What is eRostering or Electronic Rostering in Care?

An electronic roster is a digital tool for tracking employee timesheets, rotas, shift swaps, absences and more. It allows managers to juggle staff availability in real-time, ensuring they always have carers available. Some software even have advanced features, like Google Maps integration, which ensures accurate travel payment calculations. 

Managers can use digital technology to allocate rostering quickly and efficiently, ensuring that their employee roster is optimised to meet current and future needs. Finally, electronic rosters help managers to better track leave entitlements by providing real-time visibility into entitlements, automating tracking and proactively identifying scheduling conflicts to ensure efficient resource allocation. This can reduce certain absences and the reliance on costly overtime by enabling better planning and communication.

eRostering software is a tool designed to automate the employee scheduling process. Typically boasting a range of features, eRostering is well-placed to tackle the many rostering challenges a care provider might face, including scheduling conflicts, lack of visibility on employee availability, inefficient communication, and compliance risks.  

Getting a roster wrong can compromise the quality of care, risk non-compliance, and lead to an unhappy workforce. Consequently, eRostering software is a solution that no provider can afford to ignore, and that will pay for itself in the long run. Here are some of the benefits of eRostering.

Improved Coordination and Management Oversight

eRostering software streamlines administrative tasks, enabling managers to focus on core responsibilities like staff management, rather than getting bogged down by scheduling conflicts and last-minute changes. With centralised scheduling, managers have better oversight of staffing levels, ensuring shifts are covered adequately, and minimising common issues such as understaffed or overworked teams.

The software’s predictive analytics helps managers make informed decisions based on historical data, forecasting future staffing needs and optimising resource allocation for better operational effectiveness.

Replicable Roster Templates

eRostering systems allow managers to create and save templates that reflect preferred scheduling patterns, staff allocations and shift assignments. These templates can be reused for future scheduling cycles, ensuring consistency and reducing errors. This is especially beneficial for organisations with multiple locations that follow similar scheduling patterns, ensuring uniformity across different teams.

Enhanced Accountability and Payroll Accuracy 

eRostering centralises data on employee shifts, attendance and leave, which enhances accountability and reduces the risk of errors. By integrating eRostering with payroll systems, the software automatically transfers validated scheduling and attendance data, ensuring that hours worked, overtime and leave are recorded accurately and in compliance with legal and organisational policies. This minimises payroll discrepancies, reducing disputes and increasing employee satisfaction.

Increased Job Satisfaction and Empowered Staff 

eRostering improves workplace satisfaction by offering employees flexibility in managing their work-life balance. With the ability to set preferences, update availability and request shifts through the system, employees gain greater autonomy over their schedules.

This flexibility contributes to improved employee well-being, better retention rates and a happier, more motivated workforce. Managers benefit from increased staff retention, while service users interact with more engaged staff, improving the overall quality of care.

Enhanced Workplace Fairness

eRostering systems eliminate the risk of favouritism by providing a clear, objective framework for allocating shifts and managing leave. By distributing shifts equally and evenly, including during sensitive periods such as holidays, eRostering promotes fairness among employees, boosting morale and reducing resentment. Real-time updates and automated notifications help managers ensure that workload distribution is balanced and fair across team members.

Reduced Absenteeism

By assigning shifts based on data-driven insights such as employee availability, skills and past attendance patterns, eRostering helps reduce the absence of staff. The system ensures that shifts are adequately staffed, minimising the risk of burnout or stress-related absenteeism. Additionally, managers can track attendance trends, allowing them to address recurring issues promptly and implement preventative measures.

Improved Quality and Customer Care

eRostering enhances care quality by giving staff more time to focus on delivering person-centred care, thanks to reduced administrative burdens. The software’s ability to analyse performance metrics and staffing patterns helps managers identify areas of improvement, offer timely feedback and provide necessary training and support. With better staff allocation, care workers are empowered to give optimal care, directly improving service delivery.

Automation through eRostering also allows care workers to spend more time with service users, rather than on administrative tasks. The software’s ability to track staffing levels in real-time ensures that service users always receive the appropriate level of care, without gaps in coverage, maintaining high-quality service throughout the day.

More Efficient Rostering and Predictive Analysis

eRostering optimises staffing by analysing historical data to predict future demand, enabling managers to allocate resources efficiently. This data-driven approach ensures that staff are scheduled based on their skills, availability and the needs of service users, leading to more efficient use of resources, higher quality care and cost savings.

