Almond Care Providers Ltd run supported living homes for people with learning disabilities. They work to support their service users to lead full and active lives, and to help them reach their full potential through maintaining their dignity, choice and independence.

The challenge

With care quality critical to Almond Care’s mission, maintaining staff coverage is all-important. Service Manager Leigh Newton explained the complexity of rotas when he first started in his role.

“We had five different homes that we were running with 24/7 shift rotas, with each unit having its own staff team, and some staff working across multiple locations. Trying to check where staff were and when they finished was a nightmare.”

Managers had to check between several different spreadsheets to see who was and wasn’t available to work. Maintaining oversight wasn’t efficient, Leigh told us. “[As well as each manager], we needed someone else to oversee [the rota], to check for clashes and things like that.”

The solution

Once Leigh took over responsibility for rota planning, he knew that there had to be a better way of managing things than multiple spreadsheets and emails. He searched for a solution and quickly found RotaCloud. Quickly seeing its benefits, he stuck with it, and says he has never looked back since.

“RotaCloud makes life very easy,” Leigh told us. “It adds a layer of professionalism and structure to everything. We now don’t need a second person to check the rota — it’s amazing.”

Leigh and the team also make use of RotaCloud’s Time & Attendance add-on to keep track of working hours, and then use this data for payroll purposes.

And the carers and other staff the company employ have also benefited from the new system.

“Staff can easily see when they’re working now — the level of structure and clarity gives the staff a lot of confidence,“ Leigh said. “Using RotaCloud is second-nature to the employees — I haven’t had any complaints!”

Leigh said he also sees RotaCloud playing an important role in the future of the business. “There’s plenty of room for us to use more [of RotaCloud’s features]. We’re looking to grow and add more homes to our current lineup— RotaCloud is certainly something that can expand with us.”