Although many organizations keep the traditional 9-5 Monday through Friday, this isn’t always the case. We’ve all heard the term shift work. But, what is shift work exactly? With shift work, workers “rotate” shifts around the clock as the organizations they work for are often open or need to manufacture items 24 hours a day.
Shift work is a common occurrence in many industries like healthcare (now the largest industry in the United States, representing almost one in seven American workers), retail, transportation, manufacturing, call centers, even law enforcement. Industries that utilize shift workers often can’t go understaffed without significantly impacting their productivity and the safety of their workers.
It’s time to transform shift management with next-generation shift-management software to attract and engage talent, keep them retained, and deliver quality work.
Enter the Agile Organization
According to McKinsey, “the agile organization is dawning as the new dominant organizational paradigm.” The siloed, top-down hierarchies are becoming a thing of the past as organizations move towards something more scalable. McKinsey views this as a move away from thinking of organizations as machines and a move towards thinking of them as organisms.
How can this help? Agile organizations thrive under pressure and are quicker to adapt to changes—whether they be in the marketplace or in the mindsets of their workers. You’ll find that highly agile organizations are happy to adopt new technologies and methodologies that work for their organization. In shift work environments, this means a focus on on-demand talent while adopting technologies that help to make this a reality.
Challenges in Shift Work
Shift work certainly has its benefits, but it is not without its downsides. In addition to greater chances of burnout and exhaustion, the interruption of our body’s natural rhythm can lead to significant sleep problems.
The National Safety Council has recognized that at least 62% of those who work the third shift don’t get an adequate amount of sleep. The National Sleep Foundation has even identified an illness called “shift work disorder,” which can impact up to 10% of shift workers. This lack of sleep can lead to higher absenteeism as well as higher injury rates. OSHA found that injury rates are 18% higher during evening shifts and 30% higher during night shifts. Longer shifts with twelve or more hours saw an increase of 37%. Plus, shift workers are at higher risk of other long-term health issues. That leaves a lot of open shifts to fill, often unexpectedly.
In addition to the health problems that can come alongside shift work, there are many who want to leave for different reasons. Some leave for more money or a need for more flexibility at work. Poor candidate experience, and therefore poor worker experience, can also play a role. Regardless of their reasoning, industries and organizations utilizing shift work often see high turnover and no-show rates, leaving underfilled and unfilled shifts
All of this leads to issues with retention, recruitment, and shift management. In fact, these are often cited as the top three challenges for shift work. Emerging technologies have paved the way for the simplification of shift work and allow for a more agile organization structure. Better recruitment processes and talent engagement can lead to better retention.
Shift Towards On-Demand Staffing
Simplified shift management can also lead to retention as well as better organizational efficiency. Becoming more agile and adopting technology that can help simplify and optimize can go a long way to help to attract, hire, and retain talent. What if you could do it all in a single platform without disconnected technology and siloed data?
WorkLLama’s on-demand shift management transforms the way organizations manage shifts. With WorkLLama, you can simplify and optimize shift management, recruitment, and increase retention in a single platform. Minimize time-consuming and often frustrating administrative tasks with a dashboard that enables clear workforce visualization, automated shift filling, and easy-to-use self-service features. It also opens up the opportunity for on-demand staffing, taking the on-demand staffing to a whole new level.
WorkLLama allows your shift workers, both full-time and contingent, to update their availability directly in the self-service shift management platform. When an open shift is detected, Sofi, our conversational AI, will automatically send out offers to your pre-vetted, background-checked, and virtual bench to cover the shift before it begins.
Our AI-driven platform allows organizations to deploy workers who already understand your organization and how it runs. You can build brand awareness through dynamic talent pools and branded experiences to develop personalized candidate experiences that help to bring in additional candidates. Sofi can even communicate via text with a simple call and response to fill open shifts with ease. WorkLLama customers have seen a 42% growth in monthly engagement through the platform, a 23% increase in profitability, and an 81% decrease in absenteeism.
Additionally, incentives to stay with the organization—crowd-based referrals with payouts and more—-can help cut down on turnover and provide incentives and brand ambassadors for the future.
Holiday Help On Your Terms
The holiday season increases production and the need for retail and other workers as shopping spikes. It also increases the need for healthcare workers as injuries and illnesses increase during this season.
Retail and Manufacturing
The holidays come with increased demand, and that often means an increased need in staff. Seasonal workers aren’t hard to come by, but loyal, qualified workers can be. Utilizing a system that keeps your passive candidates, previous employees, and potential talent engaged can make the seasonal hiring process easier to manage. Finding on-demand talent through WorkLLama eliminates challenges with availability and brand loyalty that come from seasonal work.
Healthcare
The staffing issue in healthcare is not limited to the holiday season. Nurses, who make up the largest (and most stressed) population, are the most impacted. In fact, 99% of nurses currently report staffing shortages. Currently, there are about 5.8 million nursing professionals in the U.S., but there are about 750,000 open positions at any time.
A new study investigating caregiver mental health found 83% of nurses feel anxiety, 81% report exhaustion, and 77% feel overwhelmed at any given time. This highlights the risk of burnout among nursing professionals. With nurse burnout increasing turnover—two-thirds of nurses are considering a “departure” from the profession in the next two years with an expected 2.1 million nursing professional shortage predicted over the next three—the healthcare industry has been suffering from a talent deficit since before the pandemic.
The WorkLLama platform can help to decrease turnover with incentives to stay and ease shift management, decrease absenteeism significantly (81%), and give you access to pre-vetted, background-checked candidates that you can deploy with a simple click of a button.
It’s holiday help on your terms, and agile, on-demand shift management for the rest of the year.
Shift Toward an Agile Organization Structure
Start transforming the way you manage shift work today and take advantage of the simplicity of on-demand talent provided by the WorkLLama platform. Schedule a demo to learn more.