Employee scheduling can be a nightmare regardless of the industry, be it retail, hospitality, healthcare, construction, or logistics. Managers often must struggle with maintaining productive, functional, and fair schedules. Keeping employees, clients, and customers happy starts with proper scheduling.
Typically creating employee schedules takes time. Often there are last-minute changes that need to be made, under-scheduling, and call-offs further adding to the frustration and increasing the time spent creating schedules. Creating schedules by hand or using multiple spreadsheets and calendars further adds to a scheduling mess or potential for errors in scheduling. When changes are made to a schedule it requires sifting through multiple calendars, spreadsheets, and notifying employees. Poor scheduling leads to inefficiencies and missed revenue.
Contents
Shift Changes
Unfortunately, shifts change, even the best schedule will fall victim to call-offs. There are multiple legitimate reasons for an employee not being able to make it to work for a shift. With Covid-19 cases rising there is a risk for shift changes becoming more problematic, with employees being quarantined for up to 14 days, unable to find childcare or simple health-related issues for not being able to work.
Employee Availability
Employees have lives outside work, especially part-timers, or employees that need or want flexible work schedules. Scheduling employees when they are available keeps employees happy. In addition to part-timers, full-timers occasionally want to take vacations, holidays and have doctors’ appointments. These life moments need to be accounted for in scheduling, and especially in retail, hospitality, and healthcare it becomes important to be able to adjust for them.
Employee Burnout
To avoid employee turnover, managers also need to be careful of over-scheduling employees or creating difficult work schedules for employees. Health care workers often work 12-hour shifts, but it is important to allow for ample rest between shifts and amble time off to recuperate. Restaurant workers sometimes have shifts that have them closing one night only to return to open the restaurant in the morning. This causes burnout, it is best to avoid these types of shifts. By avoiding burnout, your employees will be happier and more refreshed. Helping to improve retention.
No-Call-No-Show
Often employees that fail to show up are due to not remembering their schedules or a dynamic schedule shift without notification. To avoid the dreaded no-call-no-show, it is important to communicate with employees any changes to their shifts immediately and to confirm they received notification. Analog systems do not do this well. Communication is important when making changes to schedules.
Covid-19 and Schedules
Covid-19 has made it difficult for keeping up with multiple last-minute changes. Managers are struggling with more than just scheduling, but also predicting and forecasting sales, production, etc., making it extremely difficult creating schedules. If managers are still relying on spreadsheets, and analog ways of scheduling the amount of time it takes to create schedules are likely increasing and causing migraines.
beepNow: beepShift
To ease scheduling issues, it is highly recommended to make a move to a software solution. beepShift is a tool beepNow has created to help elevate scheduling headaches. beepShift will help with employee retention, employee engagement, and provide a unique software solution to automates 90% of employee scheduling. beepShift solves a wide range of scheduling issues that will save time and money leading to increased efficiency and revenue. For more information or to request a consultation to solve deeper issues with employee scheduling please register or feel free to contact us for an initial consultation.
