Mighty Team of One – How to Manage HR Within Home Care When There Is No HR Team to Help!

Being a human resources (HR) professional is challenging work – even more so when you’re an HR department or administrator of one in a home care agency. This could mean everything from being an owner who assumes the HR responsibilities to a staff member who is appointed “HR” to a certified HR representative.

The fact is – if you’re responsible for it all, you know that laws, regulations, and best practices are ever changing, and your current job description probably includes something like this:

• • Keeping up with compliance (federal, state, and local)
  • Managing employee relations
  • Recruiting, onboarding, and increasing employee retention
  • Everything training: caregivers’ training, sexual harassment and discrimination, diversity, workplace safety, dementia and alzheimers, etc.
  • Running payroll and those oh so complicated payroll calculations (FLSA)
  • Scheduling your caregivers and staff
  • Reviewing employee compensation and performance reviews
  • Crafting and enforcing company policies
  • Evaluating, offering, and tracking employee benefits

 So, the major question is – how can an HR administrator of one efficiently and effectively manage an agency?

The answer lies in two places: support and technology.

Let’s Start With Technology

Talent Acquisition Software
Talent acquisition is a money pit, and it can be especially time consuming and draining. The right talent acquisition software can enable you to create new job posts and track them on the platform. Found talent that seems like a good fit? You can schedule your interviews and other events through the application too. You’ll be able to manage your candidates with custom workflows, rating templates, and email templates. You’ll also be able to generate reports to monitor how your applicants and hires are reaching you, saving you time and helping you reach the best candidates quicker.

Onboarding Software
You’ve decided on a candidate, made an offer, and now you have a brand-new employee! Yay! Now it’s time to send onboarding documents. What does this look like? Based on a new statistic published by Gallup, it says only 12% of employees believe their company’s onboarding programs adequately trained them for their roles…. that leaves 88% feeling inadequately trained. Instead of leaving a bad impression on your new hire from the start, by making them fill a stack of paperwork, save yourself and your new hires some time by using an automated software system. Work with a provider that offers you the capability to send customized documents to your new hires that can be completed and uploaded by them remotely and an onboarding dashboard that tracks their progress. You’ll make a great impression too, as they won’t have to fill out paperwork they could have done sooner and from the comfort of their own home, saving time on their first day for more meaningful things.

Payroll and HR Software
As a team of one, managing talent acquisition and onboarding can be very time consuming alone – and on top of that, you have to deal with payroll. With a seamless human capital management (HCM) software suite, you’ll be able to send your new hires from talent acquisition and onboarding straight to payroll. This will save you time, especially in an industry like home care where you have to deal in intricacies in pay, such as blended rates and premium overtime, and will also help you prevent errors.

 Learning Management Software
Providing learning opportunities to your caregivers and staff not only helps you stay compliant but also helps your caregivers do their jobs and serve your patients better. It’s a win-win situation for everybody. However, due to the pandemic, providing enrichment and educational workshops has become much more challenging and costly, especially for someone who’s a team of one. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of planning the curriculum and materials, organizing for your caregivers to take time off for training, following any CDC and state COVID guidelines, and dealing with the overhead costs, you can make your life easier by utilizing a robust and flexible online training program that’s designed around your state’s, caregiver’s, and agency’s needs. Your caregivers will be able to get all the certifications and training required from anywhere they choose.

Benefits Administration and ACA Software
Manual, paper processes aren’t just time-consuming – they’re harder to administer, have lower employee participation, and can cause costly errors. As an HR team of one, administrating benefits can be a headache with many potential pitfalls because it requires human-performed data entry and processing as well as nagging employees for their forms. And when it comes to ACA tracking, there are many risks that could lead you out of compliance. For example, knowing your FTE equivalent count at any point in time helps you determine your requirements as an employer. Why calculate this manually? When you’re relying on manual processes or other people, it’s easy to make mistakes. Benefits administration software will help you verify data quickly and ensure everything is accurate, assisting you with both employee management and maintaining compliance.

And What About the Support?

Certified HR Reps
FLSA, FMLA, OSHA – there are so many federal, state, and local HR and employment laws that you need to keep up with. When you’re doing a thousand other things, being a team of one can be intimidating and stressful and can affect your agency and your employees. Having another person or team to advise and guide you on every HR issue you can think of – as well as the ones you can’t – can save you time and money that can be better spent elsewhere on what matters most.

Compliance Team
In the home care industry, it can be extremely daunting trying to keep up with all of the intricacies in pay while also managing a thousand other things at the same time. With a robust HCM provider, you’ll not only be able to do payroll right but will also get a team of experts that will help keep you in compliance and be there whenever you need assistance or have any questions. And that’s not all. You’ll also be able to access resources like webinars, white papers, infographics, and other thought leadership pieces to stay in compliance and better run your agency.

Looking for a robust HCM provider specializing in home care and offering flexible software and expert guidance as described above? Learn more about Viventium’s full suite of software solutions and Dedicated Health Support Team on our Home Care page.

Source: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1586.pdf