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Ensuring Financial Sustainability with Position Control

Author Kristen McPherson

Financial sustainability is an important topic for any human service organization. It was a top initiative identified in our 2020 State of Workforce Management Survey, even before COVID-19 completely upturned the way we all operate. In the midst of this pandemic, ensuring your organization’s financial sustainability is of the utmost importance in being able to provide continuity of care for your clients and to take care of your employees. Health and human services agencies in particular deal with restrictive budgets, numerous regulations, and many unpredictable circumstances. Being able to look after the organization’s financial health is the first step in safeguarding the company’s future.

Room for Improvement

In our workforce management survey, human services agencies reported less than stellar statistics on financial sustainability – and that was before the pandemic. Consider some of these numbers:

  • 57% said they are able to maximize resources to operate in a financially efficient manner
  • 58% said they are able to measure and report on the financial efficiency of programs, departments, etc.
  • 56% said they are able to identify current and future financial needs to maintain service
  • 52% has the finances available to continue operations in the future

In each case, a little over half of organizations are confident in their operational efficiency and visibility into their finances. But that still leaves a substantial portion of organizations that are showing they have room for improvement. The challenge for most of these organizations is the question of “how?” Enter: Position Control.

Position Control: The Key for Human Services Organizations

Position Control is the foundation of the DATIS software, offering unique benefits for human services organizations that are looking to improve their financial sustainability. If you’ve never heard of Position Control before though, you’re not alone. Most HR and Payroll software providers offer an employee-based system that. By contrast, Position Control enables you to build, manage, track, and report on your workforce by position, independent of employees.

This means that attributes of the position, like job code, program, cost center, and so on can be tied to the position itself rather than to the individual occupying that position. Position Control helps maintain the integrity of the position and your organizational structure as a whole, even as employees fill new positions, change positions, or leave positions at your organization. With a stable organizational structure in place, Position Control provides better visibility into your workforce, enabling better reporting capabilities and the ability to maximize resources, forecast budgets accurately, and maintain compliance at all times.

Position Control and the Steps to Workforce Management Success

With Position Control in place, your organization will have the foundation it needs to succeed. Our steps to success outline the building blocks for achieving workforce management success:

Invest in Your Workforce

Prioritizing your employees at an individual level is the first step. In order for your organization to succeed, you need a strong workforce rallying behind your mission. Therefore, you need to focus on attracting top talent, engaging employees, developing leaders, and retaining high performers.

Optimize Operations

In addition to finding and keeping the right individuals at your organization, you need to empower them with the tools and processes they need to do their best work. This second step focuses on improving communication and collaboration, automating administrative tasks, and increasing productivity.

Increase Visibility

We’ve already touched on how Position Control helps improve workforce visibility. But this step digs a little deeper to include eliminating information silos by producing organization-wide insights, accessing multi-dimensional reporting, tracking labor costs and allocations, and monitoring credentials – all of which you’ll find you’re able to do easily with Position Control in place.

Maximize Resources

Increased visibility leads you to maximizing resources. When you’re able to see exactly where and how resources are being used, you can identify and correct inefficiencies proactively to maximize the use of the resources you have available.

Ensure Financial Sustainability

This is the ultimate workforce management goal for any human service agency. Each step leading up to this contributes to an efficient and productive workforce. Position Control enables you to track and measure the success of programs and services from a financial perspective, and enables you to see where your organization is headed down the road. Ensuring financial sustainability protects your organization as well as each employee that contributes to your organization’s success.

The importance of Position Control is undeniable for health and human services organizations. If your organization has ever experienced challenges with financial sustainability, you may find that Position Control is the missing piece that can help your organization move forward and succeed in achieving its mission of social good.