AAA July-August 2021 Cover Story

JUL- AUG 21

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The Future of Work AN ADVERTISING

FEATURE

Image credit: Signature Care

– a single platform solution

Image credit: Signature Care

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The Future of Work Four organisations have teamed up to solve the aged care industry’s key workforce challenges through technology, people and systems.

A

ccess to talent, effective management of workforce processes, skills development, retention and compliance and governance requirements are among the workforce challenges aged care providers must overcome daily.

Typical pain points include sourcing suitable talent, time to hire, recruitment and agency costs, rostering inefficiencies and a lack of real-time data. The implications are poor client outcomes and costs that don’t match budgets or expectations.

Recognising that not one process or system would be practical, an industry collaboration has come up with an end-to-end integrated workforce solution that aims to solve these issues. The aged care solution has been developed over 18 months by rostering technology vendor Mirus Australia, workforce management platform PowerHouse Hub, recruitment experts Pulse Staffing Australia and Astute Payroll.

The technology-focused offering fits in with a provider’s existing infrastructure, offers real-time visibility of staff costs and skills and is helping providers meet the requirements of Aged Care Quality Standards seven and eight.

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James Price

Loryn Feeney

Zain Wadee

James Price, co-founder of Mirus Australia, says securing the right talent at the right time and at the right cost is central to providing quality aged care. But it is a huge challenge for aged care providers, he says.

“Imagine if you had access to a talent pool of people who are already screened and already willing and able to work,” Price tells Australian Ageing Agenda.

He likens it to the availability of Uber drivers today compared to having to rely on taxis in the past.

“Years ago when you had to fly interstate on an early flight you would book a taxi and you just hoped it would arrive. Then Uber came and you had an infinite number of drivers who were available on demand. And it disrupted that whole profession,” he says. “We are able to deliver the same.”

The solution is designed to match an organisation’s demand for staff with carefully selected, qualified and screened staff who are inducted and onboarded through a structured staff-sourcing process, says Price.

“Pulse Staffing Australia finds the talent to put in the pool. PowerHouse Workforce manages that talent pool and making people suitable to job role available. Mirus Works! then coordinates and rosters all of the staff based on the skills’ data made available. And we also run an award calculation to pay them. And then at the end of our process, we present an interpreted timesheet and Astute Payroll pays them.”

There are four organisations in the arrangement but it is seen as one entity from the aged care provider’s perspective, Price says.

Smart solutions Zain Wadee, managing director of Pulse Staffing Australia, says competition for talent in the health and aged care industry is not new, but it is growing.

“With private enterprises, not-for-profit organisations and government departments all seeking to employ people with a similar skillset, the need to develop sustainable approaches to attracting and retaining skilled individuals is essential,” Wadee tells AAA. “More stringent screening procedures are necessary.”

Pulse Staffing Australia and PowerHouse Hub, which is the organisation that deploys the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission online learning platform Alis, both employ advanced and technology assisted screening techniques.

Loryn Feeney, General Manager of PowerHouse Hub, says you cannot really understand your workforce by looking at a roster or at payroll. “When you’ve got detailed workforce data, you can start making informed decisions about where to invest in your workforce,” Feeney tells AAA. Such as: • Where does my workforce need to grow?

• Where can my workforce contract?

• How can I unearth that existing talent in my business?

• How can I then best deploy that talent in my business?

• Which of my employees needs upskilling?

• What’s that going to cost me and how best can I do that?

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“To drive real and sustainable change it is fundamental to address the structural workforce challenges that have impacted the sector. Investment in leadership, resource levels, technology and workforce capability are all central to driving change and improving care outcomes.

Greater transparency, higher quality standards and increased workforce investment are pivotal to embedding real change.”

Greg Rickard, a Professor of Health and Director at University of Tasmania’s Rozelle Campus

“They’re strategic questions and the solutions can often be complex. That all gets informed and managed through the PowerHouse Workforce platform,” Feeney says.

The PowerHouse Workforce platform includes PowerHouse Recruit, where providers can screen and manage talent according to their specific jobrole requirements, and PowerHouse Work-Ready, where providers and employees can manage their skills and compliance requirements.

“Powerhouse Recruit allows providers to utilise smart screening technology that gets applied across three different categories of talent,” Feeney says.

Those categories are: • internal talent pools of new candidates and existing staff • public talent pools that can for example link to registered training organisations and universities • managed talent pools through Pulse Staffing Australia that are a based on a recruitment solution.

“All of those talent pools are managed and integrated through the PowerHouse Recruit solution that allows an employer to commence screening candidates according to their organisations specific job role requirements from the first contact they have with them,” says Feeney.

“As soon as a candidate registers for a job they start building a Workforce Wallet. And that Workforce Wallet contains all of the evidence of a person’s skills and experience. It holds all of their credentials and any data that relates to them.

“But the key piece is we align all of that to specific job roles,” she says. australianageingagenda.com.au

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The employer can define the requirements for their business for any job role and anyone who applies for that job is automatically screened, which saves time and money, says Feeney. All of an organisation’s talent pools are managed and viewed through a single dashboard allowing the person responsible to look at what talent is sitting inside the pools and decide who to bring forward to employ or place in a roster, she says.

“That’s a game changer because suddenly you’re able to identify immediately who meets your job role requirements. And then with the integration with Mirus, that candidate can be put forward for a roster and immediately identified in terms of meeting the requirements for that roster,” says Feeney.

