The causes of that failure vary from one situation to another.
But we’ve found that getting ‘buy-in’ from care staff is one of the biggest success factors in getting digitisation right in care. It is also one of the most overlooked.
Getting care staff to buy in, and be enthusiastic about digitisation and the systems they are going to use is crucial if your attempts to digitise are successful and as fruitful as they should be.
If you’ve been struggling to get your care staff enthusiastic about digitisation or are concerned about this vital part of the process, we’ve covered some of the best ways you can motivate them and get them on board and learn how digital technology is transforming the health and social care sector.
After reading this article you should be equipped to get your care staff on board with digitising your care service.
What Digital Transformation Means for Your Care Staff
Attracting and retaining members of staff remains an uphill battle for many care providers. This is why digital transformation is important, as it helps to reduce some of the struggles associated with the position and has a direct benefit on the people working for and using the care facility.
Digitisation saves a significant amount of time and money while increasing efficiency. In return, this improves the service user’s experience. Employees will have more face-to-face time with them rather than dealing with heaps of paperwork and the home will have more money, increasing job satisfaction.
How Digital Technology is Transforming Health and Social Care
Care services all over the country experience high demographic pressure, cutbacks in spending and staff shortages while demands for increased efficiency rise. To ensure the future of social care initiatives is taken care of, digitisation is being implemented by many care facilities. With the UK population increasing and ageing, alongside longer life expectancies, more pressure will develop on care services.
Fortunately, digital technology can take pressure off care services and can help homes with fewer members of staff continue to offer high standards of care. Efficiency and cost savings are the main reasons digital technology is being implemented in health and social care, as it frees up care workers and helps manage budget cuts.
Digitisation can also generate CQC-proven audit trails by default, which allows the organisation to utilise this data during inspections, boosting ratings and having a good impact on the service valuation.
Tips to Get Your Care Staff Enthusiastic About Digitisation
Before you implement new technologies into your care business, you need to know the best ways to get your staff enthusiastic about these changes. Here are 5 tips to help get you started.
1. Share Your Vision
When it comes to leading digital transformation in health care, getting your employees excited to work with you is key. They are more likely to get enthusiastic about digitisation if they understand the route you’re taking and what you’re trying to accomplish. You can help your care team understand exactly what you are trying to achieve by implementing software by answering questions like:
- How it will improve the service user’s experience
- How it will make the team’s job easier
- How it will benefit the business
- How the changes will improve the facility’s impact
Once you know the answers to these questions, tell them to your staff so they can see the larger context of your vision and learn the benefits within every aspect of the business.
2. Be a Strong Leader
Being a strong leader is vital if you want the digital transformation to succeed. While it isn’t always well received from the top down, leaders are responsible for setting the tone for how it’s embraced. When approaching your team, think about your attitude and language, and the way you plan to adopt new technologies and set the standard in your business. Modelling the response you want is key to achieving it. To do so, you should consider the following:
- Be optimistic about digital transformation and the value of new technology and find out the best ways to be positive
- Don’t underestimate the importance of being present, by attending training sessions and discussing changes
- Make sure you know your stuff about digital transformation by doing the right research and participating in training
Implementing digital transformation is much more than choosing and investing in software products and devices. Employee engagement is the deciding factor when it comes to bringing in new technology.
3. Invest in Training
The lack of knowledge is one of the biggest barriers when adopting new technology in care businesses. When software is first introduced, staff will be concerned about not understanding how to use the new system, that the new technology will increase their workload or slow down processes that have been developed over years on the job. Fortunately, you can overcome these concerns with targeted training.
Providing a demo of how the software works and incorporating that into a sufficient amount of training will help your employees confidently embrace the new system as it familiarises them with the new technology. When investing in training, you need to make sure the team understand what resources they can use, the best way to use them, and the steps they can take to make the most of it.
How to Ensure You Get Software Training Right
A thorough committed plan of action is needed when it comes to training employees on a new software system. Ensuring that training is a priority and hosting the right kind of training experiences with each of your employees will all help improve the success of new technology.
Making the training interactive and updating the training as the software updates or changes will be ongoing tasks you’ll need to keep on top of. Finally, engaging your employees, allowing room for failure and getting feedback from the team will reassure you that you’re getting the training done right.
1. Have a Rollout Plan
You should design a rollout plan that will allow you to support your team while the transition and adapt. Your rollout plan should also include hands-on guidance and feedback sessions during the first few weeks of software implementation. Some options you can consider include:
- Staying connected with the team during the deployment, either through emails or one-to-ones
- Rewarding success stories and sharing them to capture learning that could benefit others
- Conducting formal focus groups and anonymous surveys to see how digitisation is affecting staff
2. Spend Time with Your Biggest Sceptics
In most care facilities, there will be members of staff that have been there for a very long time and aren’t open to change. Once certain people are used to a certain way and routine, it can be very difficult to change their minds. This could bring down the mood of the rest of the care team, especially if these people’s opinions have a strong impact on their colleagues.
One of the best ways to keep everyone positive is to spend additional time with your biggest sceptics. This can consist of additional training sessions, one-to-one chats to check in on them, noticing positive changes in their attitude and praising or rewarding this behaviour. The key to spending time with sceptics is to understand their point of view and to encourage them rather than scold or patronise them.
3. Identify your champions
Care providers we have talked to have emphasised the importance of having digitisation champions, or evangelists, ideally in different areas of your business. These will be the people who really ‘get’ digitisation and how it will benefit everyone, from clients to care workers, families and managers.
Your champions will often already be great motivators or respected, trusted members of the team. Don’t just think this means the obvious leaders, your managers. Digitisation must be championed first and foremost by the people who use the system every day as they deliver care services. Their confidence and proper use of the systems you implement is a massive part of digitisation working and everyone gets the biggest benefits out of it.
Work with your champions to motivate others and articulate why digitisation is important. But your champions can also help leaders to understand care workers’ concerns, and difficulties with systems and help you come up with ideas to tackle these.
They can even be really helpful when selecting systems in the first place, by helping those in charge to understand what’s important from a care worker's point of view. Or to see possible problems or benefits from different systems that would otherwise not be known or overlooked by leadership teams.
Choosing the Best Software for Your Care Service
Hopefully, you now feel much more equipped to lead your care workers and work together to make the digitisation of your care service as beneficial as it can and should be.
You need to source information from across your team, rather than taking a top-down approach. Address people’s concerns, spend time with your biggest sceptics, win them over and don’t shun them. You never know, they may also highlight some flaws that you have not considered yet.
You need to find the enthusiasm that already exists at every level of your organisation. Champion that enthusiasm and those people that have it, to amplify enthusiasm throughout your organisation.
Ensure that you communicate clearly why you are digitising, get your vision across so that it is shared by everyone in your care service.
When you’re looking for a software provider, finding one that will go through the process with you and ensure that you always feel supported is highly recommended. At The Access Group, we pride ourselves on the partnerships we form with our clients, and we strive to offer every business a personalised system that suits the specific needs of their care service.
Our social care software can be implemented as single-point solutions (for example, scheduling) but is part of a wider care ‘ecosystem’ featuring the best care software in the UK, all delivered in a single system, with a single sign-in.
Our care management software suite is the only system you need to improve the care services you provide and run your business in a more financially sustainable way. All the tools you need are conveniently located in one place, making it easier for your employees to get on board with digitisation. To learn more about choosing the best system for