Better Staff Engagement: How to Boost Childcare Staff Retention

Retain and Sustain: Elevate your staff experience for long-term success.

Imagine juggling 25 preschoolers, 25 families, and six different software products just to make it through one day. With a workplace experience this chaotic, is it any wonder 25% of teachers have considered quitting their jobs?

Teachers and childcare workers didn’t get into this line of work because they love paperwork. So why are so many early childhood education (ECE) professionals spending half their day logging in and out of disparate tools and apps to manage their staff, students and families?

The good news is, digital transformation has finally reached the childcare community. With the right staff experience platform, you can make life easier for your teachers and team members, while paving the way for happier families and increased revenue.

But with more and more childcare software products flooding the market, how do you know which tool is right for you?

Whether you choose to partner with LineLeader or another center management tool, we’re sharing the essential tools and features you’ll want to look out for when selecting a childcare management system to transform your staff experience and keep your best team members by your side.

Today's staff challenges are nothing like yesterday's.

More than any other time in recent history, the onset of the 2020s has reinforced just how crucial the early childhood education sector is to our society. And yet, the childcare industry continues to face one crisis after another.

Your team already has a hard job. From health uncertainty to furloughs and chronic wage gaps, many ECE teachers and staff have been forced to abandon their passion in pursuit of a less stressful work environment.

Stop relying on clunky tools that make your team’s day-to-day work experience even more challenging.

Here’s a closer look at what the average modern childcare team is up against.

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Teachers and staff are blocked from organic communication and family relationship building:

Forced to manually write daily reports, staff are left wondering if parents actually see and read them. Without easy two-way communication, your staff is unsure whether families are buying into their child's curriculum and actively reinforcing it at home.
When back-and-forth calls, texts, and emails are the norm — so is wasted time. Childcare teams need a fast way to answer all key Q&A, speeding up response time and quality.
With multiple apps, emails, and devices, staff needs one place to communicate with parents and guardians in real-time.

Administrators and Directors struggle to gauge family satisfaction and secure re-enrollments:

Plagued by manual enrollment, billing, and engagement procedures — even the most crucial business data is left to guesswork.
Teacher certifications, license expirations, USDA reporting, and development standards by state, age, and program type create a never-ending juggling act for center leaders.
Center directors and admins need a unified platform that automates billing and invoicing and makes compliance, ratio management, and re-enrollment seamless - without the hassle of learning multiple systems.

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Leadership teams need to meet or beat revenue goals by leveraging simplified systems for increased family and staff satisfaction and healthier margins.

With multiple silos between centers and teams, leaders don’t have access to accurate insights on business performance and revenue.
Leadership teams need a tool that standardizes processes enterprise-wide, tapping into economies of scale and consolidated support to reduce spend and increase ROI.

The real cost of disjointed childcare management tools

There’s no question that numerous disjointed products result in an exhausting work experience for team members, with today’s educators suffering from twice as much work-related stress as the average employee.

Despite being over a decade into the social media era, it’s still not uncommon for many early learning businesses to be using multiple manual or even paper-based tools — from Excel spreadsheets and notebooks to physical checks, forms, and notes. For modern childcare workers, the list feels never-ending.

Though this may be ‘business as usual’ for many centers, the truth is: disjointed technology comes at a high and often unseen cost.

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Wasted staff time leads to increased expenses for your business.

Learning new technology for daily use — or re-learning it each time a staff member gets out of practice and stops using it for a while — is simply too much to ask of a team that’s already operating at max capacity.

And unfortunately, when tools don’t get used as they should, your directors are often asked to play ‘tech support’, dedicating valuable time to training and re-training staff members when they could be focusing on more important enrollment and operations initiatives.

Even after your staff has learned a new product, switching between various logins and dashboards is time that could have been spent engaging with prospects and parents, or improving the family experience.

With the right childcare management tool, you can save more than 35 hours of time per month, per center. Imagine what it could mean for your business to gain back an entire week of time simply by equipping your team with the tools they need to be successful.

Too many technology products lead to overspending.

One downside of the digital revolution is that it’s now becoming increasingly common for childcare businesses to waste their budget on ineffective products that hardly get used.

Each product has its own price, margin, and cost of doing business. And multiple products come with multiple support teams, development cycles, and billing invoices. With every new tool, the costs increase...

Rather than unintentionally overspending on multiple disjointed systems, using one unified platform to manage everything from enrollment to compliance on one screen helps you tap into price bundling and discounts that can increase your profitability.

Increased barriers and bad data lead to inconsistencies.

How easy is it for your staff members to talk to each other about what’s happening with each family enrolled in your center?

Disjointed processes create silos in your business. These invisible barriers keep team members focused on their own goals and tasks, rather than working toward a common mission. It also creates a poor experience for families.

When staff is given bad data to work with, they end up calling parents or students the wrong name, mismatching children and their guardians/parents, or worse — not knowing a child's allergies and medical concerns. This can lead to unsafe conditions for children, dissatisfied families, and fed-up staff members who simply can't do their job because they don't have the right resources.

