Whether you run a real world business, an online enterprise, or a company that has both brick and mortar storefronts and digital websites, employee scheduling software can optimise your workforce and help minimise worker schedule complaints and other common headaches.
Most line level managers and supervisors will attest that creating an employee work schedule that satisfies everybody is practically impossible. Upper level executives and business owners want to ensure that there is enough labour scheduled to handle business levels, but not too much so that the business is overspending for its labour, driving costs up and profits down.
Line level workers, on the other hand, are real people with real demands, such as family obligations, health issues, social lives, and other issues that can influence when and where they want to work. That means that balancing the needs of the business against the desires of the workforce can be a frustrating and thankless task for scheduling managers and supervisors.
Leave It Up to the Employee Scheduling Software
Employee scheduling software can take the responsibilities and challenges out of the hands of human scheduling managers and supervisors and put it into the digital files of a computerised scheduling software program that can create, adapt and manage schedules automatically according to a pre-determined set of criteria.
Employee scheduling software can be integrated to sophisticated forecasting tools that can accurately predict business volumes based on such factors as history, seasonality, economic changes, and even the weather. It also can automatically protect the business against unnecessary overtime, over-scheduling labour, or scheduling individual workers’ shifts too close to one another without enough time off in between shifts.
Increases Productivity and Efficiency
When human managers create work schedules, they will often build in a little extra labour to make sure they aren’t caught short in case of call-offs, shortages, or workers asking to go home early. But this is based entirely on guesswork and hunches.
Employee scheduling software can build in additional labour hours based on actual paradigms calculated from historical data, not guessing games or fudging a schedule one way or the other. The result is a highly accurate schedule to accurately predict the precise amount of labour the business needs while still accounting for the “human factor” to allow for the unexpected last-minute requirements of the workforce.
Saves Time and Money
Creating work schedules is not just the most difficult part of a manager’s job, it’s also one of the most time consuming. And every minute your managers and supervisors spend cooped up in their offices working on work schedules is time they aren’t on the floor supervising your workers and managing your business.
But employee scheduling software can perform the exact same tasks faster and with more accuracy than a human manager. Plus, automated scheduling programs can make alterations to a work schedule instantly based on changing conditions, such as terminations, departmental restructuring, and other organisational modifications.
When they are freed from cumbersome administrative tasks such as scheduling, managers and supervisors can devote more time to what they were hired to do: Manage your business and workforce to profitability.
Procedural Consistency
Most small business owners have had the experience of misplacing or forgetting a time off request from one of their employees which results in somebody being scheduled for a day they can’t work. While this may seem like a little thing, it can be a major problem for both the individual worker and the organisation as a whole.
These types of avoidable mistakes can negatively impact employee morale, your business’s ability to deal with demand, customer satisfaction, and even your business’s reputation.
Employee scheduling software codifies your time off requests, holiday requests, early in/early out requests, and other scheduling processes so that are fewer mistakes and not as many negative consequences for your business.
Workers will be happier because there will always be a procedure in place to accommodate their individual scheduling needs. Your supervisors and managers will be happier because it will ensure there is always enough labour when they need it most. And your customers will be happier because they will always get a better customer service experience when they encounter your business.
That’s what’s known as a win – win – win!
Increased Access to Critical Information
Employee scheduling software gives businesses more information they can use to successfully guide the organisation to profitability. Schedules can be accessed online from anywhere. Workers can easily track their time and attendance using their mobile devices. Managers can create schedules and check shifts with complex filtering specification.
And businesses can keep overtime within budgeted limits, reducing the probability that unexpected labour expenses will eat into the business’s profitability.
Businesses of every size and complexity can benefit from employee scheduling software that streamlines operations and helps the business build the bottom line.
