Effective employee scheduling is a critical aspect of running a successful business. In this article, we’ll discuss considerations for creating a robust employee schedule — plus, we’ll explain the benefits of leveraging technology for staff scheduling.
Pointers for effective employee scheduling
When creating an employee schedule, it’s wise to keep these points in mind:
- Employee credentials: Having the right person in the right job improves performance, efficiency, and overall productivity. For each task, you need to schedule an employee whose training and experience allow them to perform that specific task quickly, to maximum effect, and with minimal waste of time or resources. As such, it’s important to assign more challenging tasks or those that require a certain expertise to qualified employees and lower-level tasks to employees with less education and experience.
- Cost: Another thing to consider when creating a staff schedule is how much it costs to assign a specific employee to a task or shift — as well as the cost of not assigning the right person to the right task at the right time. High-value employees generally earn more, so you should employ them when and where they make the most amount of impact. For instance, if you operate a technical support contact center, you’ll want to schedule your most skilled and experienced agents for the busiest hours — preferably as part of a team that can handle escalated issues. Assigning low-traffic shifts to high-value employees is a waste of your resources. At the same time, assigning a busy shift to a newly-trained, inexperienced employee might be affordable at first glance. However, if that person is unable to resolve customers’ issues, it will likely result in a poor CX and can even cause attrition.
- Employees’ preferences: Research shows that employees greatly prefer stable, predictable schedules. Clopenings — when the same employee has to close the business one evening and open it the next morning — as well as last-minute shift requests and changes, adversely affect their quality of life. By taking your employees’ scheduling preferences into account, you can significantly enhance their work satisfaction and promote productivity.
- Regional employment laws: If you operate in multiple geographical locations, it’s possible that you need to observe multiple laws regarding the length of shifts, when employees must be allowed a break, the maximum number of hours in a workweek, federal or national holidays and regulated paid time off.
The value of employee scheduling software
When you consider the amount of work, attention to detail and knowledge of local employment laws required to create an effective staff schedule, it’s clear that this can be a complicated, time-consuming and error-prone task when performed manually.
Fortunately, employee scheduling technology takes the hassle out of creating staff schedules. It automatically takes the points above into consideration so you can quickly and easily develop schedules that meet your business needs while keeping your employees happy and engaged.
Employee scheduling software:
- Provides an overview of your employees’ qualifications and hourly wages.
- Highlights the qualifications that are needed for specific tasks.
- Enables you to add more team members during busy times.
- Allows you to keep track of your team members’ preferences regarding work hours.
- Lists geographical laws and regulations regarding breaks, hours worked, federal and national holidays, paid time off, etc.
- Reduces the labor and errors involved in manual time and attendance tracking.
Boost your bottom line with employee scheduling software
Instead of using spreadsheets, documents and laborious custom-made systems to create staff schedules, you can streamline the process with employee scheduling tech. This ensures you always have the right person to perform the right task at the right time, which improves performance and productivity, and enhances employee satisfaction and retention — ultimately positively impacting your bottom line. And that, in turn, can help you advance your business.