We know Australia’s Aged & Community Care workforce is facing mounting pressure with high staff turnover, increasing regulatory demands, and ongoing skills shortages. A proactive and targeted approach to employee engagement and desired retention can help break this cycle.
Recent reports show that 30 per cent of aged care employees intend to leave within two years*. As a result, remaining employees are likely to face increased stress and burnout, impacting their own wellbeing and the quality of care for older Australians. If unaddressed, this will only exacerbate staff shortages, disrupt quality of care and hinder the sector’s ability to meet growing demand.
Looking ahead to the incoming New Aged Care Act and beyond, having a strong foundation of engaged, skilled, agile and productive employees is critical to successfully meet the requirements and changes that lie ahead for our sector.
What’s really going on in your organisation’s workforce?
Before you react to the challenges of poor engagement and high staff turnover, it’s important to understand what’s going on through the lens of your workforce. What are the real issues staff are discussing during breaks or behind closed doors? While it’s common for these conversations to occur, normalising or ignoring them won’t make them go away. More damage occurs when negativity spreads, or when the right people aren’t aware of the real problems.
Inevitably, left unaddressed, those complaints and niggles will intensify. Without a culture of trust and open communication, staff members can’t safely voice their concerns through the proper channels and by the time key leaders are aware there’s an issue, it might be too late.
While most are aware of the issue, current workarounds are failing to make a lasting impact. It’s not that it’s been ignored, but resources are diverted to more immediate problems like filling rosters or dealing with a performance issue that has escalated. This urgent keeps HR and internal recruitment teams in a perpetual firefighting cycle.
The real question should be how can you stay deeply aware of the Employee Experience so that it can proactively inform your employee engagement and retention strategy?
We’ll get to this a bit further down…
Quick Quitting
A trend that is really hurting organisations at the moment is ‘’Quick Quitting’’ – where increasing numbers of new hires are leaving within their probation period, and without warning. It’s at an all-time high due to factors such ‘’Job Shock’’ where there is a misalignment between the initial perception and the lived the reality of the day-to-day role.
The Onboarding experience has a crucial impact on engagement, loyalty, productivity and retention, and it’s a missed opportunity for any organisation to not gain employee feedback on what new hires want and need to increase engagement during their significant first 90 days.
The real cost of high staff turnover
The costs of workforce challenges impact every area of the organisation, demonstrating why prioritising staff retention is vital:
Continuity of care:
Frequent staff changes disrupt relationships between staff and residents, leading to diminished personalised care and increasing stress for residents and families.
Financial impact:
Replacing staff costs approximately 1.5 times their annual salary**, factoring in recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity. The constant hiring cycle drains resources and reduces operational efficiency.
Workforce strain:
Disengaged staff and high turnover affects the wellbeing of the entire workforce. Staffing shortages place additional pressures on remaining employees, increasing burnout risk and prompting further resignations.
Reputation risks:
High turnover can damage organisational reputation. Inconsistent care, negative reviews and difficulty attracting quality staff creates a cycle that undermines stability and sustainability.
Future planning challenges:
High turnover forces providers into reactive workforce decisions, limiting the ability to plan for the future, implement long-term improvements that algin to strategy, or build a strong cohesive organisational culture.
The power of a data driven retention strategy
It takes an evidence-based approach to assess current workforce capabilities against needs, enabling leaders to implement targeted initiatives to address gaps.
An effective retention strategy informs action, is iterative and agile to changes and curveballs, and must be evaluated regularly and adjusted accordingly.
The evidence you need to best inform your strategy is a combination of internal current workforce data (skills assessments, turnover and vacancy rates), objectively obtained staff feedback, and external considerations such as labour and market forces, and industry trends.
Organisations often miss how to incorporate staff feedback into their engagement and retention strategies effectively.
The Employee Experience is crucial
Research highlights key reasons why workers leave – including stress, excessive expectations, lack of career development and better opportunities elsewhere – but what is your workforce saying, and what are you telling your staff that you’re doing about it?
The most effective retention plans must be informed by feedback from your own staff, which will provide valuable information about what’s working and what needs improvement.
Remember staff will only provide honest input if they feel safe to do so. When employees know their voice is being heard and their suggestions will be acted upon, they will trust feedback process and open up.
Rather than a one-and-done survey, this requires a proactive and consistent approach, with mechanisms throughout the employee’s lifecycle (such as pulse surveys) and that lean into the detail (using free form text).
Capturing and analysing feedback at key stages, from onboarding to offboarding, means organisations can identify issues before they escalate, and implement meaningful solutions where it matters most.
Leveraging AI for smarter workforce decisions
Advanced AI-driven analytics can transform how organisations respond to core workforce challenges. By leveraging employee insights maximised with tech and AI, providers can move beyond reactive staffing decisions to create sustainable workforce solutions.
