Customer story: Energise Homes

Energise Homes is a new and growing residential child care provider that supports children aged 5 to 17.

Across their current two homes, Registered Managers Ariana Carreon-Palmer and David Holmes have to plan rotas around 24-hour shifts, sleep-ins, staggered shift patterns, and complex annual leave.

The challenge

David previously used Word or Excel for his rotas. He’d type it all out, print it, then pin it to the office wall.

“But when that is on a two-on-four-off basis, and some are doing sleeps, some aren't, it's so time-consuming to do it the old-fashioned way,” David told us. “Then the way that you're getting that to staff is you’re either phoning them, aren’t you, or you’re messaging them, or you’re emailing it to them.”

They eventually moved to an all-in-one care management system, but the rota-planning side was slightly underdeveloped and didn’t quite hit the mark.

Ariana and David’s main gripe was that this software didn’t have an app for their teams to check their rotas and receive updates. So, while it was capable of building their rotas on a platform, it couldn’t send notifications out to staff. Ariana shared more. “You'd physically have to log into [the system]. Now, you're not gonna take your laptop round when you're shopping, are you, to see “Oh, it's just been published, I'll pick it up.” You had to physically log in [to check]. So, it just wasn't working for us.”

Overall, the time-consuming nature and communication with staff were their biggest challenges. The software they used proved to be just as manual as pen and paper.

For either method, it took nearly a day to do a month’s rota. “It was horrific. It was horrendous,” David told us.

And that was before changes and swap requests came in.

“We don't live in an ideal world,” David continued. “People go off sick, people have an emergency leave, people want shift swaps. So to have to keep manually going in and doing stuff on Word or Excel – it’s really, really time-consuming. It's time that a manager just doesn't have to mess around.”

Holiday management was no easier, either. With Ariana’s team having their annual leave in days and David’s team’s in hours, tracking and calculating leave proved consistently difficult.

With these frustrations quickly piling high and rotas taking too much time away, Ariana (in her words) ‘begged and pleaded’ to move to RotaCloud after using it in her previous role – and staff even asked for it, too.

Then, when asked to check if another system they used offered rota planning, and that system itself recommended RotaCloud… Well, that helped the decision.

The solution

Gone are the days of lost time to rotas and communication concerns with staff.

“RotaCloud’s just dead easy.” David shared. “It's just an app on the phone, [staff] get a notification, and it's sorted. It's just that easy for them to follow and keep track of who's in, who's not, who's on leave, who's on sick, etc.”

Ariana added, “It’s nice because it just presents everything beautifully.”

It only took Ariana three hours to set up the account, profiles, and different roles and shift patterns for the whole business, down to customising with colour-coding and staff pictures.

Now, with roles and patterns in place, David can build a rota for “a whole week and the whole staff team in literally minutes. Probably five minutes, tops.”

“Our rotas are done now until Christmas,” Ariana added (this was in March!). “I think we did it in a day.”

The speed and ease of planning and covering shifts, tracking time, and preparing payroll for Sage, their payroll platform of choice, have been their biggest wins.

Before, when a member of staff would phone in sick or book emergency leave, Ariana and David could waste half an hour trying to cover a shift. Whereas now: “We put it out as an open shift, somebody gets a notification. Potentially, you've covered a shift within five minutes, and you're not wasting your time ringing all those different staff to get ‘no, no, no’.”

“For me,” Ariana continued. “It's just ensuring that I've got managerial oversight; making sure the hours are correct, I'm clocking them in – all that jazz – for me to then generate the report, and off you pop to finance. So, it’s had so much more capability.”

It’s answered their holiday management woes, too. Before, with annual leave differing between hours and days, it was a challenge to track, calculate, and record. Now, after a swift set-up with our customer support team, they can easily manage both.

“It allows us to cultivate,” Ariana said. “So if I need my annual leave in hours and he needs his in days, we can do that.”

Booking leave and tracking attendance all on one platform has been a game-changer.

“It's easy,” Ariana said. “You can see how many days you've got left of annual leave. You can put in annual leave, dead easy. You can make notes. You can claim shifts. You've got the app.”

“It does half the work for you, doesn't it?” David continued. “The annual leave – it does it for you. You book a day. It takes a day off. No one’s using pen and paper, writing down and trying to go back through 20 other pieces of paper to find holiday request forms.”

For Ariana, it’s the time management and transparency as well. “Everything's on there. No one can go, “Oh, no, I’m owed more annual leave than that.” The report is on there. You've requested it, I accepted, that's what it is. There are no spots or maybes with RotaCloud.”

Practising for her next social care qualification, Ariana even recited: “RotaCloud has strong governance, and it provides sustainability for our organisation.”

“But on a serious note,” she continued. “It does. It simplifies operations. It's so transparent. It's user-friendly. So, for everyone, it's a win-win situation. Not just for us.”

Some last words from them both?

David: “It’s bloody easy to use and that simple.”

Ariana: “I'm obsessed with RotaCloud. So far, nothing has compared.”

We’ll call that a winner.