Before hiring more care workers, Jason Howie has a better idea. Fix the roster.
Home care providers are gearing up for another year of growth under Support at Home. More clients, more services, more staff. Right?
At Invox’s Essential Briefing: Support at Home, Year Two, Jason Howie, Partner at Pride Aged Living and former KinCare CEO, challenged one of the sector’s favourite assumptions: that more demand automatically means more workers.
“We don’t really have a people shortage problem, we’ve got a process problem.”
Before recruiting, Jason suggests checking whether your existing workforce is being used any more effectively than it was a year ago.
The morning shower problem
Everyone wants their shower in the morning. So providers recruit enough workers to cover the rush.
By afternoon, some of those workers have little to do.
Meanwhile, workforce surveys show many care workers would happily work more hours.
Here’s a radical idea. Ask the client who’s home all day whether their shower really needs to be at 9 am.
Some will say yes. Others won’t mind. Offer a lower price for an afternoon service and more might reconsider.
Jason tried this at KinCare. The morning peak never disappeared, but smoothing demand made a difference.
You don’t need to solve the whole problem. Every service moved out of the morning peak makes the existing workforce more productive.
That’s capacity without recruitment.
Stop paying care partners to fix the roster
Jason’s second challenge concerns care partners.
Too often, highly skilled staff spend their days sorting out scheduling, billing and other people’s administrative problems.
That’s expensive. And it’s hardly the best use of their skills.
His advice? Keep care partners focused on care. Give the administrative work to people and systems built to handle it.
And don’t underestimate the cost of a bad roster. Scheduling errors ripple through the business: billing problems, unnecessary recruitment, frustrated staff and clients who eventually leave.
A bad roster doesn’t just waste time. It creates work.
Centralise the paperwork. Keep the relationships.
Centralised or decentralised? The sector has been arguing about this for years.
Jason’s answer is to stop treating it as an either-or decision.
Centralise the technical work: scheduling, billing, finance and recruitment.
Keep care management, team leadership and client relationships close to the people receiving services.
He pointed to the success of franchised and self-managed providers, where personal relationships remain central to the model.
And warned larger providers against turning home care into a “sausage factory”.
Clients don’t buy an efficient back office. They buy care from people they know and trust.
The silver bullet is getting the basics right
No new technology. No clever workforce strategy. No miracle recruitment campaign.
Just better scheduling, smarter use of existing staff and fewer people doing work they shouldn’t be doing.
None of it is easy. Jason knows these problems have been around for decades.
But as he told the briefing, “there’s an enormous competitive advantage in this industry in just getting the basics right, because so few organisations actually do.”
That’s quite an indictment of the sector.
And perhaps the biggest opportunity in year two.
Before you hire another care worker, ask whether you really need one. Or whether you just need a better roster.
Jason Howie’s presentation is included in the recording of Invox’s Essential Briefing: Support at Home, Year Two, available to event pass holders.