Your Guide to Frontline Workforce Management
What is frontline workforce management and what should you expect from modern workforce management software? Here’s our handy guide.
Create and fill rotas in seconds.
Engage, recognise and retain staff.
Connect your entire workforce.
Seamlessly manage HR processes.
Pay your staff in just a few clicks.
Building a staff schedule couldn’t be easier.
Reduce payroll errors with real-time T&A.
Fill 50% more shifts with your own employees.
Ensure shifts are covered even if you're understaffed.
Manage absence requests and approvals.
Control personal and operational details of your staff.
Staff can see relevant messages in one place.
Track shift fulfilment, labour productivity, agency spend and more in one click.
Manage access simply and securely.
Sona can work hand-in-hand with your existing systems.
Find out what care employees say matters to them most at work.
Why are health and social care workers leaving... and where are they going?
Take ownership of your payroll processes.
We asked 250 Social Care leaders about their attitudes towards digitisation and their plans for the next 12 months...
How care organisations can embrace flexible working and thrive.
Maintain quality of care and reduce costs.
Bring out the best in your teams.
Streamline operations across sites.
Keep your staff and volunteers connected.
Richard, our Head of Product, worked in social care for 10 years before bringing his experience to Sona.
Over 500k shifts are created by our customers each year.
Integrate with Nourish.
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Sona is the 2022 Leaders in Care Awards winner for Innovative Solution of the Year for Care Homes.
Give staff greater visibility of shifts available to work, with a simple "shift claim" process to increase their income.
Improve employee engagement and retention with a seamless employee communication platform.
Happier staff provide greater customer experiences, which in turn drives return rates, revenues and recommendations.
Stay up to date with the latest Sona news and research.
Download Sona's latest reports and guides.
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| 7 min read
What is frontline workforce management and what should you expect from modern workforce management software? Here’s our handy guide.
| 4 min read
Learn how to access the Adult Social Care Technology Fund in order to access a grant of up to £600,000 for your digital transformation projects.
| 9 min read
Employee Appreciation Day is an opportunity for Social Care providers to recognise and engage their staff. Here are five inspiring initiatives.
PUBLISHED: April 2023
The digital revolution has arrived.
We asked 250 Social Care leaders about their attitudes towards digitisation and their plans for the next 12 months - and you can access the results right here.
DownloadPUBLISHED: February 2023
Social Care is on the brink of a digital revolution. We believe that’s because there’s a growing cohort of professionals across the sector with almost insatiable appetites for transformation.
So we created Trailblazers to celebrate some of those leaders and showcase the ways they are bringing fresh thinking and innovation to how care services are delivered and care providers are run.
Read morePUBLISHED: November 2022
Employee recognition programs are no longer a 'nice-to-have' - they are a must.
Our survey of 500 UK Health & Social Care employees highlights both the pivotal role of recognition in improving retention rates and the urgent need to address a perceived lack of appreciation in the sector.
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Despite the importance of the sector to society, working in social care can often feel like a thankless task - 92% of staff want more recognition. But providers have the power to turn this around.
3 minute read
Low wages, high burnout, and difficult working conditions are partly to blame. They're the common results of insufficient funding and high staff turnover.
The recent CQC State of Care Report concluded that these factors are highly prevalent across the U.K. Social Care system, with casualties such as staff morale, engagement and retention, and even quality of patient care.
However, a lack of employee appreciation is also a driving force. With just 21% of care workers receiving regular recognition from their employers, it's time to take action.
Not all the solutions are complex. Let's take a look at one in particular: employee recognition programmes.
Employee recognition programmes are a way of helping employees feel valued in the workplace. In the care sector, they drive up employee and patient satisfaction by ensuring hard work does not go unnoticed.
An employee recognition strategy needs to be holistic. There are many ways to identify and create opportunities to show appreciation to care staff, such as:
Rewards do not have to be monetary — a common concern across a sector that needs to keep a close eye on costs. Prizes such as 'Employee of the Month' or 'Highest Attendance Record' or a landmark 'Years of Service' award can mean just as much.
More than 2 in 5 staff working in care have left a job because they didn't feel valued. It's clear that employee recognition programmes are no longer simply 'nice to have'; they're a must for care providers. Let's look at three crucial reasons why.
Once pay is excluded, lack of appreciation is the top reason why care workers leave the sector, creating a vicious cycle.
High staff turnover has significant knock-on effects for care providers, significantly detracting from employee satisfaction and even affecting quality of care.
An employee recognition programme can create a workplace culture that employees are proud to be part of, increasing recruitment and retention: staff churn is 31% lower at companies with a 'recognition culture.'
An employee recognition programme can positively affect performance and productivity.
Feelings of demotivation mean that 49% of staff are less productive, and 39% produce lower-quality work as a result.
Conversely, staff who regularly receive recognition for their work are twice as likely to embrace innovative thinking and generally go above and beyond, which can make a world of difference to the quality of care given.
Implementing an employee recognition programme is a highly effective way of ensuring that a culture of appreciation is present across all areas and levels of your company.
Happier, more motivated staff lower your operating costs. Gallup found that, in the U.S., the total cost of disengaged employees is somewhere between $450 and $550 billion a year. Companies that rank highly for employee experience generate up to 25% more profit than their competitors.
With easy-to-use, company-wide workforce management tools such as Sona, managers can easily show appreciation to their employees.
Using a wide variety of features such as personalised messages of praise, simple feedback loops, reminders for well-being check-ins, and shout-outs on a shared newsfeed, recognition is literally embedded into our software.
The care sector's current workforce crisis needs quick fixes and long-term solutions. Employee recognition programmes can fill this role.
Urgent steps must be taken to ensure all care employees feel appreciated, particularly given the incredible value of their work.
Appreciation truly matters — download our research report on employee recognition to understand why in even more detail.
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1 min read
Every Wednesday at 1pm GMT, this 20-minute session will be your chance to see the platform in action and ask questions you may have for the Sona team.
5 min read
Agency costs in the NHS are rising to as high as £2500 per nurse shift, according to new reports. How can tech combat rising healthcare agency costs?
6 min read
Rishi Sunak is now Prime Minister. What does his leadership mean for the Department of Health & Social Care and for the care sector? We look at his plans.