Homestyle Aged Care Services enhances employee experience and improves care quality with Dayforce

It’s a fact of modern life that we are living longer. Good news for the greeting cards industry, but a development that brings challenges for aged care. If you’re in the sector, you’ll know that finding great staff is tougher than ever. With Australia’s over-80 population set to double by 2050, demand for aged care workers is skyrocketing, and competition for talent is fierce.

On top of that, COVID-19 and the Aged Care Royal Commission, new Aged Care Act have driven major regulatory changes, making it even more critical for smaller providers to stay ahead in recruiting and retaining the best people, supporting, educating, and paying them accordingly.

Homestyle Aged Care Services is doing just that, by providing high-quality residential care in 10 locations across Melbourne and Geelong. With a dedicated team of 1,800 staff, Homestyle ensures 1,000 elderly Australians feel right at home. As we age, everyone wants to remain at home, however when being at home is no longer possible. “We believe that Homestyle is the best alternative to being at home,” says Dawn Griffiths, Homestyle’s General Manager of Human Resources. “But that can only be done if we have the right employees. My job is to care for the employees who care for the residents.”

Unlocking the path to attracting staff

Attracting and retaining nurses and care workers whilst effectively managing their work-life is arguably the aged-care sector’s most critical priority. At Homestyle, that undertaking falls to Dawn’s centralised HR team of six people, supported by an extended team of roster co-ordinators—one attached to each Home.

They look after the complete lifecycle of employees from hiring, ensuring they are legally compliant to work in the sector, rostering them, paying them, supporting their development and career growth, through offboarding them, and capturing feedback.

But executing these processes was hindered by an operating environment with multiple manual processes, disparate systems, and a lack of insightful data.

“There was a need in the industry to improve the overall employee experience in terms of things like better understanding of shifts they could pick up, and having visibility into their pay,” says Griffiths. “And the way to achieve that was to improve the technology.”

With a busy, largely mature employee base not best known for being instinctively tech-savvy, simplicity was important when it came to selecting that technology. “Having something as straightforward as an app and a single login to access everything was a big driver,” says Griffiths. So, Homestyle is taking steps, with the support of Dayforce and partner Pinpoint HRM, to ensure the best technology infrastructure is now in place to support team members.

Accelerating and optimising recruitment

Prior to implementing Dayforce, Homestyle relied on two separate systems for payroll and time and attendance. Neither had an applicant tracking system in place, yet recruitment of employees was paramount. “We knew we were in a war for talent in the market,” says Griffiths.

Homestyle needed a streamlined way to publish job ads across various platforms and centralise the application process. Previously, recruitment had been handled manually; CVs were submitted on paper, reviewed individually, and then emailed to different team members. Applications often got lost in inboxes, or physical copies were dropped off at different locations without a clear system to track them. And chasing references could involve days of playing phone tag.

“There was no way of getting our arms around the candidate pool,” says Griffiths. Now, with Dayforce, there is centralised visibility of candidates from application to auploading documents, onboarding, and employment offers. Plus, pre-screening questions in Dayforce help filter out candidates based on location and qualifications, ensuring only suitable applicants move forward, and improving overall employee quality.

When Homestyle first implemented Dayforce, there were over 800 vacant shifts across its master rosters. In the latest review, that had fallen to under 150, a number that keeps all Homes remain fully staffed. A hiring process that once took 4-6 weeks on average can now be completed in a significantly shorter timeframe.

“For us, Dayforce has completely revolutionised how we recruit,” adds Griffiths. With job postings, we have streamlined our use and reduced costs for using job boards and find that most of our candidates come directly from our website “Candidate level retention has increased by about 70% because we’re able to engage them that much faster, that much better, and progress from advertisement to offer a lot quicker.”

One tool to enhance employee experience

With its single smartphone application through which Homestyle’s team members now manage all elements of work life, Dayforce has transformed the employee experience. “We do an employee survey each June,” says Griffiths. “We’d only been live a couple of months, and people said how easy the app was to use, how wonderful it was to be able to have everything in one place.”

