Chief Nursing Officers often feel constant pressure to control costs while maintaining high patient care standards, recruiting and retaining nurses and enhancing staff morale. That’s a lot to juggle.
You can recapture some of your professional quality of life with just one easy action, though: deploy scheduling software. Surprised? Discover these three ways your life can get better when you use ShiftWizard for workforce optimization.
1. Easily reduce overtime and agency costs
More than just a scheduling software, ShiftWizard provides you with the tools you need to allocate staff resources based on unit need – but without scheduling nurses who have already maxed out their available hours for the pay period. ShiftWizard accomplishes this by displaying real-time workforce data in a beautifully designed, highly visual interface.
At a glance you can see all open positions and open shifts across the enterprise – or by department. You can quickly float qualified nurses between units to avoid overtime costs. You even can receive notifications when a nurse approaches overtime status to avoid paying a premium rate.
No wonder CNOs offer high praise for ShiftWizard. As one anonymous nurse leader told KLAS when interviewed for its Nurse and Staff Scheduling 2018 Performance Report, “ShiftWizard helps reduce our overtime costs, float and agency costs, and usage costs because we get information in real time. We are able to see who has worked overtime, and who we can bring in who hasn’t worked overtime yet.” (2018 KLAS)
2. Recruit and retain Millennial nurses
No doubt many CNOs devote a significant portion of their time to developing effective nurse recruitment and retention strategies. And one surefire way to attract and keep Millennial nurses is to give them the technology they crave.
ShiftWizard does just that with full-fledged mobile scheduling and communication options. Nurses can use their phones to sign up for call, request paid time off, ask peers to swap shifts – and much more. CNOs and nurse managers can use ShiftWizard’s communication functions to mass-text, -email or -phone groups of staff people with important information at the click of a button.
This ease of scheduling and communication holds great appeal for all generations of nurses, but Millennials tend to particularly value this type of technology. And some research studies correlate staff empowerment – such as using a mobile app to self-schedule – with greater job satisfaction, which can lead to improved retention.
3. Easily enhance morale with incentives
All employees like to know they’re appreciated, and you can tangibly convey how much you appreciate your nurses by devising shift incentive programs. Maybe you’ve tried before but quickly discovered creating and implementing incentive programs can be laborious and clumsy, so you gave up.
ShiftWizard takes the difficulty out of incentive programs by highlighting incentivized shifts to make them easy for nurses to identify and sign up for. And the tracking occurs within ShiftWizard, too, to make it simple to get the rewards to the right people once they’ve earned them.
Some organizations use a system in which points accrue and can be redeemed at certain levels for incentives like a premier parking space for a month or tickets to a sporting event. Other organizations incentivize individual shifts, and whoever signs up gets the premium – maybe a gift certificate. Because of ShiftWizard’s flexibility, you can design your program how ever you want, and the system will handle it smoothly. The result? Happier nurses who feel appreciated.
Improve Your Quality of Life as a CNO
For CNOs, the beauty of ShiftWizard is that this single software tool can improve your professional life in so many different ways. From helping you keep labor costs under control to recruiting and retaining nurses to enhancing staff morale, ShiftWizard can help you feel happier and more productive every time you go to work.
