By: Max Fisk September 5, 2023
Flexible work schedules are key to increased job satisfaction, and that’s especially true in the healthcare industry. To elevate patient care while optimizing labor costs, what’s needed is a way to more efficiently manage employee hours while also better forecasting for future workforce requirements.
That’s why savvy healthcare organizations are turning to software tools like Infor’s Multi-View Scheduler (MVS) to optimize workforce management. Effectively implementing a solution like this can garner increased employee retention and valuable cost savings.
In this post, we’ll look at the many benefits involved in using Infor’s MVS, and in working with an experienced vendor like RPI Consultants to implement Multi-View Scheduler.
What is Multi-View Scheduler?
MVS is an enhanced employee scheduling tool, designed with healthcare professionals, as well as other organizations with unique labor forces, in mind. The reason? MVS provides healthcare workers with control over their work hours, and it offers multiple scheduling modalities that can be viewed, edited, and maintained in a single document location.
What’s more, the mobile capabilities of MVS help enable nurses, who work in a fast-paced environment, to easily modify their schedules while on the go, and provide better patient outcomes as a result.
Put simply, MVS is a technology platform that allows your organization to improve employee well-being, correct negative staff trends, and encourage employees to take control of their work-life balance.
What Are the Benefits of Multi-View Scheduler?
- Enhanced Employee Satisfaction: As noted in ResearchGate, “flexible work schedules give nurses the freedom and control to manage the demands of work and home, allow organizations to meet their staffing needs and can improve job satisfaction.” Scheduling software, such as MVS, enhances the employee experience by empowering healthcare workers with the ability to manage their working hours, and helps them reconnect with their “calling.” It also helps your organization improve morale and prevent turnover head on. Your employees can set their availability, trade shifts, and see schedule changes in real-time, so there’s less of a chance they’ll arrive late or show up for a canceled shift.
- Increased Work-Life Balance: Being able to play an active role in scheduling their time is invaluable in creating a better work-life balance for employees. MVS helps improve job satisfaction by delivering accurate and flexible schedules, which reduces employee frustration and burnout—top impediments to short- and long-term employee retention.
- Better Employee Retention: Speaking of retention, an August 2023 story in Forbes cites a study that says 87% of HR leaders are making employee retention their number one priority. Healthcare organizations are finding that flexible scheduling using MVS can help decrease employee turnover. Here’s why: flexible scheduling lets employees work the same amount, yet shape those hours into a schedule that takes into account their personal needs and obligations. The result: greater employee loyalty. Let’s look at nurses again: who typically create schedules up to six months in advance. And being able to choose their work hours around scheduled paid time off, such as vacations, family events, and their own medical procedures, will help boost satisfaction and retention.
- Cost Savings: MVS puts more information at your organization’s disposal–you’ll be better able to see how schedules impact your labor costs, as well as boost productivity and efficiency. You’ll have access to reports that track overtime and when employees work more or less than the hours they’re scheduled for. You can also create schedules that better reflect your coverage needs, which will help put the right employees in the right places at the right time, with fewer last-minute call-outs and no-shows. And, a significant advantage is that it will help you avoid fines from non-compliance with labor laws on the federal, state, and local level. For instance, a single instance of violating Fair Labor Standards Act laws can result in a fine of over $2,000.
- Easy Integration: Enhanced employee scheduling tools automatically exchange employee information and schedules across related applications. These include Infor CloudSuite applications, such as Finance and Supply Chain Management (FSM); Self Service Portal; Time Off Planner; GHR; Time & Attendance, and more. The seamless exchange of information ensures consistency across data stored in your ERP. So, for example, MVS can integrate time-off requests into your shift schedule. That means even if an employee can’t return to work at their expected time, MVS can help you fill the gap and ensure coverage. Best of all, there are no additional resources required for managing application maintenance.
How Does Multi-View Scheduler Ensure Better Work Attendance?
- Real-Time Schedule Access: With MVS, schedules are available to employees at any time, whether on a mobile device or a desktop computer. As a result, employees can access their schedules 24/7 and provide updates on their availability. At the same time, managers can adjust schedules and fill vacant shifts.
- Seamless Shift Swapping: MVS also makes it easy for employees to exchange and post shifts to the billboard themselves. This leads to increased employee satisfaction and higher retention rates. Plus, MVS can automatically show management who’s available to fill schedule gaps, based on availability information that’s entered by the employees into the software application.
Multi-View Scheduler at Work: Case Study
Using the right technology platform enables healthcare organizations to improve well-being in the workplace and reverse negative staff trends. Case in point: RPI Consultants was able to come to a 20,000-employee Midwestern hospital’s rescue by providing setup and implementation of Infor WFM and MVS.
Root causes of the hospital’s poor schedule retention rate included:
- A chaotic work environment
- Too much time spent on bureaucratic tasks
- Lack of effective teamwork
- No personal control over workload
- Lack of shared value with organization leadership
Healthcare workers, especially nurses and other clinicians, are frustrated because they can’t give the optimum level of attention and care to each task or patient. People go into healthcare to deliver the best possible care and services to patients—and their own operational and support systems are getting in the way.
That’s where RPI and Infor MVS came in: equity in staffing plays an important role in nursing satisfaction. MVS self-service was introduced to allow employees to create their own six-week schedule blocks. To ensure proper coverage over each schedule block, RPI helped the client implement two “flavors” of business rules: unit- and employee-based.
- Unit-based rules: These rules balanced out the number of shifts that workers could pick up; that is, if workers didn’t pick up their minimum number of shifts, they’d face a reprimand. Unit-based rules also incentivized staff members to choose some less-popular shifts; this helped ensure the hospital had employee coverage while still giving employees more control over their work-life balance.
- Employee-based rules: These made sure that the workers took a minimum number of breaks during their shifts, and that they could only work a maximum number of shifts before going into overtime. Employee-based rules also prevented employees from “stacking” their required hours in row, preventing them from working, say, six 12-hour shifts in a row and then taking the next two weeks off.
The MVS implementation helped workers to practice at the top of their license; renewed their sense of purpose; and boosted their productivity and satisfaction. And it helped the hospital improve clinical outcomes; gain higher patient satisfaction scores; and, most notably, lifted recruitment and retention efforts.
Empower Your Workforce with Multi-View Scheduler
Infor and RPI have manifested the contemporary thinking of forward-looking hospitals and healthcare systems. The result is technology that advises, augments, and automates—all on a single, cloud-based platform.
That technology is Infor MVS, and when implemented by an experienced vendor like RPI Consultants WFM practice, it can help your healthcare organization retain talent and save money.
Adopting MVS has been proven to streamline workforce management and contribute greatly to an organization’s overall success. To learn more about how RPI Consultants can help you set up MVS, as well as other WFM components, contact us below.