Client Spotlight

Help Lift The Burden On Your Dining Staff With Easy-To-Use Software

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Continyou Care

Why You Need Super Simple Software To Deal With The Ongoing Labour Shortage In The Dining Operations Of Retirement Homes

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.  The ongoing labour challenges in the industry still affect the day-to-day operations of a retirement home.  You’re not sure on any given day if you’ll have enough staff in your dining operations to give the residents a great experience or even if you do, you often have to get casual staff (who don’t know residents well) or even pull staff from other departments to step in to help out, even for a shift. 

Technology is the obvious solution to help augment the capabilities of your staff but you don’t have time to research the options.  Consequently, inaction will result in your home(s) continuing to put out daily fires related to staffing (especially dining operations).  Do the research and pick a solution to at least do a pilot, so you can see the results, which should hopefully be a better experience for residents, staff & management. 

Simplicity in software is key (so you don’t overpay)

When people call in sick or staff have been shuffled into different areas of your retirement home, learning new systems, especially complicated feature-rich solutions can be a challenge.  You may need other staff to train the new ones filling in, which can compound the problem of staff shortages as this takes up your staff’s time when their energy could be more efficiently spent elsewhere.

If you look at remote control, 90% of the buttons/functionality are not used or often.  Imagine using a software product like that – you would be paying way more for functionality that sounds nice in theory, but it isn’t actually that useful for the staff or the home in terms of delivering value.  Why not just pay for something simple that delivers the most value at the best price?  

At Continyou Care, we tried to build a very simple product that focuses on the 10% of the functionality that is super important for your dining operations.  Continyou Care has built a simple, easy-to-use product that solves a real problem – all while making it simple for staff to use by reducing the overall learning curve of the system. Our goal is to make our solution as user-friendly as possible.  As Gary mentions below in the video, “If you can use a phone, you can use Continyou Care.”

Gary O’Brien, Regional Support Service Manager from Jarlette Health Services, explains that in his experience, he could hand someone the Continyou Care system, and within minutes of getting an overview on how to use it, they would be able to start taking orders from residents. He explains that the “efficiency this gives the staff allows the staff to have more time to do greater things in the dining room.”  Some more takeaways from Gary regarding his own experiences with Continyou Care is that the solution allows:

  • A reduction in steps back and forth between the server and the kitchen – which increases the efficiency and allows for easy training of staff new to the system.
  • The dining staff can be more present in the dining room to engage with residents in comparison with the administration involved with a paper-based system 
  • A reduction in the chances of food not being served at the optimal temperature to residents by streamlining the process and reducing the amount of time food sits on the counter because the server is tied up elsewhere, which cuts down on thousands of dollars of food wastage. 

Continyou Care

We have built a software place that is super easy to use, has the functionality most useful to the home (especially in dining operations) and the best value. All our features matter – but they’re not overwhelming. If you can use a phone, you can use Continyou Care! Interested in testing it out for yourself? Contact us today!

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch