Creating effective employee schedules is always a challenge.
When attempting to manually design well-structured schedules, managers run the risk of human error. Depending on the scale of an organization, the loss of time and resources can be astronomical. Poorly designed schedules also lead to employee dissatisfaction, or worse, turnover.
Fortunately, technology has a cost-effective yet high-performing fix – employee scheduling solution. These tools automate the process of creating employee work schedules, thus improving an organization’s productivity.
Employee scheduling solutions are widely used by managers around the world. The reason is clear. These tools solve some of the most common yet pressing challenges related to scheduling.
Here are the top 5 challenges an employee scheduling software can solve for your organization.
1. Employee Unavailability
Even a single employee’s unavailability can throw the day’s operations off balance. So, managers must ensure a buffer in the event of unexpected scheduling changes. Say, an employee cannot make it to work for a few days because of an illness. With an employee scheduling solution, managers can swap shifts with an available employee instead.
Manually, this can be a rather complex and time-consuming process, especially if you work in a large organization. A software, on the other hand, can quickly solve the problem by finding a replacement from the pool of available workers.
2. Employee Shortage
For a business to run successfully, it needs to have enough employees on a day-to-day basis. Naturally, any kind of shortage means scheduling issues. If you’re dealing with long-term understaffing problems, the solution is to recruit more workers. If, however, you’re looking at unexpected but short-term staffing issues, you need a good employee scheduling solution.
Such a tool helps you deploy the right number of employees to execute daily tasks. Say, you are facing a sudden rise in demand that you are not able to serve with your current team size. Because you are understaffed, your organization’s productivity and bottom line are likely to take a hit.
Ultimately, this could also adversely affect the customer experience. With an effective employee scheduling solution, you can plug scheduling gaps at scale.
3. Unfair Scheduling
It’s only human to pick favorites – be it in a personal or professional situation. Often, managers make the mistake of not fixing this bias when scheduling employee shifts. If you are highly confident of an employee’s abilities, reward them in other ways – not by playing favorites.
An employee scheduling solution helps you eliminate subjectivity and bias while making important staffing decisions. This is even more important to not send out the wrong message. If employees feel they are being discriminated against, your organization could face real consequences.
When you have the right employee scheduling app in place, you don’t need to worry about fairness in the workplace. In fact, such a tool is also helpful in giving employees adequate time off to take a breather. With the right scheduling software, you reduce unintentional scheduling mistakes.
4. Last-Minute Absences
Sometimes, for unavoidable reasons, your team members simply cannot make it to work. The reasons could be plenty – sickness, an emergency, injury, et al. While it’s impossible to foresee unexpected last-minute absences, employee scheduling solutions help you make the right arrangements.
Such a tool gives you visibility into your team’s availability – are there other employees that can replace the absentee? It’s also important that your company has the protocols in place to tackle last-minute no-shows. With a comprehensive workforce management solution, solving these problems takes a few minutes of your time. Such tools allow managers to quickly identify and call in replacements for a no-show employee.
5. Manager Burnout
As a manager, it’s common to feel burned out. Especially when you spend your day creating schedules manually or using rudimentary technology. The bad news is that burnout can quickly extend to employees facing the brunt of inefficient scheduling.
An employee scheduling solution is a must for managing day-to-day scheduling in an efficient way. Say, you have poor connectivity for a few hours and are unable to contact employees with their day’s schedule. With an employee scheduling tool, employees know when they have to come into work, well in advance.
Deploy an Employee Scheduling Solution Today!
Human resource management is no cakewalk. Managers need to constantly monitor and motivate employees to increase productivity. Leverage the power of powerful technologies like employee scheduling solutions to improve performance and boost productivity. Automating schedule creation and management can have incredible effects on your team’s productivity and satisfaction.
Be it disorganization, understaffing, unequal shift distribution, or other scheduling issues, an employee scheduling solution solves all your challenges.
With WorkInSync, you can easily find and assign replacements for a shift. In addition, it allows you to sort your employee pool according to availability.
Invest in a trusted employee scheduling solution like WorkInSync and put an end to maintaining endless spreadsheets. Opt for a demo today to learn more.