How using the right tool for the job halves Meddyg Care’s payroll admin timeEstablished in 2014, Meddyg Care now has three locations and 125 staff dedicated to that mission. By finding the right people for the job who can combine compassion and care, Meddyg Care delivers person-centred care for its residents. But behind the tailored care and resident experience is a myriad of admin tasks and accreditation that can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Starting its digital journey a few years ago, Meddyg has moved from a rota posted on the wall to a smart solution that gives management and staff the right information at the right time.By getting the right tool for the job, Meddyg Care Managing Director Kevin Edwards says payroll admin time has now halved. Let’s hear how they did it.

25 years ago, Graham Care could only house 40 residents, but over the decades business has grown rapidly and is moving away from converted buildings to a care suite concept with new purpose-built homes. This will give the residents larger units and get nursing care within their homes while staying close to  friends and family.It’s safe to say that Will knows the business inside and out. He even lived in one of the care homes for two months to understand the experience on the ground. He believes that the key to success is to be found in digitisation.Will has introduced a lot of systems over the years and Planday has been the kind that has helped his business run smoother and didn’t cause any complaints from employees.

“There are around 350 staff in the homes. And then between 6-8 people in head office. We work in close proximity between the homes and we share processes and procedures, so everything is running on a similar way in each home,” Julie says.“I am currently in the process of setting up the department budget and revenue side of things and will shortly be working with each of the homes to implement Planday as a reporting and budgeting tool.” Julie says Planday has helped the organisation standardise performance and helps protect against disruption if one location’s administrator is unable to work. “The initial idea of using Planday was that we get something that would help head office get oversight and introduce more performance monitoring and measuring performance between the homes,” Julie says. In an industry where professional standards and care requirements are a big part of accreditation, having a single system to manage reporting and performance in a uniform way makes a big difference.  “Using a uniform system like Planday makes the company less vulnerable then, because there is only one administrator per home. So if suddenly that one person became ill then using Planday we are all using the same system and we all know how it works, so it is easier then for someone to just jump in and pick up from where they have left off.” 

Although Sussex Housing & Care has been delivering special nursing care for decades, it is not so long ago that they changed their employee management completely. In the past managers would spend hours on writing out the staff schedules and salaries by hand.  “On a payroll day we used to get a spreadsheet with 72 columns on and go through them all. We had no HR database, so it was key to get that in,” Ewa says. “The pay wasn’t quite accurate because people did their time sheets by hand, so the admin had to run around chasing people, then adding it all up and importing it in a spreadsheet. So, from that we moved to Planday,”. 

But not so for NHS Fife in Scotland. We sat down with Business Manager Graeme Pettigrew – who oversaw the implementation of Planday for the organisation in 2015 – to see how Planday makes their day work.  “We have about 120 staff who use Planday,” Graeme says.  With long and unpredictable hours, NHS Fife uses a mixture of casual and contracted staff.  “Our dental clinics are a 7 day a week service, but at the weekend we run an emergency service – and that is staffed almost universally by casual staff. So they don’t have set, contracted hours,” Graeme says. Graeme says NHS Fife’s dental clinics’ staff scheduling and communications have been modernised and simplified thanks to Planday. “In the old way of rostering, none of the systems talked to each other. You got an email about your roster, a phone call to change it and perhaps an email again,” Graeme says. “People were turning up in the wrong place or you’d get a roster emailed to you and you were actually on annual leave. We would even sometimes phone staff on their day off to tell them where they needed to be the next day. “All of these very fundamental things – that when you start to add them up – begin to annoy staff. And that has been an enormous benefit from using Planday.” “I cannot tell you how pleased I am Planday has the Contracted Hours feature.” With many NHS staff also having set, contracted hours or limits, Graeme says Planday helps keep scheduling and planning on track so managers can be confident their rota keeps to the rules – and that casual staff can pick up a shift when they want to.  “I cannot tell you how pleased and delighted I am that Planday has this feature,” Graeme says. “You can set everything up and then the schedule view tells you exactly what each employee is contracted to work. It makes a massive difference.  “First, it gives us the ability to look at contracted staff and get them on first. And then there’s the flexibility staff have – this is a crucial benefit.  It means if you’re a part time staff member working 22-and-a-half hours a week and we have an open shift and you want to work additional hours, then you can just pick up that shift. “If you’re a casual member of staff and you don’t have any set hours, but you want to put your unavailability in if you want some time off, Planday will tell me if you can work or not. I absolutely love that.”

Within a week, UCL had found, interviewed and trained around 140 staff for its 22 test booths to meet its 30 November opening date to start testing students. In all, 145 people – including management – use Planday to take the guesswork out of scheduling at the testing centre. With many of the staff students themselves, Sian explains UCL needed a sophisticated scheduling tool to handle its 14-hour per day, 7-day-a-week rotas, as well as complex needs like working hour limits for students on a visa. “It was a new team, many of whom are our students, so they needed an easy way to choose shifts so they could continue their studies. Planday allowed us to also monitor students whose visa limited the number of hours they could work,” Sian says.