With technology permeating almost every part of our lives, it’s only fitting that business managers do an overhaul of their employee scheduling system.
It’s no secret that even the best managers struggle with ensuring smooth employee scheduling. Depending on the type and size of business, they need to accurately manage different schedules of dozens of people, manage shifts, allocate tasks, resolve issues and ensure operations are running smoothly.
Without an effective scheduling process in place, managers can quickly feel the pressure mounting. This also affects employee morale when they don’t have a schedule that serves their needs and skills.
How do you keep your business moving? Here are five steps to ensure effective employee scheduling for your business.
How to Create The Best Employee Scheduling System
1. Know Your Entire Team
The first step to ensuring an effective employee scheduling system is knowing your entire workforce or team.
Create a list of employees who are currently working for your department or business. Also, note down their names, contacts, skills, certifications and roles.
You can also include additional details like whether they’re available full-time or part-time, as well as their overtime restrictions. Having this information is critical in developing an effective schedule.
2. Take Advantage of Technology
Over the years, we’ve seen the advancement of employee scheduling software. These programs can be a great asset for any business that wants to streamline operations and improve productivity.
According to Humanity, one of the top providers of online employee schedule maker software, business managers who embrace the use of automated technology are able to create a reliable process for staff availability.
The use of employee scheduling system offers managers a simple way to promote a collaborative environment. It enables employee tracking, scheduling flexibility, even shift allocation, overtime alerts, as well as an easy way to create, edit and view all employee shifts and schedules online.
Read also: Top 7 Features Every Employee Tracking App Should Have
3. Ensure Easy Access to the Employee Schedule
Even when you have an employee schedule in place, you want to make sure it’s easy for them to view and access it from anywhere they are.
With traditional scheduling options like whiteboards or paper copies, workers would forget to look at the schedule or even misplace their paperwork. If the staff doesn’t have easy access to the schedule, they’ll often show up late to work or fail to show up at all.
Having an online scheduling software that can be accessed on any device ensures that all employees have real-time access to their schedules and shift allocations.
Considering that employee scheduling is one of the biggest management challenges for entrepreneurs, automating your day-to-day tasks is a central factor in your organization’s ultimate success.
4. Plan for the Unexpected
When designing your work schedule, you should keep the unexpected in mind.
A well-designed schedule system includes a reliable Plan B, so the manager won’t start panicking if one or two employees fail to show up or have to leave for an emergency. It’s important to have a properly organized employee availability chart to help you handle such issues.
Flexibility is one of the critical pillars of any employing scheduling process.
For instance, you may have employees trading shifts in order to manage their time better. The more flexible your schedule is, the better you’ll handle your employees.
Having that flexibility to change things fast without necessarily affecting normal operations is a critical part of effective scheduling.
Related: The Ultimate Lists of Extremely Effective Ways to Motivate Your Employees
5. Schedule Tasks to the Right People
An employee scheduling system is never complete without the right people in place.
Use your updated employee list to ensure you’re scheduling every staff member based on their skills and talents.
In some cases, especially in understaffed businesses, managers end up allocating shifts to workers who are not best suited for the job. This is not good for your business.
Scheduling tasks to the right people boosts employee morale and makes it easy to achieve your ultimate goals, according to a Small Business article on the importance of scheduling staff.
To ensure an effective employee scheduling system for your business, you should consider moving away from your manual scheduling process to a software-based management solution. The right software will make conflict management easier and help you produce error-free schedules that are critical in completing day-to-day operations.
Without an effective scheduling system, managers can quickly feel pressure. Here are 5 steps to ensure effective employee scheduling for your business.