How Uniting NSW.ACT’s data-driven approach to workforce management and planning fuelled sustainable growth

Uniting NSW.ACT is one of Australia’s largest networks of social and community services providers, supporting approximately 130,000 people of all ages each year across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

The not-for-profit provider’s offering encompasses home help, private nursing, village living, residential care, rehabilitation and disability services. The organisation employs over 11,000 staff to provide care, assisted by over 1,200 volunteers.

Following COVID-19, Uniting NSW.ACT faced a combination of headwinds within the aged care sector that had the potential to impact on its ability to grow sustainably, while continuing to meet the high standards of care on which its social mission was built.

These included severe sector-wide staffing shortages, particularly in the registered nursing workforce, alongside recurrent high costs stemming from high agency and temporary staff usage.

In early 2023 Uniting’s senior leadership determined that its response to these challenges would require it to achieve three primary objectives:

• Increase the size of its frontline carer and registered nurse workforce by over 1,500 full-time equivalents in a sustainable way 
• Reduce its reliance on agency workers and unnecessary overtime
• Develop better practices in rostering, workforce planning and recruitment to enable the first two objectives to be met efficiently and successfully

To inform the decision-making necessary to drive forward this agenda, Seniors’ Services leaders sought a more focused, data-driven approach that made more effective use of the organisation’s existing Optima platform and the rostering and resource data that it made available.

Since the new approach has been adopted, Uniting has seen significant reductions in its agency staff usage – A$28m last year, down to A$16m this year. Seniors’ Services teams have also seen their cost per hour reduce alongside their number of award breaches.

Meanwhile, the centralisation of workforce planning that has been facilitated by Optima has seen increased efficiency and a significant reduction in the administrative burden in the rostering process across all 75 sites.

This has been accompanied by an increase in demand from 3,000 FTEs to 4,600 FTEs in less than 12 months and an increase in the organisation’s registered nurse workforce by more than 30% since the new processes have been implemented.

The challenge

In January 2023, in response to severe workforce shortages, Uniting’s Seniors’ Services directorate saw that it needed to act to drive effective recruitment and retention programmes.

To make this possible, the organisation would need access to more accurate workforce data across a range of domains, including its workforce gap, total staff hours, shift patterns, duties with warnings and cost per hour.

That month, Uniting gathered a group of its senior leaders to discuss how to ensure these changes to recruitment, planning and workforce management practices would enable sustainable growth. They then identified the areas in which the organisation needed to improve its capabilities in order to drive forward the necessary changes.

Brad Kearns, Head of Strategic Workforce Planning and Talent Acquisition for Uniting NSW.ACT, says: “Our frontline leaders and service managers were not necessarily astute workforce planners, but that’s because we’ve never asked them to be. So that was something that needed to change.”

Brad identified four key areas that Uniting’s aged care teams needed to address:

• Improving the workforce planning capabilities of the seniors’ services frontline leaders and service managers
• Reforming recruitment and retention practices to increase the workforce by up to 1,500 staff within nursing and frontline care
• Responding effectively to a market shortage in registered nurses
• Tackling the causes for high costs in current fulfilment, namely in high agency usage and excessive overtime 

The solution

The Seniors’ Services directorate gathered a group of senior leaders to mirror a crisis governance structure that worked during COVID-19 crisis management. Brad says: “Coming out of COVID-19 changed how we operate. We are now really good at responding to something when we call it a crisis.”

The first step in the journey to improve governance processes and create a more sustainable and effective care environment was to understand the full scope of the data could be collected using Optima more effectively. 

Until this point, Uniting had not used Optima’s reporting functionality to inform system governance, outside of exception reports used to inform payroll. Brad says: “At that point we weren’t using our Optima system correctly. We weren’t using some of the key reporting features within the platform, such as the roster analyser.”

Once Brad and his colleagues had begun to query the Optima data and reviewed the roster analyser functionality, they gained a stronger understanding of what the key indicators of quality in rostering and workforce management should look like.

Through downloading key reports covering staff hours, shift patterns and assignment summaries, they learned how to identify staff at risk of not meeting their contracted hours. 

Once the data had helped the ‘crisis’ team to gain key insights into the way that the organisation was managing its workforce at that time, a second phase of work was put into action.

An integral part of this phase of work involved the centralisation of the collection of certain types of workforce data from across Uniting’s 75 aged care service sites to facilitate the implementation of enterprise level data presentation and visualisation.

Brad says: “I don’t have time to scan 75 roster analysers every fortnight to generate insights, as those are tools for the site level. At the enterprise level I needed something a little bit bigger. So, we created an enterprise overview using Excel.”

This network-wide view was made possible through Optima’s automated system extracts, which sent data to the central team’s business intelligence environment.

At this point it became easier for Brad and his colleagues to obtain workforce gap data. This helped to quickly and efficiently inform decisions designed to improve recruitment processes, boost performance management, and lend greater confidence to the quality of Uniting’s roster data.

Armed with these insights, the team were better able to disseminate shifts to teams via Optima’s Employee Online text message functionality, a tool which greatly reduced the time and administrative effort required by both service managers and staff to manage their workloads and rosters.

The final part of the project involved building in greater automated reporting into the organisation’s business intelligence and data analytics environment.

Key benefits and next steps

• Significant savings on agency usage – A$28m YTD last year compared with A$16m YTD this year (43% reduction)
• 30% increase in the registered nurse workforce
• Reductions in time required for teams to manually input roster information due to automation
• Reductions in cost per hour of certain types of care staff resourcing, partly due to a reduction in the number of award breaches
• Moving Optima data into a central data environment has enabled the central review of demand templates and budgets
• Automated reporting creates a central ‘source of truth’ for recruitment requirements, enabling senior leaders to gather a live view of workforce gaps on a site-by-site basis
• As a result of the data visualisation and governance improvements within its Seniors Services Directorate, Uniting has begun to bring the same approach to its Early Learning business stream

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