Shift scheduling can be a nightmare for managers, taking up tonnes of time and resources. Thanks to technology, however, some tools can be utilised by organisations looking to streamline their shift scheduling and make it more effective.
While spreadsheets were a big improvement from methods such as using whiteboards and markers to organic
e staff, they are hectic and time-consuming. With more business embracing employee wellness and work/life balance programs aiming to incorporate flexible shifts and compress workweeks, scheduling has only gotten more complicated and difficult to accomplish manually.
It is hard to imagine how a large hospital can survive without a real-time shift scheduling software to manage its doctors, nurses and patients. In such sensitive environments, it is easy for things to get chaotic if issues such as emergency patients and no-show staff are not quickly dealt with.
Fortunately, Advance Systems have recognised the scheduling challenges facing employers. Tools such as eSolve Scheduling are now available to transform the hectic scheduling and shift-planning processes into simple tasks. Below are a few ways in which shift planning and roster-building can be beneficial to an organisation:
How Employee Shift Scheduling Can Benefit Managers and Employees.
1. It Saves Time
For small businesses using spreadsheets to organise their staff, it could take up to eight hours each week to get the task done. Managers using software to help them streamline the process could use the time saved to take care of more demanding and productive activities. Features such as shift-swapping take the task of finding replacements for unavailable employees off the hands of managers, making their work much easier.
2. Flexible and Adaptable to Sudden Shift Changes
Crisis management is important if you wish to maintain a positive customer outlook. How you handle sudden fluctuations in missing staff will determine your ability to continue operating in high-pressure situations. Making use of Shift Scheduling software makes it easy to manage a crisis since giving the manager a clear picture of all the available staff with the skills to match the required tasks. With just a few clicks, a suitable replacement for a missing staff member can be identified and contacted without increasing the time they have to wait.
Contact tracking makes it easy to identify the available employees who have worked in the same shifts or with the same skill-set as the one needed. Imagine having to hunt through individual employee files to find a suitable on-call doctor to handle complicated emergency surgery. With contact tracking software, the process can be reduced to a simple search and call.
3. Streamlines and Makes the Process Accessible
Using software to schedule employees streamlines the process and makes it accessible to all members of the organisation. Pre-developed templates that match the needs of an organisation can be used to quickly arrange a company’s schedule for the whole week. This can then be distributed electronically and employees can then use their phones to clock in and out, eliminating the need for back and forth emails and phone calls.
It is also easy for employees to access and request changes to the schedule as is suitable to them. Making the process of changing shifts easier creates a friendly work environment which will lead to increased productivity. Self-scheduling could also be implemented to ensure each staff member chooses the time that is most convenient for them. This reduces the instances of absent employees, making the work environment more organised.
4. They are Cost-Effective
One obvious effect of technology is reducing the number of people and time it takes to complete a given task. Instead of having a whole team dedicated to planning the shift scheduling of your employees, the process could be handled by a software requiring only a single person to key in the required information. This drastically reduces the labour costs, allowing the resources to be distributed to other demanding areas of the organisation to increase.
5. Proper Utilisation of Human Resources
While it is important to keep your workplace efficiently staffed, too many employees could hurt your bottom line and prevent you from growing. With automatic scheduling tools, it is easy to optimise the number of employees to accurately match the available workload.
Using software to manage your timesheets will also help eliminate time theft if your companies. Since the number of employees clocked-in at a given time can be easily monitored, it becomes easy to spot inconsistencies. A Quickbooks survey showed that organisations can lose up to £11 billion each year to time frauds.
6. Makes it Easy to Calculate Pay
An employee scheduling system can be used to make the processing of payments much easier. Since all the employee activities including sick days and overtime are recorded and stored, they can be used by the accounting department to automatically calculate the payments. Using spreadsheets and calendars to record sick days and overtime increases the margin for errors that could cost the business money in the long run.
Technology is rapidly seeping into various sectors and businesses that are properly utilising them gain a significant competitive advantage over their counterparts. Making use of eSolve’s Smart Rostering solutions will save your organisation both time and money, and make it a much-more harmonious workplace for your employees and customers.
