Sade White, Customer Success Team Lead at Allocate Software writes about bank staff fulfillment:
Before joining Allocate I worked in an NHS Bank Office, so one of my favourite topics is bank staff fulfillment rates.
There are many small tips and tricks within our solutions that can help you to save a bit of time here and there. Yet, these actions can collectively make a huge difference and help to make the processes run a little smoother. Let’s dive straight in…
Utilise Bank staff ‘availability’
This functionality – where staff can register when they are able to work via their Employee Online or Me app – may be seen as a ‘nice to have’ but it really will help you identify those workers who have the availability to work but may not have booked into a shift already. You can access this information via:
- Staff Availability (green tick on your vacant shifts in BankStaff)
- Or the report ‘Available but not booked’
Both views provide staff availability (and their contact details) for the specified date range so you know you are targeting the correct individuals. A big time saver if you are needing to do ‘ring arounds’ for a hard to fill staff shift.
Make the most of your Employee Online (EOL)/Me Profile
For those staff shifts you need to cover by agency, ensure your EOL/Me profiles have Feature Accesses (FAs) applied against them so your Bank staff workforce can view and book any outstanding agency duties which have been sent to your active agencies. This will enable your bank workforce to book directly via their chosen app and save you money by avoiding agency usage.
Review ‘preferred locations’ Within BankStaff
Your Bank workforce may have requested to have preferred locations applied against their personal details. It’s worth reviewing this on an annual basis to ensure workers don’t miss out on any shifts, as this will affect what the workers can view and book in BankStaff. Ensure the worker still only wants to work on those specified units, if not this expands the bank pool for the shifts they can work.
Use SMS wisely
Ensure you are using your SMS for those hard to fill bank staff shifts, but also be mindful of not overloading your people with text messages. If you are constantly texting out for each individual shift, not only is there a cost associated with this, it can also become the ‘norm’ to your workforce and therefore easy for them to ignore. Send out only when required to improve engagement.
Incentivised shifts for Bank staff fulfillment
This can be a controversial topic, but incentivising fulfillment of Bank staff duties is sometimes used in organisations to enhance Bank staff fulfillment rates. The management of those incentivised shifts can become admin heavy and it needn’t be. If you are tired of the extra admin of using duty/Bank notes or excel spreadsheets to denote when you’ve applied an uplift to a shift then speak to your Customer Success Analyst about applying ‘Pay Flags’ within your system and the benefit of utilising them. Say goodbye to your excel spreadsheet and keep account of your incentivised shifts through the system efficiently and effectively.
Lead Time
The buck doesn’t stop with the Bank Office. Bank staff fulfillment rates are nearly always impacted by their journey through our rostering systems and how well they are firstly managed by the roster creators. Best practice is to ensure your rosters are fully approved 6-8 weeks prior to the roster starting. Once those rosters have been fully approved the shifts should be immediately sent to the Bank Office so they can begin working on filling them. This will not only provide you with enough time to fill vacant shifts, but also allow you to keep agency costs down and provide assurances to clinical areas that the shifts will be filled. This also allows the Bank Office to concentrate on those ‘hard to fill’ short notice vacant shifts.
Have Sade’s Bank staff fulfilment tips made a difference to your temporary staffing?
Do let us know if they’ve helped your teams transform temporary staffing processes. Send us a message using the below contact form or email us directly at [email protected]. Or, you may have some tips of your own. If that’s the case, please share these too. You never know who they may help.
For any additional information on our temporary staffing and bank staffing solutions, visit our dedicated webpage.
