Solving the aged care workforce crisis with HR magic

Uniting’s Chief People and Strategy Officer Dr Anat Hassner looks after a workforce of 11,000 people, making sure that they feel engaged and connected to Uniting's values and culture, so that they may serve our customers in the best possible way.??

While Australia’s aged care sector continues to experience a critical workforce crisis, Anat and her team are working their HR magic to turn the tide and make Uniting an employer of choice for aged care workers.?

We sat down with her to get her insights..

It’s been a tough couple of years for the aged care sector, what are the main issues that you are seeing on the recruitment side of things??

There have been some pretty significant barriers for us to overcome to find aged care workers across New South Wales and the ACT, two key challenges that stand out are wages and barriers to entry. ?

With regards to wages, the challenge was that people could earn the same amount working for Aldi or McDonald’s, even though working in aged care is much more difficult, demanding, and in some respects, more confronting. ?

The second challenge is the barriers to entry. Whilst you can walk into McDonald's and pretty much start working the next day, taking care of older people requires a lot of training, making it a less attractive option for the same wage.?

What steps are you taking to solve those major challenges??

The government’s 15% pay increase for aged care workers last year helped to make working in the sector more attractive, but it didn’t necessarily solve the problem of being able to hire and retain workers - we have not seen the uplift in workforce that we expected across the sector. We therefore have had to be more innovative in our approach to hiring and retaining our care staff. ?

We have put in a significant amount of work into learning how to recruit better and how to onboard our care staff in a much smoother, faster and more efficient way. ?In the Home and Community Care sector, for example, we have undertaken a completely different model, centralising the entire end-to-end recruitment process into the recruitment team. This eliminated the need for hiring managers to conduct interviews reducing the amount of time needed to be invested in a high-volume recruitment space. This means that time for hiring managers has significantly freed up to focus on retaining front line teams and looking after our customers. ?

Additionally, we are implementing some programmes relating to retention to ensure our staff feel connected to the organisation and can see themselves staying with us long-term.?

Fulfilling the mandated requirements?is a challenge given the well-documented global shortage of nurses, however we are constantly working on, and finding ways to resolve this workforce deficiency. Last year alone we hired over 100 Registered Nurses from Australia. .?

Despite those wins, we’re still hearing a lot about aged care workforce issues. What is Uniting’s point of difference in closing the workforce gap??

When we initially started trying to solve the workforce challenge, we had the view that it was virtually unsolvable. ?But when we took a deep dive into our data, we discovered the number of applicants we receive is three times the size of our workforce gap. That realisation made us ask ourselves what can we do to make sure that we take advantage of all these people who want to work for Uniting, rather than losing them in the recruitment process??

Over the past year, we have made sure that our advertising process, our selection of people, our scanning process, is very specific to what we require, and that we consistently measure the gaps in vacancies to ensure we’re balancing supply and demand. We have also implemented a very streamlined rostering system, so all together these actions have resulted in a significant shift in our ability to better manage workforce shortages. ?

Our success can be measured by application rates which have increased by 71% since August last year compared to the 6 months prior and annualised turnover for permanent employees in Seniors Services reduced from 23.4% in May 2023 to 19.3% in December 2023.?

This increase in recruitment and retention has also resulted in significant cost savings through reduced reliance on agency staff – a decrease of about 30% from the previous year.?

Not every applicant is suitable for the job, and the hiring process can be a deterrent for some applicants. How do you ensure there’s no wasted effort on both ends??

When an applicant might not fit a certain role, we ask them about their suitability for a different role. We've taken the approach of a bulk recruitment process. It is not a process of just hiring one person and making sure their experience is extremely positive. It is a process of making sure lots of people go through the process and the process is as automated and consistent as possible. By introducing digital automation, adding a few more people into the process itself and keeping tabs on the end-to-end experience , we’ve started to see more success for everyone involved. ?

Another area that all aged care providers really struggle with is compliance. There are multiple compliance checks which are bureaucratic and often duplicative. Sometimes the applicants just lose interest because the process is so overbearing. ?To address this, we created an app that directly engages with each applicant. This has resulted in a reduction in the time taken to get through often onerous compliance tasks from 20 days to an average of 10. This has been an absolute game-changer for us. ?

The results speak for themselves – when we started this process, we had a workforce gap of around 1,000 by the end of last year we had closed that gap to less than 500.?

? Training has come up a lot in this conversation...how do you make that easier for new aged care staff??

It’s a big focus area for sure. Part of the reason we were struggling to onboard enough staff was due to the barriers to entry, which are the qualifications required for care service roles. These qualifications require people to invest a minimum of three full months into training. By condensing that three months into three days we were able to get people in the door and working much more quickly while completing their training and qualifications on the job and at the same time continuing to get paid. We care about their careers, we want them to stay with us, and we're investing in them to prove it.?

We’ve talked a lot about workers in aged care...do these innovations work for other services that Uniting provides??

In short yes, we are looking to leverage our learnings in this space to recruiting and onboarding early learning staff where we’re also experiencing challenges in filling those types of roles.?

Do you have any other projects in the pipeline??

There's one that's going to be an absolute game changer for Uniting and for people experience and for our customers. And that's our Human Resources Information System (HRIS). It's an implementation of an end-to-end system that will completely transform how we engage with our employees and their employee information.??

Currently, about five different systems manage an employee's lifecycle. The new HRIS will put the end-to-end process of employment onto one system, giving us higher quality of data, better engagement, and improved ability to figure out how to manage our employees and their careers. We will be able to understand at the macro level and at the individual level, what we need to do to improve engagement, productivity, health, well-being and safety. ??

The amount of data that we'll be able to use to have a much more satisfied engaged, productive workforce is huge. We've partnered with a company called Dayforce and we are keen to share our learnings with other providers.?

This new partnership will see us adopting recruitment, payroll, workforce and core HR to create a best-practice process for every single employee throughout their career journey with Uniting.?

What would you say to someone in your position at another non-for-profit, dealing with the same workforce challenges??

It's not just about our 11,000 employees, it's about all those customers that live with disadvantage, that's who we want to solve these shortages for. We're obviously a large NFP, and we can flex when we need to, and potentially add more resources and change the way we do things with less risk. What I'd like to offer other aged care providers and NFP’s is that I'm open to having conversations about how we might be able to help and support each other. Our learnings are open to you, let’s solve this together.?

With the strides you’ve been making, what’s the next big challenge that you want to tackle this year??

There's still a lot of reforms to come from the government, which we are unpacking and understanding. We have a team that's focused on making sure we are compliant with these new reforms, and some of those include the increase in care minutes, which continue to have a significant impact on the amount of aged care workers, particularly nurses, that we require.?

The mandated requirement for a Registered Nurse to be on-site 24-7 at every service also places further strain on the need to find more nurses, particularly in regional and remote areas. We have entered into an Aged Care Industry Labour Agreement with the federal government in September last year and we are initially exploring extending visas for 60 staff already working for Uniting.?

In terms of our employees, the next focus area is keeping them engaged and committed to Uniting, and what we know is that the first six months are critical for retention. We are addressing that through programmes we have launched to make Uniting an Employer of Choice, such as offering transfers between services, providing career enhancing training such as “palliative care”, ensuring front line teams have consistent and continuous conversations with their managers, further developing leaders to focus on engagement and retention through a number of in house built leadership assessments and programs.??

Hopefully we can talk again in six months, and we’ll be onto the next stage of our transformation process?

Thanks Anat?

Thank you!?