Developing a positive workplace culture should be a top priority whether you employ seasonal, hourly or full-time employees. Therefore, effective employee scheduling is a key skill that managers & supervisors should master. Unorganized scheduling also causes frustration amongst employees, which could lead to high turnover rates.
To ensure that you create awesome employee schedules, you need the following basics covered:
- Every shift must have an adequate number of employees.
- Peak times and special occasions should be taken into account (cue festivities!)
- Schedules must be 100% accurate and error-free.
According to the Great StaffAny Survey we conducted, managers stated that they spent around a quarter of their time scheduling their employees. Given the time and the complexities involved in conventional employee scheduling, it’s no wonder that errors are so common.
The 7 tips below will help you avoid the most common scheduling mistakes by creating schedules that your team will love.
1. Create schedules ahead of time
Doing schedules last minute significantly increases the risk of insufficient manpower. Moreover, your employees’ plans may be disrupted as you scramble to stuff your schedule with the required manpower.
If you’re a retailer, F&B business owner, or operate in any business involving shift-based work, you should do your best to schedule shifts in advance. Your team will love the fact that they’re able to commit to personal plans easily because of the advance notice you provide them with.
2. Create accurate schedules quickly
Of course, in order for you to release your schedules as quickly as possible, it helps that you have a platform that is efficient and optimized for scheduling. With an app like , your team will be able to receive real-time and up-to-date schedules, and be able organize their lives outside of work. With the StaffAny app, apart from scheduling fast, employers can also plan next week’s schedule on-the-go. For example, some of our users complete their outlet scheduling during commutes on the MRT every morning!
Your team will also be able to receive accurate and timely schedules. Rushing through schedules can result in errors and cause your team to lose confidence in your ability to manage them.
3. Prioritize Team Communication
It’s a given that different issues will come up when dealing with your employees’ shifts. How changes and issues are communicated can have a big impact on your business. You should find it just as easy to communicate with one of your employees as you do with your whole team. Ideally, emails and instant messaging should be avoided as messages can get lost and conversation threads can become confusing. Your team members should be provided with the tools to communicate effectively with you and amongst themselves.
4. Ensure that schedules are easily available
Your team needs to be able to access their schedules anytime and anywhere. Providing paper copies of schedules can be inefficient and it is certainly not the most environmentally-friendly. As most of your employees will have a mobile phone, their schedules should be easily accessible via their mobile devices. Staff scheduling apps can definitely make you and your employees’ lives easier by allowing both parties to view your work schedules wherever you guys are.
5. Create schedules according to roles
While many business owners are inclined to create schedules based on employees’ performance, there may be times when you need more employees of a specific role to run the show . For example, you may need more floor staff the following Saturday to cope with a customer hoping to organise a birthday party for her five year-old kid.
By scheduling your employees based on their skillsets, you can avoid overwhelming your scheduled staff with their tasks-at-hand on the day itself. Additionally, it is also another opportunity for you to recognise your staff’s efforts – especially when they are assigned areas of work that they are strong at.
6. Give employees more autonomy
Giving employees more autonomy in their work schedule will allow them to feel more valued and appreciated as an employee of your business. At the same time, we should ensure that we have contingencies in place should an employee calls in sick or needs to apply for an urgent leave.
Our StaffAny app allows for such autonomy and flexibility by empowering employers with an option to customize shift timings to suit the needs of their employees. We love this feature as it also creates an open environment for team communication. Employers can also react to a manpower shortage quickly with a push of a button, notifying all employees of available shifts on a short notice.
7. Try your best(est!) to accommodate leave requests
To double down on employee autonomy, leave applications are a crucial point to which employers should pay extra attention to. Not only do employees feel more valued, it gives them an opportunity to unwind and come back recharged. No wonder this is considered an entitlement by most employees!
To manage your employees’ leave requests well, it helps that your scheduling tool is able to incorporate these leave requests when you are doing your schedule planning. This is exactly what we had in mind when we were building StaffAny’s “Leave” feature – so you can rest be assured and leave this to us!
Building a good employee schedule is the backbone to well-oiled operations within your business. Staff scheduling does not have to be tedious and expensive.
We’d love to help your business achieve your goals better with automation.
