To Amplify Your Workforce Productivity: Think Flexibly

Our recent conversation with Cali Williams Yost (see the video) about creating “a new context for how, when and where work can be done” revealed implications far beyond Cali’s base message that flexible workplaces promote better performance and well-being. The bigger concept is strategic workforce flexibility, and it transcends the accommodations put into place during COVID.

Flexibility could be the big, new lever we’ve all been searching for in the quest to improve recruiting and retention and amplify productivity. And flexible thinking doesn’t only apply to scheduling and virtual work – it can apply to the entire clinical and non-clinical caregiving value stream.

Flexible Thinking Enables the Creation of Time and Space

When you think ‘flexible’ you should literally be thinking ‘cosmic’ value creation potential, IE time and space. Flexibility manufactures time by challenging assumptions about why work needs to happen in a certain way, at a certain time, or in a certain place. And flexibility creates space by, for example, allowing workers to seamlessly fit their work life into their personal life. We’ve been forcing square pegs into round holes for as long as we can remember; when you remove the discomfort of the bad fit, it opens up the potential for greater productivity and satisfaction.

Hybrid/remote work is, of course, the low-hanging example that’s fresh in our minds from the pandemic. (IE, Reduce commute time and stress, thereby leaving more time and energy for family, friends, and other pursuits.) But this covid-driven A-ha moment is just the jumping off point for a departure from “one size fits all” thinking. It shows us there is huge upside in recapturing lost time and space.

The Big Question

To begin to understand the implications in home care, we need only to re-write Cali’s big question for achieving flexibility, which is, “What do we need to do, and how, when and where do we do it best?”

As:

“What do we need to do, and how, when, where and by whom can it best be done?”

Now, Apply the Big Question to Your Value Stream

Once you have internalized the big question above, the next step is applying it to the value stream. Meaning, question everything. Many of us have been in the field for 20, 25, even 30 or more years. What assumptions have been ingrained along the way that need to be dispelled?

1. Scheduling
   1. When did scheduling first consider the needs of working parents? It wasn’t that long ago that traditional workdays had to end at 5:00 pm, which necessitated many working parents finding expensive after-school accommodations or perhaps forgoing the workforce altogether.
   2. Matching available hours to client needs: When did personal care providers first discover it was possible to match the needs of a 15 hour/week client with the desired schedule of a retiree who wants to work those same 15 hours? We didn’t always practice this.
2. Benefits
   1. Employee contributions: Many organizations are using variable contributions based on income level, meaning those with lower incomes make a lower contribution. Prior to that, why was a specific dollar contribution expected of everyone across the board, irrespective of income?
   2. Benefits selection: Some organizations allow you to choose the benefits that make sense for you personally. For example, if you already have sufficient life insurance, you can swap out the company-paid benefit for something else…say, company-sponsored childcare. Do benefits always have to be one size fits all?
3. Rewards/bonuses: Would you rather have a cash bonus or more time off? Why do we make only one choice available when some people would take the cash and others the lifestyle choice. Aren’t we leaving time/space on the table by forcing rewards into one bucket or the other?
   
   
4. Recruiting less experienced nurses: Many of us are discovering a higher ROI by developing less experienced clinicians themselves, versus paying exorbitant sign-on bonuses for experienced. The option was always there, but the default choice was hiring a fully developed clinician.
   
   
5. Clinical interventions: We are already using flexibility in our clinical interventions, perhaps without realizing it!
   1. Resource substitution: When we substitute LPNs for RNs, or have nurses cross-trained in therapy, this is flexibility at work. Instead of saying, “this can only be done by an RN or PT” – we adapted. We flexed.
   2. Virtual visits: The pandemic (again) forced us to realize that we can perform fewer in-person visits and substitute them with virtual visits without sacrificing quality.
   3. Artificial intelligence: AI is augmenting clinical decision-making to make more accurate judgments around, for example, last three days of life.

By now you realize that this list could go on and on. Moving ahead, flexibility is the mindset we need to overcome our labor bottleneck and amplify the productivity of our workforce.