Fair and Transparent System

eRostering eliminates human bias in the rostering process, ensuring that shifts and leave are distributed fairly according to clear, objective criteria. This promotes transparency, fairness and trust within the workforce, which in turn boosts employee morale and enhances quality of care.

Enhanced Compliance and Regulatory Support

eRostering helps improve compliance with regulations by ensuring that staff schedules align with contractual agreements and avoid breaches. By automating scheduling and communication processes, eRostering reduces the risk of non-compliance, such as double-booking care workers.

Regulatory bodies like the Care Quality Commission (CQC) advocate for the use of technology to support outstanding person-centred care by streamlining processes and ensuring compliance with industry standards.

Despite its many benefits, eRostering, when not administered correctly, can have some disadvantages. In an article published in the Nursing Times in 2019, the following challenges were identified: 

Work-Life Balance 

eRostering lies at the heart of enabling staff to achieve a rewarding work-life balance. However, inflexible and unpredictable shift patterns make it difficult to balance their work and personal commitments. 

In shift-based roles, work-life balance is affected by three factors:

• Predictability of the roster
• Level of staff input into the roster
• Amount of advance notice staff are given about their shifts

The problem arises when staff experience too much variability in their shifts and too little control over it.  

Reconciling Flexibility and Fairness 

A common assumption is that fairness means all staff are given a similar number of unsociable shifts and have a similar number of requests granted. This conception of fairness is often enforced by rigid rules such as a fixed number of approved requests per person. 

However, a better approach would be to allow staff to have more say about their schedule and create a team-based rostering process which encourages open discussion and negotiation to accommodate individual work-life balance preferences. This approach calls for an eRostering system that is both intuitive and intelligent. 

Usability Issues 

Managers use the auto-roster function of their eRostering systems, but they often struggle to understand how to change the rules on which their system operates. Eventually, they find that their daily working environment is increasingly disassociated from the rules programmed into their eRostering system and they end up fighting against the system instead of using it.  

In some cases, managers revert to using the eRostering system manually, which negates many of the advantages of the software and reintroduces concerns about human bias and favouritism. 

Empowering Staff 

For staff to be genuinely empowered in health and social care with team-based rostering, eRostering systems must encourage a collaborative approach to scheduling. Staff need to be able to understand the rules that guide their roster, how the rules affect them, and how the rules can be modified.   

Some eRostering systems are based on static rules engines which require specialist expertise to understand, making them inaccessible to regular staff members. Although this might be remedied by extensive and expensive training, a better solution would be to opt for eRostering systems which are user-friendly and intuitive.

To conclude, eRostering software is revolutionising the way care providers manage their workforce, helping to balance operational efficiency with the delivery of high-quality, person-centred care. By automating complex scheduling processes, providing real-time insights and fostering a transparent and collaborative workplace. eRostering enables care services to optimise resources, improve employee satisfaction and ultimately, enhance outcomes for service users.

While challenges like usability and balancing flexibility with fairness exist, the right eRostering solution can address these concerns and unlock the full potential of your workforce. Our Access Care Rostering (ACR) solution is purpose-built for care providers who need a reliable, scalable and user-friendly eRostering system to tackle the unique challenges of the care sector.

By integrating real-time scheduling, predictive analytics and harmonious compatibility with payroll and compliance systems, Access Care Rostering simplifies workforce management while reducing administrative tasks. Its innovative features, such as fair and transparent shift allocation, leave tracking and advanced reporting, empower management to make data-driven decisions with ease.

“As the original founder and creator of People Planner, it was paramount for me that Access Care Rostering became the most intuitive, most comprehensive, and most innovative rostering solution available in the market today.“

Says Ian McMullon, the director of Access Care Rostering. “Supporting the Access Care Rostering Project over the last 3 years has been an amazing experience, but the icing on the cake is the amazing feedback from our clients when they see what we’ve done!”

At Access, we have over 30 years of experience in supplying software solutions to the care sector, supporting more than 11,000 registered care locations across the UK. With reliable, always-on services tailored to your needs, Access Care Rostering ensures high performance and stability to support care excellence. If you would like to learn more about our eRostering software, contact us here to discuss your needs to book a demo.