As someone running a home care agency with human resources responsibilities, you probably have a lot to manage each day, like onboarding, payroll, paid time off, benefits, and much more. These administrative tasks likely take so long that it leaves little to no time to make sure your patients’, clients’, and caregivers’ needs are taken care of. It doesn’t have to be this way. With flexible human capital management (HCM) software, you will be able to streamline all of your everyday HR processes, which will allow you to spend more time on what matters most.

HCM software will not only free up your time, but it will also provide you with multiple other benefits and save your home care agency money in the long run. We’ve gathered the facts to demonstrate a true ROI in the world of HCM.

How Will HCM Software Impact ROI?

Employee Retention: Onboarding

You hired 5 great caregivers and have a 3-day orientation so that you can share your agency’s culture and expectations, get them on payroll, and complete all the onboarding documents. During this orientation, you give them their onboarding package, and everything seems to be running fine. On day 3, you submit their information and didn’t notice that 2 of your caregivers missed a signature, and 1 wrote the wrong social security number.

Uh Oh.

Unfortunately, cases like this are not uncommon when onboarding manually.

Tax withholdings, HIPAA forms, W-4s, I-9s, 401Ks, health insurance, direct deposit – you get the idea. Employees have to fill out and sign a gazillion forms, and there is plenty of room for error.

Based on the Society for Human Resources Management, onboarding is a crucial time to woo your new employees and leave them with a lasting impression. If you start off with a great onboarding experience, 69% of your employees are more likely to stay with you for 3 years (SHRM). That is a great lasting impression, especially when you take into consideration the current caregiver turnover crisis and all the money you invested – $4,129, the average cost per hire (SHRM).

One way you can create a great onboarding experience is by switching to an automated onboarding process. The minute you hire a new employee, all the HR paperwork begins. Life will be much easier by streamlining your onboarding process online. Based on a survey by the Aberdeen Group, 83% of the highest performing organizations surveyed started onboarding before the employee’s first day.

Going electronic will reduce time spent on administrative tasks, leaving little room for mistakes and increasing employee satisfaction. You will be able to upload and send all onboarding documents, like offer letters, I-9s, W-4s, E-Verify, online signatures, and WOTC!

To learn more about creating a successful onboarding process, listen to The Basics of Effective Onboarding.

Administrator Productivity: More Time

OK, this one is a given – if you are currently doing payroll or any other HR tasks manually, it probably takes up a lot of your time. Based on the National Small Business Association Annual Tax Survey in 2018, 20% of small business owners spend over 6 hours every month administering their own payroll, and most of these are not even home care agencies, who spend even more time on complex payrolls.

But I use a payroll company already… Well, how productive is your current payroll system? Payroll involves many steps, and as a home care agency, you have a very complicated payroll situation. Is your payroll company handling all your current needs? If you read our case study on Mrs. G’s Services, you’ll find out that the generic payroll provider they were using was not sufficient. Mrs. G’s staff frequently had to go back and fix many errors; their payroll system was not allowing them to adjust for retroactive pay and overtime, blended rates, or shift differentials.

All-in-one flexible HCM software will improve your productivity and reduce the amount of time spent fixing payroll errors, so you can concentrate on managing your agency.

Agency Compliance Risk: Less Exposure

Keeping up with local and federal regulations can be a daunting task. You got into the home care industry to help patients with their daily lives, not to research the ever-changing regulations.

Here’s a scenario for you: Jody, one of your aids, is working on two unique cases. Her first case is in New York City, where she is getting paid $18 an hour, and her second case is in Westchester, at a rate of $15 an hour. She is a hardworking employee and put in 5 hours of overtime this week.

As overtime is 1.5 times the regular rate per hour, how will Jody’s overtime pay be calculated in this situation, having worked multiple rates?

Definitely not by using $18 per hour x 1.5, nor by substituting $15 into the calculation. If you chose either, you would not be compliant under FLSA regulations. If your current software does not allow you to correctly calculate multi-rate overtime and blended rates, then it will set you up for risk of noncompliance and potential penalties due to incorrect tax withholdings; this could eventually incur a cost on your agency’s bottom line.

This is where HCM software with automatic multi-rate overtime calculation and geo-tax location comes in. Great HCM software will allow you to analyze the hours, blend the rates, calculate overtime, and notify you whenever a new regulation or law passes without requiring you to lift a finger.

If you’re looking for further tips to try and avoid an audit, check out The Ultimate Home Care Audit Survival Guide.

Business Intelligence: Informed Decision Making

Working in-home care, your middle name has become “Chief Reporting Officer.” Don’t you wish there was an easier way? A little wand you could wave to have a report in your hands whenever a union or the Department of Health needs one?

Depending on the complexity and the amount of employees you have, a report can take hours to complete. Imagine the amount of time you would save if you had a tool that could support analytics by feeding it the information you need via drag and drop?

It is possible!

A great HCM software suite will arm you with a Business Intelligence tool that will allow you to compare, contrast, measure, and execute a plan more strategically by analyzing all payroll data within the platform. Like what? Turnover, departmental costs, month-over-month, year-over-year – the possibilities are unlimited, and the impact on your ROI is endless.

And if you like fancy graphs, there are plenty of those to choose from!

Total Benefits of HCM Software

Once you add up all the time saved and mitigated risk, you can see the ROI of HCM software clearly. Overall, these are not the only benefits; HCM software can help your agency tackle the high caregiver turnover rate, make an impression on your new employees, boost engagement, and allow you to spend more time building your business and fostering your staff and caregivers.

To recap, HCM software will impact your agency through better:

• Onboarding – Creating a seamless and engaging onboarding process.
• Productivity – Increasing your productivity by reducing the time you spend performing tedious tasks so that you can focus on managing your workforce and clients.
• Compliance – Having an automated system that will decrease your time spent fixing errors and will help you stay compliant by adjusting to industry intricacies.
• Business Intelligence – Being able to quickly generate a report that was due yesterday by simply dragging and dropping information.