Health care staffing is now a multi-billion dollar industry. With more jobs in the industry constantly opening up and additional facilities seeking assistance in filling their available positions, medical staffing agencies will only continue to play a critical role in the sector.
However, managing contract and contingency workers can be difficult, even for an agency that centers around the pursuit. Thankfully, there are a few best practices medical staffing companies can leverage to ease common pain points.
Understand the individual strengths of your workforce
In order to properly place contract workers, medical staffing agency administrators must have a full understanding of their employees' most valuable skills. Whether this extends to the background a worker has, experience working in certain types of facilities or an affinity for a specific concentration of health care, it's important that medical staffing agencies know these strengths.
"Managers have a robust resource for making the best decisions about where to place their contract workers."
Contract and contingency workers can help facilities cover long- and short-term staffing needs, lower their overtime levels and employee costs while still maintaining a high level of patient care. These benefits are only realized, though, when the right contract candidate is placed in the right facility.
Having a workforce management solution in place can help medical staffing managers easily organize and access details about their contract staff members, including competency testing, attendance and more. In this way, managers have a robust resource for making the best decisions about where to place their contract workers to ensure the best fit for the institution's specific staffing need.
Ensure even opportunities
Contract and contingency workers can become dissatisfied if they feel they are being overlooked by the medical staffing agency. When one contract employee is continually called upon while others remain on the bench, it can cause these skilled workers to go seek out other opportunities - and the staffing agency as well as its clients could miss out on having a knowledgeable expert on staff.
In order to avoid this while providing more even and fair opportunities to contract and contingency workers, staffing agencies should have a robust organization and management system in place to track workers' time at facilities and their overall attendance. This enables managers to get the most complete picture of staff scheduling, and provide the best opportunities for their contract staff in a way that supports satisfaction with the partnership.
Support on-time invoicing
Contract and contingency workers also expect to be paid quickly and on time. Any delay here can also contribute to high rates of dissatisfaction, and impact overall productivity.
To support this, staffing agencies must keep impeccable records for each contract and contingency worker's time and attendance. This helps ensure that that employees are paid on time, and that payroll data is accurate.
Managing workers with a workforce management platform
Overall, the key to ensuring the best management of medical staffing agency's contract and contingency workers is to leverage a workforce management platform. However, not all of these solutions are created equally.
Medical staffing agencies should seek out a workforce management platform that was especially created with the needs of the health care industry in mind. This means that the solution will be able to provide critical capabilities for tracking attendance, scheduling, testing, recruiting and payroll.
To find out more about best practices for managing your agency's staff, contact the experts at BlueSky Medical Staffing Software today.
