Filling Roster Gaps Fast Without Paying Agency Premiums

The day is Friday and the time is afternoon. Your regular has called in sick for the weekend sleepover, another regular has just resigned with a week's notice, and the roster for a four-resident home is now 3 shifts short until Monday. You're familiar with the choices you have before you, having tried each of them already, calling your casuals and hoping they'll come, asking desperate permanent staff to work that second shift or telephoning a labour hire agency and paying a higher rate for a stranger that's never met the people living in the home.

None of these choices are desirable, and most importantly, the situation has become so commonplace. For most Supported Independent Living services this is not an occasional crisis. It is a structural feature of running homes, with staff who have many options. Each SIL manager knows the actual cost is more than the agency margin. It's the resident who eats dinner with a stranger, the behaviour support strategies of which the fill-in worker has never heard, and the permanent staff who burn out on every other shift.

Why the usual fixes keep failing

The casual pool doesn't work because it's too shallow and too passive. Most of the SIL's have lists of people they've recruited a few months ago, and half of those are now working elsewhere, and no one is forced to respond to a text message on a Friday. Overtime fails because it turns your best personnel into your most exhausted. Agency labour hire works at a price, but the people that come are not necessarily the ones that match the house, and the margins it leaves for the provider keep shrinking.

Or, treat gap coverage as a preemptive measure and consider the independent workforce as a working platform, no longer a last-resort.

Building a faster, cheaper coverage system

Make a house profile for each house. 1 page per house, residents (in an appropriate de-identified or consented form), routine, behaviour support essentials, non-negotiables and practical information such as parking, keys etc. This is an area that can make a huge difference when a new worker is able to read this before they start their first shift. Even the best worker wastes his first hour if he doesn't have it.

Pre-approve independent workers and keep a bench. When a vacancy arises, rather than starting from scratch, find independent support workers in your area, perform screening and verification, and guide walk-throughs of houses and document who is best suited to each house. You can use a platform such as Support Network to search for workers by suburb, availability, experience of supporting complex support needs and their willingness to work overnight or sleepover shifts, the most difficult shifts to cover.

On planned, not on crisis shifts. Where you can, roster a new bench worker alongside an experienced staff member on a planned shift, not in the middle of a crisis. They get to know if they fit in the house, they get to know the people, and the first time they work in a crisis, it isn't the first time they've been in the house.

Match to the house, not only the shift. A cover is not really a cover when it is filled by someone who disturbs the household. Compatibility with the residents matters as much as availability, tolerance to the specific dynamics of that home and familiarity with any behaviour support plan. Fit by house, not just by suburb, should be recorded on the bench.

Build an honest escalation ladder. Prioritise the type of response by cost and quality: bench workers who know the house well, then bench workers who have read the profile, then a wider platform search, then premium agency labour hire, not as a reflex.

How this plays out in practice

Imagine a typical situation: a SIL provider with three homes in a region that is often forced to pay for an expensive agency cover during the school holiday period, when everyone else has gone on holiday. The provider hires a roster of 8 independent workers and trains them over 6 weeks, with each worker being inducted against a specific house profile or two house profiles, while simultaneously providing one planned shift to each worker in addition to permanent staff. At the next holiday period most gaps are filled by bench workers at standard rates, instead of agency premium, and whatever is left is filled by a worker who has been met by the residents at least once before. In a system such as this, the difference isn't the workers. It is recruiting previous to the vacancy rather than during the vacancy.

Working well with independent workers in SIL settings

As with employees, independent workers in your homes should also be clearly informed about who is assigned to their shift, the information they need about the residents to keep them safe, and who to escalate to and what to escalate. Then, treat them in the same way, such as knowing the residents' behaviour support needs before working alone with them. The whole idea is consistency for residents, and continuity can be created by providing your best bench workers with a steady stream of shifts.

Next steps

Build your first bench for the hardest-to-cover house: one house profile, five good independent workers, one planned trial shift each. Then do it this month when there is a relative respite in the noisiness of the roster.