Retaining Staff in your NDIS business
“I love this industry. It’s not about coming into work, doing an 8 hour shift and leaving. It’s so much more than that. For some people we can be their eyes, their ears or their hands”. - Disability Support Worker, quote from United Voice submission to the Productivity Commission, March 2017.
For disability workers and service providers working in the NDIS, their workplace is more than somewhere to go. But the sector has a reputation of having poor staff attraction and retention issues, job insecurity, pressure to deliver services to a price, and staff churn.
To put it in economic terms, there is so much demand and little supply. Valuable staff need to be looked after, trained, sheltered from too much red tape, and given access to better IT systems to be satisfied and efficient as possible.
The bottom line is that any money saved in managing service provider's businesses can then be spent on frontline staff training, salaries, delivering quality services and a working profit to ensure service providers businesses are viable.
The NDIS marked a major milestone in September 2018, reaching 200,000 Australians receiving NDIS support, and that number is set to reach 460,000 by 2020. What is not as well-known is the number of staff required to service the participants.
"By the time the scheme is fully implemented in 2020 we will need about 160,000 full time equivalent jobs - that's a doubling of the workforce over that time." Ken Baker, CEO NDS said in 2017.
With an ageing workforce, it is imperative that you retain key staff, and ensure they are well-versed in their obligations, work processes and not putting themselves or their clients at risk.
For service providers the awareness of their quality obligations and how staff are informed or act (casual staff, volunteers and full time staff), can be efficiently handled using an online resource.
Time is in short supply and service providers need to have their staff as productive as quickly as possible.
Mistakes are costly and can come with a very high penalty.
Losing a staff member or hiring new staff is time consuming and takes hours away from building a business.
Sole providers are working long hours and are under pressure to be business owners, carers and meet their audit obligations.
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