The daycare industry faces many hurdles to providing great care and building a sustainable business. One of the largest challenges is staffing.
Staffing challenges stem from a variety of causes, including the fact that it’s tough to build a fee structure for parents that is affordable while paying daycare staff a fair wage with benefits. Additionally, the applicant pool is often underqualified with no educational background or previous experience but with high salary expectations. And due to the pay and benefits challenge, daycares are competing with retail and service jobs as well as seasonal work.
And the issue is nationwide. It leads to facility closures and fewer options for parents – or in some cases, no options for parents in less populated areas.
Learn ways to solve the staffing challenges your center faces and find high-quality staff that will build a consistent, safe environment for parents and children.
Improve Recruitment Strategies
Hiring quality staff at your childcare starts with a good foundation, such as the job description and where you post the job. Here are some ways you can improve your recruitment strategies.
- Write a comprehensive job description: To find the right candidates, you need to explain the job well. Be clear about qualifications, responsibilities and expectations. Some qualifications you might want to include is whether the the applicant must be CPR and first aid certified or if you require them to have a degree in early childhood education.
- Recruit from the right channels: Simply posting a job is likely not enough. While you might get a couple of qualified applicants, the better move is to reach out to local colleges and universities with an early childhood education degree option. That way, you can connect with students looking to grow their experience during their education and build a talent pool for recent grads by connecting with the alumni office.
- Make pay and benefits as competitive as possible: Look into the average salary for jobs similar to yours in your area. Then do your best to be as competitive with those rates as possible. This will make your position more attractive to applicants. Consider offering health insurance and offering a flexible work schedule to meet the employee’s needs. Using childcare software can help you build your staffing models around when students attend your center.
- Outline your culture and values: Allow the applicant to get to know what working for you will be like. Explain your workplace culture and be specific about your values. Showcase your environment and mission for helping children grow and learn.
- Offer ongoing training and development: Invest in your people with professional development and ongoing training. Demonstrate how much you value your employees and their growth in the industry.
Wages and Benefits
In most areas, daycare staff are paid the same as those working retail or fast food. But the work is more involved and often less flexible. Depending on the going rate for childcare in your area, increasing wages might not be realistic. That means you have to compete with hourly jobs near you with other means.
Consider offering health insurance, retirement benefits and access to experts who can train your staff in investing and saving.
Include details in your job description about your total compensation package. Your daycare center might also choose to offer employees free care for their children. This can be attractive for parents of young children as they face the same challenges of finding affordable care that does not consume their entire paycheck, especially if they have multiple children.
Reduce Staff-to-Child Ratios
Even once you hire great employees, staff retention can be a problem. That’s because childcare jobs are stressful, leading to burnout and turnover.
Lowering your staff-to-child ratios can help reduce the stress that each daycare employee experiences to help retain staff so you don’t find yourself once again recruiting staff and starting the process over again.
Supportive Environment
Offer your staff the tools they need to succeed. Setting expectations that they communicate regularly with parents without communication software sets them up to fail. Or putting developmental milestone tracking expectations on the employee without simple evaluation and documentation procedures causes frustration and burnout.
Make communication and documentation seamless with good daycare software so your team has the tools necessary to succeed.
Retention Bonuses
Another troubling statistic about staff turnover is that 50 percent of childcare workers leave the labor force upon leaving their jobs. That means that once a childcare worker leaves your employment, half of them are leaving the industry entirely, further causing staffing challenges within the industry.
Once you have great staff, you need to do everything you can to retain them. While you might not be able to increase hourly wages, an annual retention bonus could be enough to keep staff with you.
Community and Family Engagement
Become an advocate for better working conditions in the industry. Get families involved in advocating for flexible schedules and accommodations to meet childcare worker needs.
Your child care center can be a leader in your industry by explaining to parents and families the challenges inherent in retaining the best staff. Greater understanding can build a better environment for daycare workers to thrive.
The Role of Daycare Technology
If you want to build a flexible working arrangement for your staff, you need to tools to understand when children attend your center and how best to cover ratios to stay in compliance with local regulations. Daycare technology is a crucial element in building a competitive center in your community while recruiting and retaining the best staff for the job.
Experience why iCare Software is a leader in partnering with daycare centers to build sustainable business models that attract and retain families and employees. Schedule a demo today.