in: Home Health Care, Company News
Call it what you will: no shows, late, unpunctual. Caregivers who show up late cause enormous headaches for their patients, patients’ families, and their employers.
Home health care technology can go a long way toward helping you track and monitor caregivers’ time. We recently discussed scheduling issues in this blog, How Cloud-Based Home Healthcare Scheduling Helps Agencies Succeed During COVID-19. If you’re struggling with employee punctuality issues, here’s how you can address them while simultaneously monitoring their time using home healthcare technology.
What Causes Punctuality Issues?
It’s tempting to immediately blame the caregiver for being lazy, oversleeping, or inconsiderate. It’s likely, however, that some other issue is causing problems with punctuality. If you have an employee who is consistently late for patient appointments, you may wish to ask them about the following issues. All of these may contribute towards chronic tardiness.
- Childcare needs: Many caregivers are single parents. They may be struggling with childcare needs. Perhaps their babysitter showed up late, and that made them late to work. Or their daycare center call and said a child is ill. Ask about childcare needs and consider offering options to employees if several employees report similar needs. An afterschool program, a paid daycare option, and other forms of childcare may go a long way toward improving employee punctuality while also improving your healthcare agency’s benefits package and attractiveness to potential employees.
- Traffic: Some cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and others are notorious for traffic issues. If employees cite traffic delays as one of the reasons for their chronic punctuality issues, consider using your home healthcare systems’ tracking and route options. Some systems include GPS-type maps that plan the most efficient routes. This saves time as well as gas for employees and can help them circumvent accidents and delays.
- Inconsistent shifts: Another reason why employees may be late is inconsistent scheduling. Assigning people to consistent shifts helps them plan their lives around their work. They need to schedule their own appointments including childcare needs, healthcare needs, grocery shopping, and family time. You can also use your home healthcare management system to review shift assignments and preferences and make sure that people are assigned to the same shift each week.
- Personal emergencies: Everyone experiences a personal emergency now and again. An emergency dentist visit or a flat tire is both unexpected and unavoidable. Although you can’t predict them, offering paid emergency time off can help you manage schedules better and assign someone else if someone has a personal emergency.
- Poor communication: Are you available to your employees by phone, text, or email? Return calls promptly and welcome prompt, clear communications. It’s better to hear from someone running late so you can alert the patient and their family than to have families furious because a caregiver never showed up or showed up late to an appointment.
Use Incentives to Reward Punctuality
Home healthcare technology enables you to track hours by employee. Set up a system of rewards so those who are always on time get a bonus, a gift card, or company recognition. By rewarding the behavior you wish to see repeated, you underscore its importance.
Home Healthcare Technology: More Than Accounting
Home healthcare technology offers more than an accounting program. It offers a complete healthcare business management system that includes accounting, payroll, customer and patient records, human resources information, tracking of supplies and materials, and much more.
Off-the-shelf business accounting packages aren’t set up for the home healthcare industry and often require considerable custom programming to make them compatible with a home healthcare business’ needs. Mindover Software has experience working with home healthcare agencies in order to provide them with home healthcare technology that meets their unique needs. For more information, please contact us or call 512-990-3994.
