The importance of having a strong staff schedule should never be underestimated. Solid schedules form solid foundations and from fundamental foundations businesses can grow, develop and thrive.
Scheduling is an art form and the best schedulers are some of the most important employees within any organisation. Creating an effective schedule traditionally requires skill, knowledge and a large dose of patience!
Having an effective employee schedule means everything happens when it’s meant to happen. It’s the magic ingredient to having healthy business operations. However, the need to schedule staff on a regular basis creates pressure among managers and, when not done correctly, can create uncertainty in staff.
The good scheduler will historically be using a spreadsheet and spinning many plates to make the schedule work – from weekly availability to annual leave requests. Employees will often change how many shifts they want to work and this cause more headaches for the scheduler.
Days at a time can be lost to create a good, well-managed schedule. And we think these days could be best spent elsewhere if the process of creating a good schedule was made easier.
But what is it that makes a good schedule? Here are three tips to make killer staff schedules…
1. Put the right people in the right place
The most important element of any schedule is getting the right people, in the right place at the right time. It also needs to ensure they’re doing the right thing. When it comes to being more efficient and productive this is the single biggest factor to get right. It will help your business optimise its performance, boost staff morale and provide a better experience for your customers.
2. Know your assets
Knowing your team means you’re able to understand them as individuals, so cater to their needs, while at the same time knowing where their skills are best deployed. Knowing your assets also means knowing who is available, when they’re available and how much they want to work. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to create much stronger schedules.
3. Make sure it’s flexible and accessible
A good schedule should be flexible and accommodating, easy to understand and easy to manage. You and your staff should be able to access it from anywhere at anytime. You should use software that has this functionality as standard and has been built around making the process as easy, stress-free and effective as possible.
It’s for these reasons that we advise companies to ditch the manual schedules and the spreadsheets and instead replace them with workforce management software. Intelligent and automated software will save your business time and money.
Embracing a new solution will reduce the risk of incorrect schedules, reduce the stress that goes into creating them and drastically improve productivity. We specialise in helping businesses find a scheduling solution that delivers the results they are looking for.
Contact us to speak to one of our experts and see how we can help do the same for you.