Previously, team members had to access separate systems for rostering and payroll, each requiring different IDs and different passwords and access to a desktop computer. Only this way could they see which shifts they had, which were available to bid for, and what they would be paid. Employee rosters were circulated via email. Leave requests were submitted on paper forms that would be easily lost and difficult to track.

With no efficient time data syncing between the systems, any retrospective changes had to be manually corrected, adding extra work for the payroll team, an inefficiency that consumes at least 25–30% of their time during payroll processing. What’s more, the rostering tool was nearing the end of its life and lacked security. “We couldn't continue to use it because it wasn’t going to meet the standards required from a security perspective,” says Griffiths. “We have to be secure. So, it was about finding an alternative technology we could work with.”

Homestyle’s partner, Pinpoint HRM, worked closely with the Dayforce product and technology team to refine a suitable solution for the care provider. “We received great support from Dayforce,” says Gaurang Shah, Senior Project Manager, Pinpoint HRM. “And that working together really helped us deliver value for Homestyle.”

Employees can now access their schedules, view their pay, request time off, upload documents, complete online learning, and bid for shifts—all within a single platform.

The best people for the job

By enabling dynamic scheduling and providing employees with a centralized view of their shifts, Dayforce has significantly strengthened the rostering process. “The connection to shifts is fantastic,” says Griffiths. It allows for quick responses to available extra shifts, but whereas once that process operated on a first-come, first-served basis, with Dayforce it is more intelligent.

“One of the benefits that Dayforce shift bidding has brought about is that it provides the ability to see who has bid to do an additional shift. We can check the employees' skills, experience, and worked hours to select the most suitable team member for the additional shift. This has also dramatically reduced overtime and improved the employee skill mix, as there was previously no transparency into the hours worked or who was the best employee for the shift when the first responders were taking additional shifts,” explains Griffiths.

When shift availability is released, the system filters individuals who do not meet the criteria for a specific role or shift, improving the quality of applicants. The first-come, first-served approach often resulted in some employees taking on more shifts while equally qualified others may have missed out. With real-time tracking, rostering coordinators can now easily monitor shift distribution and prevent over-scheduling, ensuring a more balanced allocation.

“That shift bidding process has become a lot more beneficial overall, and it’s also become a lot more robust for Homestyle,” says Shah.

Griffiths agrees, acknowledging the value in terms of health and safety, the duty of care to residents, and cost effectiveness for the business. “If an experienced person calls in sick, then you want to replace them with an equally experienced person,” she says.

Sector compliance and streamlining tasks

Residential Aged Care is a highly regulated sector, and it’s important that police checks, skills certificates, and training are kept up to date. Previously, this was done manually, with no reminders available about pending certification expiry or training requirements. “Now, because everything sits centralised in Dayforce, it’s all connected,” says Shah.

Dayforce helps streamline regulatory and compliance tasks, such as police checks and certification renewals, sending notifications to roster coordinators, managers, and team members when they’re due. The result is improved compliance and task tracking, as well as significant time and effort savings for Griffiths and her team.

Historically, leave requests were submitted using paper forms, and often left under doors, leading to misplaced or overlooked requests. Now, the entire process is digital, allowing employees to track their leave requests in real time. The same applies to medical certificates; once submitted on paper, they are now uploaded for easy tracking. These improvements have streamlined administrative tasks by creating greater autonomy over their work life for employees, thus reducing the burden on roster coordinators who previously had to manually process, follow up, and upload documents.

Caring for Homestyle’s needs into the future

As it continues its Dayforce journey, Homestyle is looking to integrate role-specific learning plans through the Dayforce learning management system and is preparing for future seamless module integration and app enhancements.

Twenty-four months in, the picture looks positive and full of promise. “We are able to process pay in two rather than the previous three days,” says Griffiths. “Twelve months after implementation, we needed to step up recruitment by an additional 40% to meet government-mandated care minutes, and that wouldn’t have been possible in our previous system without adding at least two full-time resources to our recruitment team, while reducing our time-to-hire. Compared to the previous systems we were dealing with, we’ve gone from a bicycle to a car, and it’s a much bigger world.”