PowerHouse Recruit is addressing key pain points of sourcing talent, time to hire and costs of recruitment, and provides a significant return on investment on each of them, she says. Similarly all activities in Powerhouse Work-Ready again align to a job role, says Feeney.

“It gives businesses the capability to build a series of frameworks related to the selection process, onboarding, skills, upskilling staff and compliance. Each job role has a skills and compliance framework that applies to a person.”

All of the information is added to a person’s Workforce Wallet, which belongs to the individual. Each employee can access a dashboard to see everything they’ve completed and how compliant they are to their own job role.

“I can broadcast my shifts instantly to the talent pool and then I can monitor whether or not they’ve seen it, rejected it or accepted it.”

“As a provider committed to building high quality services to meet the future demand for aged care, one of the highest priorities is attracting and managing employees and managing replacements to maintain a full roster. The concept of a single platform workforce service is extremely attractive and starts to paint a picture of what the future of work looks like.”

Graeme Croft, Director of Signature Care

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It’s also possible to provide access to courses to fill any gaps and update the wallet once completed, says Feeney. Similarly, a person can have their other skills and experience screened against a different role within the business.

“So an individual might have two separate profiles. One for personal care worker and one working in hospitality, for example,” she says.

The platform also has workforce engagement and communication tools because engagement leads to better retention outcomes, says Feeney.

Employers can poll and get an emotional health check on their business as often as they want to.

“All that data related to each employee is collected, aggregated and fed to the managers and the executive team, who can access visual reporting on their workforce.”

Smart rostering Mirus Australia’s role in the collaboration is to provide a best-in-class real-time rostering solution, says Price. That solution is Mirus Works!, which was launched in 2016.

“If you ask providers about external spend with agencies they might not know the cost of their roster for the first of January until mid-February because if you’re waiting for the employment agency to bill, you probably wouldn’t get billed until the middle of the next month.

“We can give you real-time visibility of the staff who are using it and how much they cost. We can give you real-time, give or take three seconds, visibility of whether someone’s clocked in or not and at the place they’re supposed to because we’re using geofence technology,” Price says.

The sign-on and sign-off technology is available to anyone with a smartphone. So is the technology that manages the shift offer that Feeney mentioned above. Everyone one in the talent pool will have access to the Mirus Rostering app to receive shift offers, says Price.

“For example, Jessica is a skilled RN who wants to work in inner-west Sydney. We can offer her those shifts. As soon as those shifts are

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Sector wide suitability The offering is suitable for providers of all sizes and priced accordingly. Price says the cloud-based

“Attracting and retaining a skilled and adaptable workforce in the numbers needed is the biggest challenge facing the aged care sector in Australia. We need new approaches for identifying and capturing talent, providing them with the necessary skills and creating pathways to sustainable careers within the sector. The model driven by PowerHouse Hub and Mirus, with Pulse and Astute is a great example of the innovation needed.”

Jodi Schmidt, CEO, Human Services Skills Organisation

“When you’ve got detailed workforce data, you can start making informed decisions about where to invest in your workforce.”

The Workforce Wallet, a unique digital ID for each worker

Image credit: Signature Care

offered, whether it’s for tomorrow, next week or the week after, they pop up on your smartphone, and you say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.

“If I’m at head office and I want 10 staff next month, I tell Pulse Staffing Australia that I need 10 staff. They use the Mirus platform to roster based on availability and skills – we are not going to send an RN shift to a kitchen worker and vice versa – and they’ll do that digitally and instantly.

I don’t have to pick up the phone to 10 people to ask it they are available or leave messages to get called back.

“I can broadcast my shifts instantly to the talent pool and then I can monitor whether or not they’ve seen it, rejected it or accepted it. And that promotes fairness,” he says.

The defined process within PowerHouse Workforce ensures only people who have the right skills to work will be offered shift, offering compliance reassurance, says Price.

“When the data seamlessly comes into the world of Mirus we won’t roster someone who doesn’t have those skills, which might be ‘I’m an RN, I have a police check and I have a vaccination.’ They’re key because it’s a compliance requirement.

“Then under quality standard seven, which is around staffing and compliance, and standard eight, which is governance, we can show through Mirus Works! in real-time that someone working has the prerequisite skills to be able to work.

“The paperwork burden is diminished because it’s a click button.”

The bottom line benefits include fewer external agency relationships to manage, fewer people internally needed to manage the talent acquisition process, advance planning capability and more efficient processes, he says.

“You will also avoid unnecessary overtime because you’ve got a real-time award engine helping you understand the cost of every decision you make. That’s saving money.”

It means you can easily roster permanent staff for all the hours you are paying them for and not unnecessarily roster overtime hours, says Price.

solution means there’s no flat fee and providers pay per person rostered.

“A large client with thousands of staff would want to run a talent pool for themselves. But a rural area provider with five or six different facilities might run a talent pool for all of them.

They only pay on demand when they roster someone, so there’s no fixed costs,” he says.

Similarly, Feeney says PowerHouse Workforce is priced accordingly for different types and sized providers. When an organisation licenses the platform they get access to all the tools and functionality inside and because it’s built on open standards it can connect to other technology solutions, she says.

“We can integrate with any payroll system, any learning management system, any recruitment solution, and we do. One of the key benefits is that an organisation doesn’t have to replace any of their existing technology platforms. We can integrate them and we’re able to pull the data from all of those different sources,” Feeney says. n

Contact Mirus Australia T: 1300 738 145 E: info@mirusaustralia.com W: mirusaustralia.com Contact PowerHouse Hub T: 1300 787 611 E: sales@powerhousehub.com W: powerhousehub.com

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