How Does Digital Rostering Improve Care Home Staffing Efficiency?

It’s no secret that care homes are feeling the pinch of fewer care staff and more demands on qualified care providers. Care work is both physically and emotionally demanding and while it’s such a rewarding job, those pressures can prevent new recruits from signing up. Particularly where the pay may not match up to the expectation.  

Those same pressures can also be the reason some care homes find it difficult to retain staff. Burnout, sickness and absence create a cycle of additional pressure on lean care teams who are often dealing with increasing numbers of vulnerable patients and sometimes with increased shift hours.  

All of this creates a reliance on agency staff, which often comes with a hefty price tag, tipping the balance sheet off kilter. 

But while many of these challenges rely on a system change, it’s rostering which can have the biggest impact at a care home level. Manual, paper-based rostering opens up the likelihood for error, where teams are over-worked or mismatched with their patients' unique needs. Digital rostering can support – not only removing workload but also helping care home leaders to identify pinch points in the future and solving for them long term. 

Digital rostering for care homes takes the process of staff schedules online. Rather than filling out schedules manually, whether that’s on paper or on a spreadsheet, digital rostering gives you an easy way to match your team and their training to the needs of your patients. 

It allows you to easily create rosters which can be monitored and viewed in real time. You can match your team members’ skills to your patients while also tracking your team’s timesheets and attendance records to fill gaps and stay compliant with time limits and rest periods. For your team, it means they can easily request holiday, log absences and you may even find a solution which integrates with your payroll, to prevent salary administration errors due to misreported absence. 

The aim is to give you time back on the areas of your care which are most important to you. In some cases, it can reduce the time care managers spend on their rotas and scheduling by up to 60%. 

Discover how digital rostering can reduce pressure, improve efficiency, and support safer, more consistent care.

Manual rostering is often seen as a time sink for care leaders because of the level of decision-making and referencing involved. With manual solutions, there’s limited visibility of your team’s availability which can require a lot of cross-referencing between systems and previous rosters to ensure that you take into consideration planned holidays and workload. 

This can increase the risk of error and may mean that once a roster is written, it needs to be amended even after it’s been shared. These changes can also make it tricky to keep on top of version control and, in worst cases, may lead to gap filling due to staff absence. 

While it can seem as though there is increasing pressure for care homes to move away from paper-based and manual solutions to digital ones, it’s for good reason. 

Digital rostering gives you: 

• Faster and smarter rota creation
• Real-time visibility of your staff and upcoming absences
• Reduced dependence on agency staff to fill the gaps in your roster
• Better and more proactive management of holidays and planned absences
• Safer staffing due to compliance around time limits and rest periods 

Whether you’re a care leader, manager, team member or someone overseeing multiple care homes, there are plenty of benefits of digital rostering. 

For care staff and managers

As a manager, you’ll be able to create a suitable rota for your care teams quicker than ever before, and while that’s incredibly beneficial for your time, it also has great benefits for your team too. Care staff are able to get their schedules further in advance, allowing them to plan their time better which leads to increased satisfaction. Schedules also become fairly allocated. Plus with extra oversight on time limits, rest periods and absences considered, last minute changes are less likely to happen. And with a happier team you get improved morale and even better staff retention.

For care quality

Though it may not be immediately obvious, person-centred care also benefits from digital rostering. This is because staffing levels become safer and team members are able to be matched, based on their skillset, to unique patient needs. It can lead to better continuity of care because the same carers are seeing the same patients on a regular basis. 

Single home vs multi-site care groups

At a higher organisation level, digital staff scheduling provides central visibility when managing multiple sites, allowing for consistency and compliance across all care homes. For single care home providers, it gives you local control of your site.

The first thing to consider when looking for a digital staff scheduling software is that it’s designed with care home workloads in mind. It’s often easier to work with a software provider who understands the intricacies of the care industry and builds improvements based on ever-evolving standards of care. 

Something easy-to-use should also be a top priority - there’s no need for digital rostering to be complicated. If it is, you’ll only be spending more time on your staff scheduling. 

It’s also worth looking for a system which does more than just rostering. You may also consider software which integrates with care home workforce management, such a payroll and your existing care systems. 

The final consideration is a software which gives you real-time reporting and scalability. This means that your digital rostering can grow as you do and highlight inefficiencies for even more proactive scheduling in the future. 

Take control of care home staffing with confidence. Discover how digital rostering can reduce pressure, improve efficiency, and support safer, more consistent care.