"I got into senior care to spend time sitting at my desk," said no one ever.
Yet this contradiction sits at the heart of a persistent challenge in senior care organizations: the gap between why professionals enter this industry — the calling to provide direct resident care — and what actually consumes their workdays. When we surveyed senior care professionals, 87% said that the people they serve keep them coming back to work. But administrative tasks, documentation requirements, and scheduling complexity steal time from bedside care and threaten both employee morale and the bottom line.
In a recent McKnight's webinar, four senior care leaders discussed the strategies and tools they’re using to tackle this challenge and help their employees get back to care.
The administrative burden in senior care didn't emerge overnight. For Julie Braswell Stafford, Executive Director at Chatham Nursing and Rehabilitation, the reality crystallized during the pandemic. "I saw our nurse leaders and even staff that were not nurses being pulled to the floor to help pull every resource we had in the facility together," she explained. "But the expectation was still there, especially for nurse leaders, that the paperwork still had to be done. The reports still had to be done, even when you were filling in for staff members on the floor."
Mark Mitchener, Corporate Vice President of Management Operations Services at Greystone, pointed out the pressure that documentation presents to caregiving staff. “We’re always trying to find that time for our staff to be at the bedside with the residents, but then to still get that documentation done to show that they provided that care. There's just a limited amount of time for us to get all of this stuff done,” he said.
Scheduling can also pull employees away from care work, as Brandon Tappan, Chief Revenue Officer at ShiftKey, explained. “A constant pain point that I hear from those exploring services like ours is still this very time consuming task of keeping up a direct care schedule – all the communication associated with who's calling off, who's on which unit, who should we call in, how do I again reconcile that once I get someone.”
Merrell Egerton, Regional Director of Labor Management at Atlas Healthcare, has seen firsthand how the pressure from these tasks can drain workers. "Sitting in the chair of the HR director for ten plus years, getting to be a regional director, I saw the burnout was real," Egerton said.
The panelists identified several areas where technology has meaningfully reduced administrative burden.
A solid scheduling and communication platform is a tool the panelists agreed is a must-have.
Julie Stafford shared a stark before-and-after picture when her community went from paper scheduling to using OnShift: "I've seen nurses that sat on the phone for hours trying to find someone to come in to work. And the technology today, you can put that actual shift in, send it out to everybody, and it gives each one of them an opportunity to say they’ll be glad to pick it up."
For Merrell Egerton, who oversees thirteen communities with thirteen different staffing coordinators, the streamlined scheduling she gets with OnShift is essential. "A scheduling system is your bible. You have to have it. If you don't have it, it's going to be very chaotic," she said. She also noted the dramatic efficiency gains: what once took ten minutes to manually write out a monthly schedule for a staff member now takes three seconds on a computer.
Beyond scheduling, the panelists emphasized the importance of consolidating disparate workflows. Egerton explained the impact: "In the staffing scheduling world, there are a lot of platforms – payroll, scheduling, call-off reports, and more. When those workflows get streamlined together and you only have to go into one area to view and manage info, it's absolutely game changing."
The payoff extends beyond time savings. When administrative tasks are simplified, staff morale improves. "For my team, they tell me all the time that when you change those programs and you make it more sustainable, it gives them time to go into the floors and be with the residents, and that boosts employee morale," Egerton noted.
Mark Mitchener shared that Greystone has implemented AI to review incoming hospital referrals, saving nurse leadership time.
"We've been able to use AI to scrub the referrals as they come in. Instead of spending 30, 45 minutes reviewing those 200 pages from the hospital, that technology can kind of scrub that and give us the highlights of it. And it takes that 45 minutes down to about ten," Mitchener explained. "That gives them a lot more time now to be doing the other administrative tasks that we've asked them to do."
Importantly, Julie Stafford emphasized that AI is not here to replace caregivers, but to support them. "If we use it to do some of the documentation forms, review some of the records that are coming in, that just frees up our staff to be back at the bedside where we want them to be. The reason we all got into this was to be at the bedside."
Across the panel, communication emerged as central to how change in employee retention and care quality happens. Merrell Egerton emphasized the importance of employee listening: "Asking the staff what we can do as managers and directors, what are their tasks that are difficult for them, are taking up their time — that's where we can help get back to more human connections."
Mark Mitchener agreed: "It's all that communication with our teams, finding out where their pain points are and where they need that help. We're aggressively looking at technology that's out there, having demos of all these sorts of technologies that are coming through to try to see if we can find stuff that can help take some of that burden off of our teams."
Julie Stafford highlighted stand-up meetings as a way to maintain this dialogue: "Communication is key to what we do every day. Our daily stand-up meetings in the facilities have a very vital process. If you try to address every department and address the needs every day in one meeting, it eliminates the amount of meetings that you have to have outside of that meeting, which obviously gives you more time at the bedside with the residents."
When staff feel invested in process improvements, they're more likely to embrace change. As Merrell Egerton noted: "If you show them what your plans are and let them give you advice on how to roll it out, they will definitely be opinionated and let you know what they think."
The gap between why people enter this profession and what their daily work allows them to do puts workers at risk of burnout and organizations at risk of financial loss, but solutions are available now. "Your staff needs this relief,” Brandon Tappan stressed. “There are options out there. If you're not carving any strategic time to evaluate these processes and evaluate technology that's available, then who is?"
Mark Mitchener summarized the need for thoughtful technology strategies as a way to get senior care workers back to care. "Technology is coming into our industry. AI is coming into our industry. We've got to be accepting of that. But we've got to have those conversations to make sure that we're using it responsibly in a way that provides our staff with opportunities to get back to the bedside, caring for our residents."
Administrative work isn’t going away, but open communication with staff and the right technology solutions can create efficiencies that leave more room for caregiving work, supporting care quality and financial goals.