New partnership for Social Care announced with Care Hires
Sona and Care Hires announce an exciting partnership.
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.
Practical ways to boost team morale with proven examples from across the sector.
Find out what care employees say matters to them most at work.
Search and view employees with customised permission levels.
Key employment information all in one place.
Store visas, professional certifications and more with easy access.
Control personal and operational details of your staff.
Why are people leaving Social Care, and where are they going?
We asked 250 Social Care leaders about their attitudes towards digitisation and their plans for the next 12 months...
Why are Hospitality workers leaving the industry, and what can you do to retain them?
Share updates with a single click.
Staff can see relevant messages in one place.
Request post-shift feedback from staff.
Recognise staff contributions by sending them praise.
Identify staff at risk of churning.
How care organisations can embrace flexible working and thrive.
Maintain quality of care and reduce costs.
Maximise profitability through AI-powered forecasting & scheduling.
Elevate your operational efficiency and guest satisfaction.
Streamline operations across sites.
Developed alongside Social Care experts with decades of combined experience.
See why we are the leading user-friendly, end-to-end platform that prioritises both efficiency and wellbeing.
The Sona Partner Network is an ecosystem of solution experts and complementary technologies.
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.
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.
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New research, insights, and strategies for frontline leaders.
Downloadable templates, reports and guides from Sona.
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Learn how our customers are transforming their people operations.
| 3 min read
Sona and Care Hires announce an exciting partnership.
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Steve Rockey, People Director at The PIG Hotels, is joined by Sona's VP of Hospitality, Paul Watson, in conversation on the culture strategies that deliver high performance teams.
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This article explores 5 common drawbacks of legacy tools and how next-generation, bottom-up architecture unlocks revenue growth.
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Do you know how the frontline feels about new tech?
Sona’s most recent 1,000 person survey delved into the motivations of both leavers and joiners to the sector.
PUBLISHED: August 2024
What motivates the next generation of Care professionals to stay in the sector?
Growing organisations need high impact solutions.
The order in which you roll these out can deeply influence implementation success rates and staff buy-in.
Those tasked with digital transformation have to be ROI-focused and demonstrate the potential savings and operational impact a solution can bring in order to see beyond the initial implementation cost.
This table will help you:
The data applies to organisations of 1000+ staff | WFM
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CRM |
Digital Care Planning |
Compliance |
eMAR |
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Total impact score | 13 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9 | |||||
Expected financial benefit |
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Financial impact score (1-5) | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||||
Expected non-financial benefit |
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Organisational impact score (1-5) | 5 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 5 | |||||
Implementation effort and timeline |
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Implementation effort score (1-5) | 3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
Workforce Management refers to end-to-end solutions that include Scheduling, HR, and Payroll.
1. ROI
75% of operating expenses in many organisations consist of staff costs. Next-generation solutions aim to address the specific areas affected by administrative tasks, over/understaffing, and agency spending. This accounts for approximately £6.5 million and 470,000 hours for every 1,000 employees.
2. Re-invest in the organisation
Efficiency savings can help pay for other investments, such as staff benefits, resident experience, or infrastructure.
3. Compliance & safeguarding
WFM keeps records for compliance & evidence gathering; with real-time Time & Attendance, it records where staff is at all times, tracks morale post-shift, and prevents under/overstaffing issues that can affect residents.
4. Continuity of care
Managers can create schedules that match residents with familiar employees each time - even when having to use agency staff, thus ensuring continuity of care.
5. Future-proof organisation
Next generation WFM will build a strong operational foundation that improves the staff and resident experience, while ensuring compliance, and facilitate choosing other systems as data will flow smoothly from it.
When choosing the first digital solution - whether that is a brand new process or an improvement on a legacy provider - there are three core areas that transformation leads can focus on.
We’ve spoken extensively to leaders facing (and overcoming) these pressures, to be confident that the three systems at the core of the map are the best starting point.
The CQC’s recommendations together with generous government incentives - projected to end in April 2024 - have made care planning and digital records keeping one of the first areas organisations consider for digitisation.
From increased productivity to evidence-gathering, providers can reap the benefits of keeping real-time updates on care planning activities. This generally leads to better collaboration among multiple staff members, as everyone has access to the same information about a resident's changing needs.
However, digital care planning solutions aren't always the ideal first choice. Their impact on the organisation is generally reduced to record keeping, and they don't tend to contribute to overall efficiency or save costs.
Roll-out expenditures can also increase, as providers need to invest in hardware (phones or tablets) for each staff member and ensure the location's internet infrastructure is compatible.
eMAR lifts another paper burden from Care staff and is generally the system of choice for organisations looking to keep track of a resident's current medication plan.
Since eMAR solutions usually record details like dosage and directions, they tend to simplify the process for Care staff, allowing them to electronically record administered medications without the hassle of manual pen-and-paper documentation.
The overall benefit is in the quality of evidence gathered and the increased assurance of resident safeguarding, but the impact on the business won't usually cover the implementation cost or support other future initiatives.
CRM solutions are designed to help organisations manage resident enquiries, occupancy rates, sales, and billing. They can support a marketing strategy and enable organisations to stay in touch with customers and prospects.
For these sales-focused Care organisations, CRM solutions can impact the occupancy rate, increasing it by approximately 30%. However, to make the most of their potential, a dedicated sales person or team is usually a requirement.
Scheduling software (also known as rostering or e-rostering) is a key solution for organisations looking to improve operations and wellbeing across the board.
75% of Care organisations costs are spent on staff costs (based on annual report data from leading UK Care organisations).
The intelligent labour deployment that scheduling solutions deliver can help tackle expensive productivity issues such as understaffing or overstaffing across locations, and reduce agency usage by up to 60%.
Safeguarding for staff and residents is also a challenge that many multi-location providers struggle with. This can significantly impact organisational viability and employee and resident wellbeing. Scheduling software keeps attendance records for compliance & evidence gathering while a real-time Time & Attendance feature records where staff members are at all times.
Furthermore, if Scheduling communicates seamlessly with the HR and Payroll systems, this can also lead to managers saving time on manual data reconciliation and avoiding incidents when running Payroll.
Overall, according to Sona shift data, up to 20% of these costs are in scope for savings with a next generation solution.
Based on a recent Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions report, shifting to digital scheduling will have huge implications for employee morale, work-life balance and managing temporary staff. This is particularly important as flexible work becomes more and more a priority for those joining Care.
This means that sticking to analogue scheduling or legacy providers could hamper everything from recruiting and retaining skilled professionals to missing out on productivity gains and cost savings.
Finally, with scheduling playing a core role for many Care home operations - including HR and Payroll - selecting the right provider will simplify the next few stages of a successful digital journey.
We'd love to learn more about your organisation and explore what Sona can do for you.
Let us know your number and we'll call you soon.
Arrange a Zoom call at a time to suit you.
Drop a line to our co-founder Oli - he'd love to hear from you.