HICA Efficiently Manages Staffing and Reduces Agency Use with UKG Ready

HICA Group provides care and support services to older adults and people with learning disabilities across northern England. Based in Hessle, UK, the nonprofit organisation has 1,700 employees who deliver care across 18 care homes and home-based care services.

Challenges

Accurately managing the pay of care home employees and those working remotely in people’s homes was an ongoing issue for HICA with paper timesheets. HICA operated on salaries based on contracted hours rather than paying actual worked hours. Rarely did employees simply work contracted hours, thereby requiring pay adjustments for sickness and overtime to be processed a month behind. With paper timesheets arriving at head office from 30 cost centres for manual processing, many with handwriting that could be difficult to correctly decipher, potential for error was high. Payroll queries were common, as were many post-payday adjustments to pay employees for their actual time worked.

The manual system provided no access to workforce information. Local management held paper rosters preventing remote support and cost control. Information was held across an array of spreadsheets that relied on manual maintenance and prevented real-time reporting. Administering any HR life-cycle process experienced a lag. Identifying local trends required huge processing power to trawl through spreadsheets and paper files. Information was unreliable – often finding staff hadn’t worked the contracted hours they were paid for.

During times of high absence or annual leave, organising overtime was time-consuming as staff availability was unknown. Agency could often be the easy default solution; the alternative being managers having to physically walk around the site or telephone staff.

Solutions

To overcome these challenges, HICA implemented the UKG Ready® solution, including its scheduling, timekeeping, HR, and recruitment modules.

On-site employees now clock in and out using a tablet or the solution’s mobile app, and remote employees can easily track their time using the app. Geolocation technology ensures they are at an approved site when inputting their time.

In assessing how well employees have adopted the solution and its functionality, Natalie Dangerfield, Head of Human Resources at HICA, says they have “really embraced the change.”

Results

Visibility has been a tremendous benefit of implementing the UKG® solution ― remote visibility into site schedules, staff availability, staff sickness, and the true need for agency staffing. Before, managers would know that staff sickness was high because they were firefighting trying to cover shifts and agency usage was high, but identifying trends required a labour-intensive process.

Dangerfield says UKG Ready “is a really good tool” to help HICA identify how to reduce agency staff. “We can more easily correlate high usage against workforce planning, unexpected absence and recruitment needs and create targeted action plans to address. We can see what is being done to prevent reliance on agency and achieve a consistent approach to absence management that we’ve never had before.”

With remote visibility into workforce planning and agency use, HICA can see if it’s partly due to staff sickness or poor management of employee holidays. Dangerfield says that having 11% of staff on holiday every week is the goal, to avoid large peaks in holiday time off to prevent year-end holiday cramming, that results in agency use and sudden, large labour expenses due to using overtime to cover holidays.

“I’m able to pump out a lot of management intelligence that we’ve never had before,” she adds. With the workforce data in UKG Ready, HICA has detailed reporting on employee absence, overtime, and agency usage ― and how they correlate. We can identify and tackle ineffective and costly schedules such as overstaffing one day whilst relying on overtime on other days.

“We can make better decisions on whether or not we actually need agency or if we can just reallocate our resources,” says Dangerfield. “And we can see what we’re using.”

Workforce data enables HICA to reconcile employees’ actual time worked with what their contracts stipulate. With this information, the company can see if any employees are underworking and if others have been paid overtime that wasn’t truly overtime.

Social care is often underfunded, and local authorities negotiate rates yearly. With 70% of HICA revenue spent on staffing, Dangerfield says, “UKG is really critical to giving us the ability to make sure staffing is managed tightly but also managed safely.”

In the event of a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection, HICA can point to the data held in UKG Ready to demonstrate compliance across a wide range of areas. The solution securely stores and tracks annual criminal record declarations, health risk assessments for night workers, sickness return-to-work forms, and driving-for-work declarations. Staff also upload car insurance and MOT certificates directly into the system. Policies—such as the Inclusion Policy and Code of Conduct—are released via UKG Ready for employees to digitally sign, providing clear audit trails.

Dangerfield explains, “All of this is great evidence for the CQC. It’s held securely, not in paper files, and can be audited remotely.” This digital approach ensures that HICA can easily demonstrate compliance, streamline documentation processes, and maintain a consistent, accessible record of workforce-related certifications and acknowledgments.

With accurate, real-time information, HICA was recently able to move to real-time pay, including providing on-demand wages. If employees work today, they can claim these wages tomorrow. This provides a safety net for employees who have unexpected expenses and want to avoid the added costs of a payday lender.

“We anticipate that staff will be more encouraged to work overtime because they can claim it the following day instead of having to wait for payday,” says Dangerfield. She sees on-demand wages as a differentiator for HICA and a great retention tool.

In looking at the total landscape following HICA’s first year of using UKG Ready to transform its people management, she adds “In terms of the CEO and the senior management team, it’s been revolutionary to have this oversight of staffing.”

Visibility into staffing helps HICA ensure that sites are operating safely and efficiently with the right staff, and are not over or understaffed. Using less agency staff not only reduces labour costs but also provides continuity of care for residents, who enjoy seeing the familiar faces of regular staff.