1. Understand The Staff That Works For You
One of the keys to getting started with better scheduling has to do with knowing your staff. You need to get to know all of your existing employees. From there, you can figure out whether they are part-time or full-time employees.
You’ll be able to incorporate any overtime restrictions and incorporate their preferred work hours to satisfy their requirements.
2. Maintain Optimal Communication
When you are trying to optimize your scheduling, you need to maintain communication with them. The fact is, employees have lives outside of work. Because of this, they will have life things that get in the way of their normal work hours. These things can require them to take time away. Without having proper communication procedures in place, you will find yourself scrambling to fill their spots. Having standard procedures in place will ensure that your managers aren’t left completely surprised when someone calls out.
Likewise, you want to give schedules to employees ahead of time. Advanced scheduling will ensure that you give your employees all of the time they need to go over their shifts. You want them to know when they are scheduled to work so they can prepare accordingly. They should have ample time to request time off and to find someone to replace them for that respective day.
3. Come Up With a Process For Employees To Submit Their Preferred Schedule
You want to have a way for employees to submit their preferred working arrangements. This can be a great way to enhance their satisfaction. Likewise, it can promote collaboration and give the managers the information they need to right-fit employees into the right shifts.
4. Make Schedules Accessible
You need to keep the work schedules accessible to all involved parties. It’s important to have the schedule in an easy-to-access place because it will ensure they can access it whenever they need to. Having a system like Tracktime24 in place for schedules can be a good way to reduce no-shows and to keep everyone informed. You may even want to integrate a system that sends out text or email notifications to employees whenever a new schedule has been posted. Try to keep your schedules in an accessible and centralized location.
5. Have Backup Plans
When you are scheduling, you want to have a backup plan. No matter how organized and efficient your system is, you’ll need to have an emergency backup plan that you can turn to when things don’t go as planned. Having a plan B and even a plan C will ensure your managers aren’t scrambling to fill spots when they have an employee no-show.
There are plenty of tools like availability lists and shift trades that can help to keep managers completely in control over their workforce and minimize disruption.
6. Use Software
You want to leverage the power of software in your business. Technology has made it easier than ever to effectively coordinate with all of your employees and to maintain a steady and organized workflow. Having employee scheduling software integrated into the mix can be a good way to simplify things to make it much easier for employees to follow along.
This can help managers organize their shifts much better, but it can also help them post the schedules in advance for their employee’s benefit. This can be a very crucial point during the holidays when a lot of employees may be planning a getaway. A manager can utilize this type of system to send out notifications to employees about their schedules. There are plenty of features that make it a worthwhile addition including:
- Warning employees about a scheduling conflict
- Monitoring availability of employees
- Looking at and logging clock-in and clock-out times
- Tracking all of the labor costs throughout the organization
7. Schedule Employees Based On Their Skill Sets and Talents
You will find that an understaffed company will force managers to fill positions with employees that aren’t necessarily the best for the job. This can negatively impact everything from the quality of the product being put out and even the workforce’s morale.
Having an effective scheduling system in place can help managers produce work schedules with minimal errors and allow them to optimize schedules to put out the best product possible.
