Simplifying complexity to support growth with Sona.

🌱 The challenge: Managing complex growth

Greensleeves Care is a leading not-for-profit residential care provider with 28 homes across England, delivering 24/7 care for residential, nursing, and dementia needs.

As the organisation has grown, including through acquisitions, operational complexity has increased. Greensleeves Care needed a workforce management solution that could adapt to their expanding footprint, simplify highly complex processes, and support their continued growth.

Growth by acquisition presented a unique set of challenges for Greensleeves Care. Newly acquired homes brought different contracts, pay structures, and terms & conditions that had to be carefully integrated into a single system.

Homes were complicated because we had a mixture of different terms and conditions. Some homes had their own legacy payroll terms, and others followed our Greensleeves Care contracts.

Anna Muir, Digital Transformation Lead

Staff often worked across multiple roles, from care assistant to domestic assistant, adding further complexity to scheduling, payroll, and compliance. Existing systems struggled to accommodate this diversity, creating administrative burdens, inconsistent data, and room for error.

The solution: Flexible, tailored Workforce Management

Greensleeves Care selected Sona as a trusted partner to navigate this complexity, deploying their Scheduling, HR, and Time to Gross Pay products. As Susan Weller shares:

The key was to understand both the resident journey and the employee journey. We mapped every touchpoint to see where integrations were needed. Sona gave us the flexibility to develop a solution that truly worked for us.

Susan Weller, Digital Transformation Director 

Sona's AI-native workforce management platform was configured to handle Greensleeves Care's varied payroll rules, contract types, and shift structures, while simplifying the experience for staff on the frontline. From clocking in and out to booking annual leave, picking up open shifts, and seeing their entitlements in real time, Sona made daily tasks fast and intuitive.

Katie, an Administrator, highlights the transformational change:

I used to spend hours manually calculating holiday entitlements with complex formulae. Now it's done automatically in Sona. It's amazing.

Katie, Administrator

Key achievements of Greensleeves Care with Sona include:

• Streamlined multi-role staff scheduling and payroll accuracy.
• Significant reduction in administrative workload across all homes.
• Improved visibility and control over complex payroll structures.
• Faster onboarding of newly acquired homes into a unified system.
• Enhanced staff engagement through easy-to-use mobile functionality.

Fast adoption, rapid results

Despite the complexity, staff across Greensleeves Care adopted Sona quickly.

After about three or four weeks, you could see the domino effect. Everyone had it on their phone. They saw open shifts, picked up extra hours, and overtime was automatically processed in payroll.

Anna Muir, Digital Transformation Lead

Bethany, a Home Manager, echoes this sentiment:

I’d say Sona saves me up to five hours a week. That’s more time I can spend with staff, residents, and families.

Bethany, Home Manager

Driving financial and operational impact

With more accurate rostering and automated payroll calculations, Greensleeves Care is seeing significant efficiency gains and cost savings.

• Reduction in payroll queries and errors
• Faster pay runs (many new homes up and running within 4 weeks)
• Reduced agency usage, with staff quickly picking up open shifts
• Less time spent on admin, freeing up leaders for resident care and staff support

"We’re seeing a downward trend in agency costs," shares Susan. "And the financial savings allow us to reinvest in care delivery."

Susan Weller, Digital Transformation Director

To balance the implementation of Sona alongside other digital solutions and avoid overwhelming staff, Greensleeves Care opted for a staggered rollout approach. This phased method allowed homes to adopt the system at a manageable pace while maintaining operational stability.

Greensleeves Care anticipates that all of its homes will be fully live on Sona by the end of the year.

Award-winning digital transformation

Greensleeves Care’s success with Sona has not gone unnoticed. The organisation recently won a Care Home Award for Digital Transformation for its joint rollout of Sona and Nourish, recognising its leadership in modernising workforce and care management.

The Sona project delivered on time and within budget. For any provider looking for a system that can be tailored to meet complex requirements, I would absolutely recommend Sona.

Susan Weller, Digital Transformation Director