Live to work or work to live? 

It is a million-dollar question that the modern workforce has been asking themselves these days. Many people work fixed hours that end at a specific time every day, but for many others, it won't be the case. 

Take the healthcare workforce as an example. Most of the care workers, doctors and nurses work longer than scheduled hours and all through the weekend. The past year has shined the spotlight on the prolonged fatigues, burnout and psychological strain on frontline health care workers.

“According to a survey conducted in 2020, the majority of NHS staff in England worked additional unpaid hours. In 2020, over 40 per cent of NHS staff worked up to five hours of unpaid overtime in an average week. Furthermore, nine per cent of NHS staff stated to work six to ten unpaid hours a week and nearly four percent 11 hours or more.”

Even though the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak and societal instability are to blame, the truth is that modern work-life balances have been out of sync for quite some time due to rising work demands, inefficient scheduling procedures, and overburdened staff. 

Thanks to the advanced technological solutions, healthcare and social care organizations can now improve the work-life balance of their employees by offering more flexibility and control over their schedules. Implementing innovative workforce management solutions helps in increasing employee engagement, retention and overall productivity.

So here are a few ways to provide your staff with a better work-life balance. 

1. Enable flexible work schedules and easy access to shift swapping

Lack of flexibility and difficulty to swap rota is one of the major challenges faced by healthcare employees. However, we all know that everyone has personal responsibilities that may hinder them from reporting to work unexpectedly. Sometimes it might be due to childcare or school, or any other commitments. Whatever may be the reason, your organization should have a flexible system in place to swap shifts easily and update the schedule automatically. 

Having a flexible work schedule can offer the following set of benefits:

• Minimizes tardiness and absenteeism
• Increases employee productivity
• Higher talent recruitment and retention
• Improves employee morale and satisfaction

By providing your employees more flexibility and control over their rota and schedule - whether it is through easily accessible timesheets, automated rotas or real-time notifications - employers can nurture a positive work experience. Increasing transparency and fostering a trusting environment can be crucial to individual and organizational productivity in the workplace.

2. Implement a fair rota system

A fair rota system aspires to be accessible, flexible, non-discriminatory, and balanced. Your rota schedule should be designed to ensure that all employees are represented fairly at all times, while also considering what is best for the organization as a whole.

If your employees can't forecast or organise their daily lives adequately, they'll lose interest in their jobs and start looking for a job elsewhere. 

By generating and sharing rotas at least two weeks in advance, predictive scheduling attempts to provide employees more security and control over their time. This prevents shifts from being published without notice. Moreover, employees are also saved from the trouble of last-minute call-ins and shift swaps. As your employees can plan their lives around shifts more confidently, predictive scheduling enables a healthy work-life balance.

3. Make it easy to process leave and time-off requests

Does it seem like your care workers or nurses are weary or struggling to stay focused during their shifts? If yes, then you might be looking at the hallmark symptoms of employee burnout. 

With the kind of work that healthcare employees and social care workers do, it is no surprise that they feel stressed and exhausted. 

Google search data, gathered from search volume tool kwfinder.com, highlights a gradual increase in the volume of searches for ‘signs of burnout’ over the last four years. Let us see what we found while searching for burnout statistics in the UK.

• Searches for “burnout statistics” in the UK rose from 1,000 in August 2016 to 3,600 in August 2020 (a notable 290% increase)
• Searches for “recovering from burnout” rose from 320 to 880 over the same period (175% increase) 

Employees are more likely to skip time off and breaks due to a range of explicit and implicit causes, such as:

• Fear of being left behind
• Being thought of as replaceable
• A shortage of coworkers to cover their jobs 

However, lack of time to rest and refuel can have a detrimental influence on employee performance, loyalty, and customer happiness, among other issues.

Employers can utilise software solutions to track the number of hours worked, leaves of absences taken, as well as previously scheduled time off, and combine the information to identify employees who are on the verge of burnout or exhaustion.

Streamlining the time and attendance system with features such as easy leave request submissions and approvals, notifications enables employees to have better control over their work-life balance. In addition, it also alerts the management regarding the staffing needs and schedule shortfalls.

When it comes to creating a healthy work-life balance for your employees, it is essential to keep ahead of the curve. Know what your employees are striving for and offer them innovative solutions.

Does your organization have any workforce management strategies in place? Do let us know. If you wish to discuss more your workforce management challenges, get in touch with us. We would be glad to help you out.