Get to the Root Cause: Increase Productivity and Patient Care While Reducing Labor Costs
The Causes and Consequences of Incremental Overtime
Incremental overtime may be costing your healthcare organization thousands of dollars unnecessarily and result in decreased employee morale and poor productivity, so it’s important to understand its root causes by gaining the ability to track overtime. A Labor Productivity/Labor Management solution that delivers key analytics provides specific answers to the root causes of incremental overtime. Common causes include:
- Early clock-in/late clock-out
- Inability to complete required tasks by end of shift
- Shift transition conflicts (i.e. last minute attending to patient needs or handoff not yet completed)
The Solution and its Benefits
A Labor Productivity solution provides data for labor hours so that ratios can be derived based on each organization’s definition of incremental overtime, and this leads to a clear understanding of the root causes of incremental overtime so that corrective action can be taken, including:
- Ensure management visibility at change of shifts
- Employee coaching/staff meetings to aid time management skills
- Provide daily reports/analysis to managers to establish protocol for handling incremental overtime risks
- Designate a synchronized clock that employees should rely on (i.e. department wall clock)
- Educate employees on OT authorizations – cite repeated behavior in performance evaluations
By addressing the causes of incremental overtime using data provided by a Labor Productivity solution, providers can deliver great patient care while decreasing labor costs by thousands of dollars and increasing productivity.
