Creating or improving staff scheduling services in your healthcare organization can be a game-changer for operational efficiency and employee satisfaction. This step-by-step guide, developed by Workforce Edge, is designed to make the process of setting up scheduling services in your organization straightforward and rewarding. We understand the importance of effective scheduling, especially in demanding environments like hospitals and long-term care (LTC).
1. Assess Needs
The first crucial step is to thoroughly assess your organization’s scheduling needs. This involves considering the number of employees, reporting structures of unit managers and program directors, the types of shifts required for each occupation group, and any special considerations like part-time workers or peak operation times. This understanding will serve as a solid foundation for designing the right tools and processes.
2. Design Your Staff Scheduling Practices
There are upwards of 20+ staff scheduling and deployment business processes. Most are classic staff scheduling and related to swapping shifts, shift filling, and vacation/PTO planning. Others are rooted in clinical, financial, and people processes that flow through the staff scheduling function. Collective agreements and labor laws may affect some of your timeliness and business rules but are quiet on many points. This is where your organization’s values can come to life.
3. Set Up the Staff Scheduling Organization
It is healthy to have mixed emotions, opinions, and objective discussions about centralized, decentralized, and hybrid services. Once your business processes are designed, you know how you are going to “do business.” Now, you need to think through the design of your scheduling services, which are built as a mix of transactional and strategic resources that support unit leaders. Your service delivery model needs to fit your culture. Your scheduling service is required to help maintain consistency and standardization in practices, which translates to staff equity.
4. Be Deliberate About How You Use Replacement Staff
Float teams, unit-based relief, multi-site arrangements, clinical and non-clinical clusters, super-nurses, daily floats, travelers, internal agency…you name it, and the model has been operationalized somewhere. When it comes to developing your relief workforce coverage strategy, factors such as data points, size, sharing arrangements, and resource agility are needed to respond to data and AI applications concerning census and acuity. Be deliberate about how you manage and mix your teams and when you place these resources in known open shifts.
5. Optimize the Foundation
No matter how sophisticated the processes and well-funded your internal scheduling service may be, it can be all for you if you have a shaky foundation. What is the foundation, you ask? The actual staff schedules. Their quality, compliance, workability, and design must be sophisticated to operationalize the intended model of care and baseline staffing each shift each day. Building optimized schedules is no easy task. Change management methods to support unit leaders and frontline staff through a schedule change are important, as are the speed and quality of the master schedule planning and build tools in use.
6. Train Staff and Leaders on the New Ways of Working
Accepting services from your scheduling service organization, your internal service provider can be uncomfortable for some. We are always afraid to let go and lose control of healthcare operations. Train your managers, employees, and schedulers (!) on how to partner in this collaborative environment. Consistent resources should support units so schedulers can build client relationships and learn the lingo and unique operational needs. Regarding reinforcement, the business processes you have designed have become your standard operating procedures and daily workflows to keep everyone on track.
7. Turn on or Re-configure and Re-engage Your Scheduling / Timekeeping System
Choose scheduling software or tools that best fit your needs. Look for solutions that offer flexibility, ease of use, and integration capabilities with your existing systems. Your next step is to either install or re-configure scheduling software against your new business processes. Customize the scheduling system to match your organization’s needs. Define rules for shift assignments, availability, and overtime and ensure compliance with labor laws. A well-configured system can automate many scheduling tasks, reducing the administrative burden on managers.
As with any system change, this may or may not involve setting up server networks and ensuring the software integrates smoothly with other systems, such as payroll and HR. Proper infrastructure setup is crucial for seamless operation. And conduct thorough testing before a full-scale rollout!
8. Rollout
Implement the scheduling system gradually, using a process-integrated approach. Don’t just focus on the bells and whistles!
9. Monitor and Adjust – in Order to Sustain
Standing up scheduling services is critical to enhance workforce management and operational efficiency. By following these steps, your organization can implement a robust scheduling system that meets your needs and supports your goals. At Workforce Edge, we are committed to helping you achieve optimal scheduling practices to improve workforce wellness and operational success.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where our experts discuss the pitfalls of staff scheduling and common mistakes people make in implementing step #3.
