Your staff are your most valuable asset, so managing your calendar and rota with a staff shift planner is easy. When employees are treated well, turnover is reduced, morale is raised, and customers are more satisfied.
Managers like you confront a recurring dilemma in any industry: how can you automate your personnel scheduling process as your business expands? What are the most effective strategies to reconcile the needs of your company with the needs of your employees in terms of scheduling?
If you’re considering switching from Excel to a system created expressly for producing schedules, you might want to take a look at a staff shift planner.
How Does a Staff Shift Planner Work?
Software packages called staff shift planners assist organizations with covering shifts. and guarantee they always have the staff they require. Employee scheduling software retains this information instead of keeping track of handwritten time-off requests and availability notes scrawled on notepaper.
When it comes time to create a schedule, you won’t have to worry about forgetting Lauren’s schedule request because a staff shift planner will already have these conditions established.
If you try to schedule Lauren for Tuesday afternoon and she is not available, it will let you know. It will never be simple to create a timetable that works for your company and all of your employees, but with the information in the system, you’ll be well-equipped for the task.
Benefits of Staff Shift Planner for Businesses
Here’s how a staff shift planner may make a company run more efficiently.
- You are open seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Ten people work for your company.
- There are six people employed full-time.
- Four people work part-time for the company.
- Two full-time employees are restricted to working until 6 p.m. Two more would like to start at noon, even if they can work later. While the fifth and sixth full-time workers are available to work whenever, one prefers to take the weekends off, and the other prefers Wednesday and Thursday.
- Two part-time workers want to work nighttime shifts, but they only want to work weekends.
- The third wants to work Monday through Wednesday from noon to 9 p.m. and Tuesday from noon to 9 p.m. Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Wednesday from 4 to 9 p.m.
- In the fourth situation, she doesn’t care when you schedule her as long as she gets at least 20 hours per week.
With the use of this data, you can design shifts and schedules that provide the most comfort for your employees while also ensuring that you have enough coverage during your busiest periods and are not overscheduled during your slower periods.
Back then, when you’d sit down with a timesheet and all your employees’ requests and requirements, filling in the gaps as best you could, you’d probably forget to include one or more requests or requirements and end up having to make a last-minute change to the schedule after it was published.
Staff Shift Planner Helps Schedule Shifts That Work for Everyone
You might restrict employees’ capacity to seek time off or unique schedules if you adopt a business-first strategy. Unstaffed shifts, unhappy workers, and a high turnover rate could arise from this.
You can now instantly see what everyone needs by entering staff requests and your chosen rota into the planning program. Additionally, a lot of these systems have a mobile app for immediate communication with employees in the event of schedule changes. Additionally, in some shift planning systems, authorized employees can switch shifts without first getting your approval.
Even if scheduling may not be your favorite task, a staff shift planner can modernize your procedure and free up both yours and your employees’ time.