR management system our team would be freed up to do more of what they’re passionate about.”
This last quote illustrates an important point: those working in HR have generally pursued this career to improve the way workplaces operate. Even though they acknowledge the importance of compliance, they are “people people” and can resent the amount of time spent buried in spreadsheets in pursuit of maintaining compliance status. Resentment leads to disengagement, which leads in turn to poorer performance and higher attrition.
Save time and effort with Cited
Through automatic collection, registration and reconciliation of staff checks, credentials and certificates, Cited makes the management of your aged care workforce fast and simple.
With Cited, admins have more time (and headspace) to get on with the real job. Cited helps to minimise data entry,and automatically requests all documentation from new and existing staff, saving you the trouble of emails and phone calls.
The platform enables Aged Care workers to upload their credentials and complete any training right from their mobile device. Our helpful automatic alerts also mean your staff will never let their credentials lapse again.
Our single source of truth is updated in real-time, providing a step-change in workforce compliance visibility as soon as you implement the Cited platform. Any workers who don’t meet safety requirements will stand out immediately, giving you the confidence that your workforce is meeting your standards at all times.
Get in touch with Cited today to discover how we enable rapid onboarding, reduced costs and admin, portable worker documentation, automated document collection and simplified reporting.
Most importantly, slashing the time spent on compliance monitoring means you can focus on the overwhelming challenges facing the industry in 2023: attracting and retaining the staff required to meet higher minimum staffing ratios.
