Care center Zuiderlicht

Real self-scheduling and guaranteeing good care
Zuiderlicht is the fifth and latest assisted living facility of OCMW Ghent and is located in Mariakerke, Belgium. It is a true trendsetter in its approach. A warm and positive climate is essential for Zuiderlicht; a climate in which residents are given respect, space and time, and where assistants and residents show interest in one another and treat each other as equals. In total, 144 residents live in Zuiderlicht, assisted by the attentive care of 110 employees.

An innovative professional organization in practice
Zuiderlicht invests in innovation and strives to apply these principles to its organization. To that end, Zuiderlicht wanted to make employees responsible for their own shift schedule, while still guaranteeing high-quality service. Other assisted living facilities have noticed that more than half of the scheduled shifts are traded among employees. When the new Zuiderlicht assisted living facility was under construction, management wanted to avoid the time-consuming problem of trading shifts.

The Scandinavian three-round model for self-scheduling

In order to achieve those goals, Zuiderlicht decided to implement the Scandinavian three-round model for self-scheduling. To facilitate that, the organization chose ORTEC’s integrated solution. Every month, the ORTEC staff planning system automatically generates the necessary shifts. The employees can then use the integrated ORTEC self-scheduling solution to choose which shifts best suit their personal preferences. The smart system only allows employees to choose shifts for which they are qualified. In every step of the shift planning and scheduling process, the system monitors and respects the needs of the organization, the individual employee’s choices, and the balanced workload within the team, while automatically preventing violations of the Working Hours Act.

No one wants to return to the old scheduling method
Steve Sercu, Director of Zuiderlicht, explains: “Where before the employees would plan their private lives around their shift schedule, now they can choose their schedule around their private lives. Self-scheduling is a convenient way for employees to draw up 90% of the shift schedule on their own. The other 10% is finished by the planner, with the support of the ORTEC system, which suggests the best solution for the specific situations. Having employees decide on their shift schedules for themselves has reduced the number of schedule changes to only four or five per month! No one wants to return to the old scheduling method, and even the labor unions are enthusiastic.