Can you improve your staff ratio efficiency without spending hours on spreadsheets?

Staffing is by far the biggest cost the nursery faces, and often the most time consuming part of day-to-day management. Many of our customers have stated that the job would be so much easier if you didn’t have to employ people!

Add to that the costly task of up-skilling the workforce and you are in danger of spending more time managing staff then the rest of the business. However, by using the right system you can reap the benefits without facing time constraints.

Having a well-organised admin process for staff documents makes it easier to maintain a happy workforce and maximise your business’s investment in staff.

As with child’s data, you need to keep staff records up-to-date so that you can quickly identify key information. Whether it’s critical data like allergies, medical data or emergency contact details, or management issues like an upcoming appraisal, their availability to work or the expiry date of key qualifications.

Below we reveal some best practice to simplify staff data… 
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Staff ratios don’t need to be challenging…

Shifting staff around to maintain ratios can often be incredibly complex, and demand a significant amount of your time, to ensure the correct numbers are allocated. Without a computer based process, there is no option but to calculate staff rotas by hand, day after day. Not only is this prone to errors, but there’s a risk that details like holidays get overlooked and constant changes for sickness and absence are hard to manage. This can cause overstaffing, or failure to reach ratio, and often leads to staff being frustrated.

A popular system implemented by some of our customers has proven popular with staff. A 5 week rota is created which ensures each staff member gets one different day off each week depending on the week number. For example week 1 an employee would have the Monday off, followed by Tuesday for Week 2. Staff then benefit equally from a long weekend twice every 5 weeks, resulting in better team morale, with staff being invigorated and motivated. This is often traded off against longer working hours for four days, ensuring full-time staff still get their hours.

Your system should be able to integrate staff data to help you maximise staff costs and find areas to exploit. For example, Abacus has an ‘Occupancy Opportunity’ report which turns staff ratios the other way and tells you how many additional children you could accommodate in the nursery with the staff already present on a particular day. The nursery could sell these places at any price, as it is all a contribution to the bottom line, given that the staff cost is there anyway.

Dealing with payroll

Preparing data for payroll can often be a time consuming process, especially given the number of shift changes, sickness and absences that most nurseries have to contend with. The only answer is to keep a rolling record, day by day, to avoid the arduous and almost impossible task of recalling these details at the end of the month.

As a minimum, you should create daily timesheets that clearly state what hours staff worked, any absences and any overtime accumulated. Sheets can easily be filed ready to be reviewed, or checked against at the end of each month.

Need to share the data with your payroll administrator? Using a free service like Dropbox enables you to securely share files easily with other users and the contents still remains accessible and editable to both. This way you can keep administrators up-to-date on sickness or holidays as and when they happen.

Abacus can provide working hours, sickness and holiday reports, as well as resources to track overtime which helps significantly speed up this lengthy process. Add to this the feature that automatically schedules rotas into a weekly pattern, makes Abacus a complete staff management package for any nursery.

Abacus provides a flexible and highly organised system to manage your staff rotas and payroll based on occupancy levels and staff availability. See the system in action during a live demonstration with one of our customer care team.
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Keeping staff records organised helps sustain good staff morale…

A happy workforce is a productive workforce! This also has a dramatic impact on children’s learning and is pivotal to the offering of quality childcare. It is important to gain feedback from staff and reward them for their achievements, however, staff appraisals often go forgotten. Make a point of organising appraisals for each staff member a minimum of once a year and more frequent group feedback sessions to encourage and build a strong team. This can easily be recorded on a computer with reminders set for a particular date, or events can be automated using a system like Abacus.

You should have access to a list of all staff members containing their next appraisal dates and comments from their previous appraisal. This way you can track the development of all your staff and deal with issues quickly, should they arise.

Important certificates such as First Aid, Health and Safety and Food hygiene last for 3 years and their renewals can easily pass unnoticed. It becomes impossible to schedule an event three years in advance unless you have an automatic system in place.

Abacus provides a holistic overall for the development of all staff in your setting. You instantly gain insight into upcoming appraisals, qualifications due for a member of staff and pending holidays booked.

There are also a wide range of reports available to print out including, staff registers, police checks and daily room registers.

Enhance the way you complete staff administration in your nursery – book a demonstration of the software today!
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How much time could you save? Abacus has over 20 staff-specific reports available that help you complete staff administration without the added frustrations. Complete the form below for your online demonstration of the industry’s award-winning software.