workforce
Providers turn away from casual contracts In the face of increasing competition, integratedliving has made significant workforce changes, the organisation tells LINDA BELARDI.
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arge not-for-profit community care provider integratedliving has moved away from a primarily casual workforce in a bid to deliver greater continuity to clients and boost staff retention. Permanent staff now make up over 80 per cent of its workforce, up from 40 per cent prior to the recent home care changes. The organisation, which operates in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, has also lifted the minimum number of contracted hours for part-time support workers from an average of five to 20 hours per week. Georgina Chalker, the organisation’s chief people and customer engagement officer, says an analysis of its workforce in late 2016 highlighted the challenges the provider faced in delivering continuity and consistency to clients with a casual workforce model. Among its large casual workforce, it was common for staff to hold multiple jobs with different employers, which contributed to fluctuating staff availability. “Our market research identified what was most important to our customers, and that was service quality, reliability and continuity,” says Chalker. Casual labour is now used predominantly to cover short notice or unplanned gaps in the rostering of its large permanent part-time workforce, she says. integratedliving is an example of a broader industry trend away from casual employment contracts in home care. According to the latest aged care census released last year, casual staff fell from 14
WINTER 2018
27 per cent of the community aged care workforce in 2012 to 14 per cent in 2016. Over this time, permanent part-time employment jumped 13 per cent, to make up 75 per cent of the workforce. Community care workers experienced the strongest growth in permanent parttime employment when compared with nurses and allied health staff working in home care and support. Chalker says moving to a core permanent workforce is helping the organisation offer continuity to customers and deliver job security and certainty to staff, with flow-on effects to higher employee satisfaction. “With a permanent team there are advantages when it comes to the retention of staff. We have also increased our training and development considerably because we know we will enjoy the benefit of what we invest in our people,” says Chalker who joined aged care from the mining and manufacturing industry. Shifting away from a large staff pool working a small number of hours has also created efficiencies in the administrative and head office support required.
VALUING SUPPORT WORKERS integratedliving is also investing in improved career progression pathways to further recognise and develop its care workforce, says Chalker. A new role has been created called a customer support advisor, which can only be filled via internal promotion from its support workforce.
“Once we had this core permanent team, we started to create reward, recognition and retention strategies that have allowed the value of the support worker role to shine in our organisation,” she says. Chalker says getting the workforce right has set the organisation up to succeed in a competitive home care environment. “Our home care packages are thriving and that’s a testament to the quality and the reliability of what we are delivering via our support workers to our customers.”
RETHINKING RECRUITMENT Other major HR changes at the organisation have included implementing more timely recruitment processes to fill staff vacancies, which is complemented by detailed workforce planning. This has had the effect of reducing delays in the commencement of services and use of brokerage arrangements, she says. The organisation’s resource and service plan is now better able to predict workforce needs before gaps emerge, she says. In preparation for the industry reforms, the provider has changed its recruitment criteria to emphasise customer-service focused qualities and commenced psychological profiling of all candidates. “We think more about the characteristics of the person – are they flexible, adaptable and customer-service focused? “We now focus on the talent of the individual rather than tenure or experience in a certain role or the industry itself.” n