A sophisticated employee feedback platform analyses workforce trends to uncover the precise factors impacting employee turnover and employee engagement. This enables providers to make informed decisions that directly impact retention.
From insights to action
While employee feedback data is essential, translating it into action is what truly drives change.
Organisations that are embracing this data-driven approach have demonstrated they are listening to feedback from staff, which is helping them build more engaged, capable teams that want to go above and beyond, and stay at the organisation longer.
To achieve this, organisations must shift from short-term fixes and firefighting to a forward-thinking, insights-driven approach that is beyond what any one Human Resources individual has the time to conduct and analyse on their own.
What if there was a system for improving employee engagement and retention in this way? A method that enables leaders to know exactly how to boost their Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) across the organisation?
Here’s the solution….
At Above & Beyond, we’ve developed an Employee Experience Feedback Program that integrates employee feedback with AI and understanding of the Aged and Community Care sectors. This powerful combination allows organisations to identify workforce priorities to drive your Employee Engagement score and improve your eNPS, which impacts desired retention.
Having the right information and expertise is the key to removing guesswork and costly mistakes, and provides the clarity needed to make informed, impactful workforce decisions.
Employee Experience (EX) Feedback Program
The EX Feedback Program captures insights at key stages in the employee life cycle and translates this data into action that aligns with your engagement and retention goals. It puts your employees’ voices in your hands and allows you to:
- Pinpoint and prioritise initiatives to boost Employee Engagement
- Understand which experience correlate directly with low Employee Engagement
- Identify red flags before they escalate
- Understand the different areas of your organisation like never before
- Turn insight into informed action
You can say goodbye to trialling new workforce initiatives to see if they succeed. This program delivers tailored engagement and retention initiatives by leveraging data, AI and HR expertise based on real staff insights.
Voice of the Employee
The EX Feedback Program captures the moments that matter for your staff. From significant milestones in an employee’s journey like onboarding and offboarding to ongoing engagement surveys and timely Pulse checks as required, to ask the right questions at the right time. Nobody knows your organisation like your people – and research shows when staff feel safe, they will tell you everything you need to know to make good quality decisions.
Making sense of staff feedback with AI
Text Analytics
The Employee Experience Feedback Program puts the Employee’s voices in your hands allowing you to hear, understand and act. The program’s custom AI Text Analytics model identifies and groups themes and topics in free text responses (without HR having to manually analyse them). It also assesses positive and negative sentiment, so you know where you’re doing well and where you need to focus attention.
Our platform is the only system of it’s kind that purely specialises in our sector and we love that it’s learning more and more about our Aged & Community Care sector.
Key Driver Analysis
Our platform identifies and informs which specific initiatives will directly impact and improve your Employee Engagement rating and your eNPS, resulting in better ROI and overall productivity and retention.
The EX Feedback Program dashboard shows the Focus Areas that will be the key drivers to overall engagement in your organisation.
This Key Driver Analysis unearths what specific factors correlate with low eNPS and engagement. This removes the guesswork and helps you to streamline effort, resources and energy by focussing on action which will make a difference – rather than implementing reactive short-term measures.
Reliable data presented in this way allows care managers to focus on where they can have the biggest impact on staff satisfaction.
Interactive Dashboard
The survey results are displayed on an interactive dashboard designed to be intuitive and user specific. This allows organisations to quickly understand what’s going on with their workforce and to take decisive, informed action. Feedback is presented in a way that makes it easy to identify emerging patterns and trends over time and across different employee segments / departments / locations etc.
Overall, the user friendly dashboard provides an empowering level of visibility, to track key metrics, identify emerging trends and benchmark results against specific standards.
Informed decision making to boost Engagement & eNPS
Purpose led organisations like those in aged & community care are caught in a vicious cycle. They’re (often) unable to thrive in fulfilling their purpose driven goals because they’re stuck in a tactical, reactive stage of workforce planning. They resolve immediate staffing issues to fill a gap but it might not be a strategic move, and may result in more turnover.
However, there is a way to move beyond the revolving door, and evolve from quick fix tactics. The EX Feedback Program delivers an evidence-based engagement and retention strategy which harnesses the power of data, AI and HR expertise, and aligns to your People & Culture goals.
We know that an engaged, stable workforce is critical for delivering exceptional care so here’s a way to drive meaningful change, fast.
For more information or to request demo of the EX Feedback Program, email laura@aboveandbeyondgroup.com.au
Authors
Laura Sutherland
Director & Founder
P 1300 831 949
E hello@aboveandbeyondgroup.com.au
Laura is a Workforce specialist, Leadership and Career Coach with a background in Psychology. Considered the go-to trusted advisor on workforce challenges in our industry, Laura partners with clients to understand their specific challenges and tailor the most effective and sustainable solutions. Her core professional purpose is to improve and future proof Aged Care & Community Services by supporting organisations to develop the potential within their people.
References:
*Ideagen Aged Care Workforce Report 2023
**The Australian HR Institute
