High cost agency spend – the plane crash of workforce management?

Author: Sarah Reed SCW HUB

Delving into the intricacies of managing your workforce we look at how taking a holistic approach can help to reduce the need for agency support.

In the book ‘Outliers: the story of success’ Malcolm Gladwell talks about the misconceptions around the causes of plane crashes –that they generally are not due to one catastrophic fault, but due to a series of issues or failures that accumulate. A collection of failures, so to speak. Whenever I explore the issues of high agency spend, or of the use of high-cost agencies, this is the analogy I tend to pull.

During my operational days within a provider, I took on the role of mobilising and managing a centralised bank. The work happened to coincide with the implementation of an e-rostering system, and it became quickly clear that the best way to reduce the volume and costs around temporary staffing was not going to be through the management of the bank itself, but instead would come from taking a more holistic approach, looking at the wider drivers, workforce management practices and cultures within an organisation. This can start with local practices around the use of agency frameworks and management of bank workers, working outwards to explore governance and ward level practices around rostering as well as organisational drivers and the impacts of local recruitment markets.

Taking this holistic transformation approach is not an easy or quick task, but it is one that is very worthwhile! It requires detailed insights into the drivers of why temporary staffing requirements exist, looking at every stage in the workforce lifecycle from national workforce shortages to the management of annual leave and rostering practices at a ward-by-ward level.

The transformation takes you on a journey through HR systems, management practices, cultural change, staff engagement and much more. It really gets to the heart of why the need for temporary staffing exists and how you can reduce the volume of requirements. In doing that, you can start to plug holes, reducing the eventual volume of requirements that are unfilled, making better use of your capacity across substantive staff, bank workers and framework agencies, reducing the likelihood of the need for high-cost agencies and reducing your overall agency spend.

If you’d like to know more about SCW’s high-cost agency spend reduction approach, please contact Sarah Reed, Associate Director for Workforce, EDI and Wellbeing, sarah.reed9@nhs.net

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