Often when newer staff can't access the family data they need, senior staff members are forced to step in and take on lower-level tasks that keep them from performing their own job duties.

It's a vicious cycle. Without easy access to the information they need, childcare staff can’t provide the personalized experience companies in other industries deliver — and it impacts the families you serve.

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From burnt-out to tuned-in: How the right platform improves the staff experience

A unified childcare experience platform improves the staff experience by eliminating fragmented products and the problems they bring. With one platform and one login, your staff can easily maintain a strong quality of service, minus the stress and lost time.

Imagine handling all of the following tasks in one unified platform:

Digitized check-in and attendance tracking
Automated billing and invoicing
One-click reporting
Classroom and ratio management
Curriculum management
Staff management
And more

Say goodbye to overcrowded file cabinets and sticky notes. The right platform takes your staff’s core workflows from cluttered to clean in a matter of minutes.

The essential features of an all-in-one childcare experience platform

While we can’t always change the systemic issues affecting our staff, we can create a better work experience for the dedicated team members who support our business each and every day.

But not all childcare management tools offer a modern and unified staff experience. Here are the core benefits and features to look for in order to select a childcare experience platform your staff will actually appreciate.

Integrated messaging

You lead a team of educators, not tech support.

With a classroom of children under the age of six, teachers don’t have time to sift through emails, texts, and voicemails — they need to reach families as quickly and easily as possible.

With a secure messaging center in the same app where parents and caregivers already interact with your center, your team members can finally drop the Q&A juggling act and provide an engaged and responsive experience for families.

LineLeader’s Engage module provides a user-friendly parent app and parent portal where team members can easily and securely share important announcements as well as key learning moments and milestones.

When combined with LineLeader’s Enroll and Manage modules, staff members can view texts, emails, and messages in the same place where they track attendance, manage check-in and check-out, and view daily schedules.

Automated billing and invoicing

For today’s parents, checkbooks are a relic of the past.

A great childcare experience platform meets families where they are and enables them to pay through one app, while also automating the billing and tuition processing for your staff. Team members can easily see where you have outstanding payments and help keep a healthy cash flow across the business.

A platform that offers flexibility in how you bill is also key. For example, the ability to charge specific families or entire groups for special events like field trips should be simple and easy, requiring no additional emailing or paperwork for staff.

Handling subsidies should also be a breeze. Give your staff a platform that helps them easily connect various types of subsidies to a child’s profile whenever you receive a remittance form.

LineLeader’s Manage module does all of the above and more. With no re-login required for parents with outstanding invoices and no manual entry or awkward email reminders for team members - reclaim your time and energy.

Digital check-in and check-out

The start of the day sets the tone for students and staff members — so why not make it seamless? Digitized check-in and check-out help keep daily transitions smooth.

With a simple tap, families can let your teachers and staff know when a student is arriving, while automatically updating your attendance tracking and classroom ratios. For center directors, you’ll have real-time access to the exact number of students and staff members that are checked into your center(s) at any given moment.

If classrooms aren’t in ratio, you’ll know immediately if you need to call in support. When a student comes or goes throughout the day, ratios are automatically updated — saving staff countless hours on paper-based check-in and check-outs.

With the right childcare experience platform, key transitions are instantly easier, safer, and less of a bottleneck for team members.

Real-time reporting

Chances are, you didn’t enter the world of early learning because you love looking at numbers.

Real-time reporting protects you and your team from bad data due to cluttered spreadsheets and manual data entry.

With unified data and one-click reporting, your team members can find any information on any family with a simple search — no logging in and out of different systems.

LineLeader’s Manage module has all of these capabilities and more:

Ability to view a complete stream of student and staff activity business-wide
Real-time updates on classroom and enrollment ratios
Schedule and curriculum management for students and staff
Instant reporting for state requirements and licensing needs

Of course, reports on family engagement and center performance are also critical.

With LineLeader’s Manage module, each child’s profile shows an engagement score based on interactions between your team members and families. You’ll have a valuable measure of the childcare experience staff members are providing, all while keeping your finger on the pulse of revenue and enrollment.

With one central and fully digitized command center, teachers and staff can easily find any data on any family, at any center — no screen-switching or inbox excavation hunts required. Your team has the ability to self-serve quickly, find the data they need, and keep the business moving forward.

LineLeader is the first and only unified childcare experience platform that delivers full-featured customer relationship management (CRM) software, a family engagement app, and childcare management software (CMS) — together in one solution.

Because the future of childcare is about people, not tech. A unified childcare experience streamlines operations improve profitability and help boost the extraordinary education you’re already providing.

Resources to help you run your childcare business.

childcare crm, childcare software, childcare technology, enrollment operations, enrollment software

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Additional Content Resources

For more information on specific childcare resources regarding marketing tools, campaigns, tips, and best practices - see below.

1. Check out expert tips for improving staff retention.

2. Equip your staff with an online attendance tracker to easily check students in.

3. See three connections between staff and family retention.

4. Update your preschool assessment forms the day-to-day of your childcare staff simpler.

Child's Play: Better Staff Retention Starts Now

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