The cost of bad communication
Care workers use an average of 7 different communication tools and spend 63 hours per month on the phone. They consider half of this as wasted i.e. 32 hours. That does not sound like a lot? For a 38-hour week, the time wasted accounts for 21% of the total working time. Almost an entire working week per month! If you compare this to the average salary of a carer, £1,677 plus ancillary wage costs, this equals almost £410 per person per month. With 100 employees you loose £41,000 per month; with 1,000 employees this shoots up to £410,000 per month - or just under £4.9 million per year!
That should be a wake-up call for every manager. The cost of poor communication has already been recognized in many industries and has been addressed accordingly. The success of companies such as Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams is proof - long before the pandemic they made the rounds. If it was not clear enough, Corona showed us how important it is to share information and stay up to date, wherever you are. The term “improve internal communication” currently generates 915,000,000 results in Google search.
And yet little is happening in terms of communication in domiciliary care.
Care has always been a place where employees work collaboratively at different times from different places - so actually a pioneer of the future of work. However, reality is very different.
Reasons for failing to address communication in care
How can this be explained?
On one side, those who have recognized the problem are usually not the decision makers. This is the reason why they resort to WhatsApp, risking data privacy breaches, or implement complicated workarounds with existing software.
On the other side, are the decision-makers. These either do not know about the problem or have the feeling that other things are more important, such as new care software with additional bells and whistles, hoping that these unnecessary features will solve their problems. Because "communication" is difficult to quantify, it is rarely seen as an overhead cost of everyday care. So decision makers focus on obvious projects.
Those who attempt to fix the problem often try solutions such as Threema or Slack and quickly reach their limits, as these tools are not tailored for home care.
And while the introduction of a solution for centralised communication is postponed year after year, millions of pounds are lost that could have been put to much better use elsewhere.
