GoodLife has been around for over 40 years. Over that time, we’ve learned a lot about how to build a stronger and more stable workforce and drive positive outcomes from it.
Some of the strategies we’ve developed are unconventional, but they’re very effective — so much so that we’re able to pay our staff well above the industry average without raising our payroll budget.
To continue building on this impact, we launched a program called GoodLife University in 2018 to help other providers learn and implement our practices at care organizations across the country.
Implementing these strategies has had a considerable impact on our provider partners, including increasing DSP pay by an average of $3.08 per hour while still saving hundreds of thousands in annual payroll costs.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the strategies we used to achieve these outcomes below.
1. Reduce the percentage of part-time staff
As we mentioned before, relying on part-time staff comes with a lot of problems like wonky schedules, high turnover, and more people involved in care. One of the first things we focus on with the agencies we work with is increasing the percentage of full-time and decreasing the percentage of part-time staff.
Full-time staff spend more time at work, so they get to know the rules, routines, and individuals they serve better. It also takes fewer staff to fill the schedule, meaning fewer handoffs between caregivers and fewer chances for errors and miscommunications. For staff, full-time employment also means better benefits and more desirable schedules (which in turn reduces turnover and saves your organization money).
By following our schedule design and pay strategies, our provider partners were able to decrease the percentage of part-time DSPs to just 6%, compared to the national average of 32%.
2. Make schedules more attractive
A key component of our schedule design strategy is the three-day workweek. In the three-day workweek base schedule, DSPs work 12 to 13 hours per day and have 16 to 18 days off each month. Schedules consist of one weekend day and two week days (either Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday or Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) with a swing day in the middle.
Three days of work and four days off is considerably more attractive than the typical five-day workweek. In fact, 92% of American employees said they prefer a compressed workweek schedule, making it a valuable recruitment and retention (translation: cost-reduction) strategy.
We also help our provider partners leverage strategies like premium pay for weekends and special days, which sounds like a counterintuitive way to save money but actually reduces costs in the long run by minimizing call-offs and eliminating unbudgeted overtime.
3. Create a replacement workforce
It’s not uncommon for care agencies to have anywhere from a 30-35% vacancy rate. This not only causes providers to decline referrals, but also forces them to turn to costly temp agencies to fill the gaps — the workforce equivalent of taking a payday loan.
This is why a major part of our strategy revolves around teaching agencies to create an internal pool of relief staff to cover planned and unplanned openings. For instance, we help our provider partners crunch the numbers to anticipate how many shifts will be vacant on any given day so they can have trained staff ready to cover them.
Having your own relief staff at the ready allows you to provide uninterrupted care and support for the people you serve without extra cost. Considering that temp agencies often charge as much as $40 per hour for care staff, the savings can add up quickly.
Will these strategies work for you?
Absolutely! Building a stronger and more stable DSP workforce is one of the most complex challenges care providers will ever face. Here at GoodLife, we’ve spent nearly half a century studying workforce issues and developing new pay and staffing strategies to solve them.
The bad news is there’s no magic bullet that will eliminate all of your staffing woes. The good news is that there are many tactics like the ones we’ve described above that, although not magical, will provide you with immediate relief and return on your investment. To learn more about how we can help you implement these solutions, contact us today.
