Scheduling Simplicity for Assisted Living Facilities
We Make It Easy for You So You Can Make It Easier for Your Residents
Assisted living facilities are a wonderful place for retired folks to live. But scheduling your senior lifestyle community’s staff so they can provide the comfort, security, provision, and happiness your residents need –day in and day out –is anything but relaxing for too many communities.If your facility is like many others we’ve encountered, you’re dealing with constant scheduling problems related to:
Balancing multiple departments and vastly different skill sets
- Struggling to maintain required patient to staff ratios
- Keeping an optimal and caring staff on duty 24 hours a day who can meet the diverse array of needs with in the community
- Responding to and complying with surprise inspections
- Running in service meetings after incidents and knowing for sure that everyone who needed to be there was there
- Tracking all the ongoing coursework and certifications for your staff
And, on top of all these scheduling and time management challenges that are unique to senior lifestyle communities, you have to fend off the‘normal’scheduling problems faced by any large organization.
We don’t believe ‘normal’ is acceptable. You, your team, and your residents deserve better.
Scheduling Frustrations of Assisted Living Facilities
Here are just a few of the normal –but almost entirely avoidable –scheduling frustrations you probably deal with:
Nonstop Employee Requests
Your employees request time off for vacations and sick leave. They want to know how much time they’ve accrued. They want to switch shifts with other workers, sometimes at the last minute. The constant barrage of calls and emails with schedule-related requests that affect every other part of the system makes you dread it every time the phone rings.
Feeling Undervalued
Your employees often feel out of the loop from a lack of communication about upcoming schedules, not getting questions answered fast enough, and having a hard time accessing information.They blame you, but your team is already swamped.The tragic result –constant turnover and burnout, losing your best people.
Crisis Whack-a-Mole
You frequently find yourself, as an HR manager, putting out scheduling fires at the last minute only to watch another one flare up. Hurtling from one crisis to another, and no time to develop the better system that you know is sorely needed. Some crisis examples:
A department leader’s child gets sick and they have to miss work. The usual replacement is already scheduled for swing shift. Who else is available and has the skills to do the job?
A surprise inspection hits the day a key member of your kitchen crew comes down with Covid or some other illness. How will you pass the inspection now?
A resident falls on a new employee’s first day, and the documentation is a mess.
Who gets blamed when these sorts of things don’t get handled well? You do! Who do the employees gripe about? It’s your fault!
Can you do anythingabout this? Yes!
Simplify Your Senior Lifestyle Community Staff Scheduling
Scheduling, and all parts of your assisted living facility that are affected by it, can be made so much simpler by using customizable scheduling software that has been built to smoothen out the challenges that make this part of your job so hard.
No other assisted living scheduling software can adapt to each facility’s specific needs like Schedule Ease. We built it this way by design.
Schedule Ease has built a version of its software specifically for assisted living facilities. Not only does it reduce the time and frustration you thought was normal as you produce weekly or biweekly schedules, but it simplifies the other unique challenges faced by your industry.
With Schedule Ease, you can:
Schedule by Skill –Put the Right People in the Right Jobs
Do you know –when making a schedule –which employees are best suited for certain jobs? Can you build out theschedule based on these particular skills?
Serving food to a senior in memory care requires a different skill set than serving food to one who is still independent. The same goes for nurses, housekeepers, and even maintenance workers in some cases.
Scheduling at assisted living facilities is about so much more than meeting required patient to staff ratios. Scheduling by skill helps avoid all sorts of problems, because you now have confidence that the person working a particular shift is the best person for that job.
That means reduced complaints, reduced incidents, happier staff, and happier residents.
This is the bread and butter of Schedule Ease. We call it ‘skill-based assignment scheduling.’ It is revolutionary. Why?
Because it goes far beyond the shaky scheduling approach most places rely on. What if someone wants to swap shifts? With Schedule Ease, you won’t accidentally switch a highly skilled worker with a lower skilled one for a critical job. When a highly skilled worker calls in sick or needs some time off, you’ll be able to fill their slots with similarly capable workers. When a new resident arrives, you will have the right team on hand to familiarize them with the facility.
Document Everything
You can document in service meetings that happen after an incident. You’ll have a record for who was there, what happened, what was said –all the relevant details that might matter to anyone in the future.
You can also document the actions your team takes in response to an inspection agency audit so you can verify compliance and not have to worry about the follow-up inspection.
Beyond that, you can track each employee’s progress with their ongoing coursework and certifications. You will know, and they will know.
Best of all, because employees can access their scheduling and documentation from any whereon their mobile devices, you don’t have to be bothered by incessant phone calls. Employees can check their progress themselves, and make sure they’re on track and up-to-date.
Create Schedules Weeks in Advance
Not only can you create schedules weeks ahead of time so you and your staff all know what’s ahead, but it’s easier to make adjustments as well because you can see everything mapped out on one screen.
A schedule is like a house of cards.Make a change, and it affects all the other parts. With Schedule Ease, you will know that your changes aren’t going to cause chaos three days later. You, and your employees, will always know and be aware of what’s ahead.
They will feel informed and empowered because they can monitor their schedules, request changes, and know what’s happening –all from anywhere because their password-protected access is mobile accessible. And you will feel in control of a system that too frequently feels like digital anarchy.
Preserve Employee and Resident Safety
With our touch-free facial recognition time clock, your residents and staff will be protected from germs and viruses that may be transmittable via surfaces like a time clock everyone has to put their hands on.
Request a Free Demo of Schedule Ease for Your Assisted Living Facility
See how it works!
If your current scheduling system fills you with dread and despair, then you know you need something better. Why not give our system a look and see if Schedule Ease really is as great as we’re making it sound?
If it’s not, you’ll still be better off because you’ll know more about what’s possible for scheduling in the 21st century. But if our software is better than whatever you’re doing now–and we’re very confident that it is –your life, and your employees’ lives, will be forever improved, less stressful, happier, and more in control.