“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get!” - Lewis Carroll
Do you ever feel like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? It seems the harder you work, and the faster you try to accomplish your tasks, the more other things get in the way. A facility full of small children is, by definition, a chaotic wonderland but we have four tips to increase your productivity without increasing the pace.
Investing in labor-saving technology is part of the answer but improving the work environment and planning round out the solution to the treadmill that can keep you running in place.
Take a look at four productivity tips to incorporate into your childcare center.
Improve Classroom Management with Childcare Software
Classroom management is more than how a teacher manages the students and the curriculum. It includes managing the use of space and moving groups of children between spaces efficiently. If your facility has multiple classrooms dedicated to different activities, you want to make sure those rooms are being utilized as much as possible.
You also want the children in your care to have the maximum amount of learning time and minimal travel and disruption between classrooms. With careful planning and the advantage of childcare management software, you can easily plot your space and determine the optimal traffic flow and use of every room in your facility.
Childcare management software helps you map your space and schedule not only the types of activities each space will host but also group and schedule children to move in and out of each classroom at specific times. If you have a classroom dedicated to art and your facility cares for 60 children of two different age brackets, you may wish to keep the class size to a maximum of 20 so every child has the opportunity for individual as well as group instruction.
You have three groups of 20 kids to rotate between the art classroom and perhaps two other rooms as well. Childcare management software helps you visualize the classrooms, the groups, and the layout of the rest of your facility so you can plan the most efficient way to provide three different areas of learning.
Eliminate Repetitive Tasks
Repetitive administrative tasks can put a drag on productivity when the tasks have little to do with childcare and more to do with recordkeeping. Keeping inventory, invoicing, daily activity logs, and other paperwork takes time away from your real job.
Childcare management software can streamline administrative tasks by automating ordering, inventory, and invoicing. It can also provide faster methods of documenting activities for each child.
- Automated check-in and check-out can track absences, late arrivals or pickups, and late payments without intervention from you or your staff.
- Notes about individual children can be input with a few keystrokes from any computer or smartphone.
- You can pull reports to help you with purchasing supplies, documenting attendance for the state, as well as calculating payroll for your staff.
Digitize Documentation and Communication
While everyone may not be online, most people are. Parents appreciate the convenience of online enrollment, registration, and bill payment.
- Staff appreciate the elimination of paper to sort and file, and checks to take to the bank.
- Besides registration and payment activities, many parents have come to prefer electronic communication over phone calls, paper notes, and face-to-face visits.
- Text messaging, email, and information posted to a parent portal can ensure every parent is kept abreast of any developments that require their attention or simply see what their kids are up to.
Childcare management software can provide online bill payment, enrollment, and a parent portal that provides private communication for each child. Parents can have constant contact with your facility and a place to go to obtain copies of policies, look at artwork, and see photos and videos of their children at play.
Meanwhile, you and your staff are saved from filing, trips to the bank, and keeping track of dozens of forms, attendance slips, and other pieces of paper that seem to get lost when you turn your back.
Retain Talent
Every company knows that when a staff member leaves, productivity lags until a replacement is found and trained. Besides the expense of recruiting, onboarding, and training new employees, the workload must be reapportioned to the remaining staff, placing a strain on everyone.
Employees stay where they are challenged, appreciated, and have access to efficient and effective tools to do their jobs. The longer you can retain an employee, the fewer times everyone must take on extra work as a new hire is found.
Childcare management software takes much of the administrative burden off of teachers and other staff. Let's face it; nobody goes into teaching to spend their days filling out forms, tracking activities, or planning with nothing but pencil and paper. The more busywork employees must perform that has nothing to do with their core reason for working, the more discouraged they become.
Find ways to reduce these types of tasks and your teachers will have additional time to plan new and exciting activities for the kiddos and more energy to give to each child to help them learn.
Productivity may seem like a word more closely associated with manufacturing or office work. But when you run a business (and a childcare facility is a business even if it's based on love for youngsters) you want to find a way to maximize time for your core reason for being. You must minimize the time spent doing things that tend to make you question your sanity due to the repetition and mindless nature of the tasks.
Children and staff both thrive in a stable environment where the day runs smoothly, and everyone learns and has fun. Good software tools are a tremendous productivity boost wherever they are adopted, including the very human area of childcare.
Childcare software automates the simple repetitive tasks and allows you and your teachers more time to engage with the children. The software has helped you schedule your classrooms, send invoices and process payment, and keep the parents up-to-date on their children’s progress and activity in childcare.
Through it all, you will have an environment that makes your teachers want to stay with you, saving you time and money in recruitment, training, and lost productivity.
