Employee scheduling goes way beyond merely creating shifts for your employees. Scheduling managers need to take a lot of different factors into consideration when crafting worker schedules. They need to account for availability, time off, budget limitations, project resources, weather, and of course business demands. All the while, trying to ensure they have enough employees on staff to get work done in a timely manner.

Scheduling can be an extremely time-consuming process and, if not done correctly, can lead to an unhappy workforce, low productivity, and be the demise of your business. By using the best scheduling practices possible, and implementing modern employee scheduling software, you can turn your scheduling process into a well-oiled machine that provides a positive outcome for your business and its workers.

Use Historical Data to Schedule Efficiently

Even in ever-changing businesses, such as hospitality, there will be prevalent cycles when it comes to business activity.  For example, hotels near beaches will see an influx of customers during spring break or the summertime. Hospitals may have more patients during the flu season. No matter what type of business you are in, you can use historical data to better schedule your employees.

By using employee scheduling software, you can quickly reference past year’s data to determine staffing needs on any given week. While mining this data may take some time, once you have the information readily available, scheduling will be much more efficient and far less time-consuming.

Take Into Consideration Scheduling Conflicts and Errors

Simply copying an employee schedule from one week to the next is a surefire way to get scheduling wrong. While your business demands may remain constant, employee’s personal schedules and availability are ever-changing.

Publishing a schedule and then having to change it last minute not only disrupts your business workflow but can also upset your employees when they have to adjust to a new schedule last minute. This can also leave management frustrated as they have to try and track down their workers to ensure they know their schedule has changed.

Useful employee scheduling and time tracking software will notate an employees’ availability throughout the week and allows them to update their availability as needed. Some employee scheduling and time clock software even allows users to enter their preferred working hours. The scheduling manager can easily reference this information to try and accommodate the employee’s availability and preferred working hours while ensuring their business demands are met.

Implement a Scheduling Communication Method

Perhaps one of the most significant issues with traditional methods of scheduling is the inability for effective communication. In past years, schedules were created in a spreadsheet or were written down and posted in a high-traffic area for employees to review. They would have to look over this information every day to ensure that their schedule did not change.

Not only is manual scheduling ineffective and time-consuming, but it can also make it especially challenging to relay scheduling information to employees in a timely manner. Workers rely heavily on knowing their work schedule in advance so they can adequately plan their personal lives and make accommodations if needed.

With time clock and scheduling software, you can notify workers the moment their schedule has been published – typically through different communication channels, including email or push notifications. They can also receive notices the moment their schedule has changed, allowing them to adjust their personal lives accordingly.

Long gone are the days of ineffective scheduling and having to chase down workers to give them their shift assignments. Web-based employee scheduling software takes what was once a time-consuming and inefficient process and turns it into a well-oiled process that requires little effort. It allows management to turn their focus to more critical business operations such as ensuring profits and fostering a productive, inclusive work environment.