Staff scheduling is the process of organizing the work time of a company’s workforce in order to best carry out daily business activities.
What Are the Steps to Create a Staff Schedule?
- Checking employee availability including vacation requests and preferences;
- Evaluating organizational needs;
- Building shifts around employee availability, skill, and experience;
- Optimizing labor costs;
- Communicating the schedule;
- Managing conflicts such as mistakes or shift exchange between employees.
Due to its unpredictable nature, staff scheduling is a living process. Managers are often required to go back and forth between the different steps to ensure that both individual employee and organizational needs are fulfilled as circumstances change. Scheduling should be backed up by time and attendance tracking processes.
Why Is Staff Scheduling Important?
Staff scheduling is core to running a company. Proper staff scheduling helps ensure that customers will receive high-quality service at all times. It also helps employees to maintain a better work-life balance as scheduling in advance helps make plans outside of work.
Why Use a Staff Scheduling Software?
Using a staff scheduling software facilitates many tasks related to employee scheduling such as organizing work shifts, creating and communicating the schedule, and tracking leave requests. Scheduling software can largely automate such tasks.
The benefits of using scheduling software include:
- Increasing productivity;
- Limiting scheduling mistakes;
- Improving employee satisfaction.
