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This article provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to optimize your work schedule so that at the end of each day, your team is more productive and efficient.
Knowing how to schedule personnel requires a thorough understanding of how your firm functions, such as the busiest days and months, as well as product sales patterns. It’s also crucial to understand your workers’ demands. The finest schedules are flexible, don’t overwork or underwork personnel, optimize earnings, and are well-publicized ahead of time.
Consider Homebase if you’re looking for scheduling software. It enables you to set work shifts for an infinite number of workers with ease. Additionally, after you’ve created your weekly plan, you can duplicate it each week, and the system will handle all time calculations for you, saving you time and eliminating mistakes.
Follow these easy steps to get started scheduling, which can be made simpler and faster using staff scheduling software:
1. Make a detailed employee list
Begin by compiling a comprehensive list of all of your present personnel. When you start allocating work hours, this will be your reference sheet. Input as much information as possible to aid in the creation of the best schedule feasible. Employee names, job titles, and shift preference (night vs day) are just a few instances of data.
Employee Name
When entering each employee’s name, be sure to include both their first and last names. Keep an eye out for duplication. Employees with similar first and last names are much more likely to have at least one coworker with the same name. You’ll need to employ a differentiator in these situations, such as a middle name or initial.
If they agree, you may be allowed to use a nickname for one worker and their full name for the other (Michael versus Mike). Due to a misunderstanding regarding an employee’s identity, scheduling them for a double shift inadvertently might result in disputes and costly overtime compensation (along with higher taxes).
Employee Job Title or Role
Any formal job titles or roles that represent the extent of your employees’ work should be documented. When it comes time to create the schedule, you’ll need a simple approach to match people to the roles that need to be filled.
Some employees may have various job titles, depending on your company. Many restaurant personnel, for example, work as both servers and hosts on separate days. By including this information in your employee list, you’ll always know how to get the most out of your workers’ work time each week.
Shift Preferences and Availability
You should ascertain each employee’s shift preferences as soon as they are hired. Do they prefer working in the morning, evening, full-time, or part-time? It will be simpler to schedule if you include this in your reference sheet.
Although you should seek and record your workers’ general availability at the time of recruitment, you should also urge them to notify you as soon as possible if their availability changes (at least a couple of weeks in advance, if possible).
If you use an Excel schedule template, you can generally arrange the information we recommend you include in your personnel list more effectively and quickly. All you have to do now is fill in the information particular to your workers and company in the columns that have already been set up.
2. Make Use Of A Calendar
Scheduling is an activity that requires foresight. If you use a calendar, this is simple to execute. Make a list of critical concerns for certain days or weeks, such as planned staff vacations or weeks with strong sales volume.
On your calendar, you may also mark pay periods and dates.
3. Think about your company’s scheduling requirements.
You must consider the demands of your company while creating a good staff schedule. Is it true that some days are busier than others? Is it true that certain weeks appear to be slower than others (for example, during the holidays)? Is there a certain product or service that you sell more of and that necessitates scheduling additional people in a specific position?
Although you may believe you can rely on your intuition to determine which trends to examine when scheduling, we advocate using data or reports from your systems or software wherever feasible. It’s more exact and objective. If you have them, go through your company’s sales statistics from year to year. If you detect significant increases in business during certain months or weeks over the course of many years, you may raise the amount of staff you book for that time period with more confidence.
Having statistics on service sales trends might be beneficial if you operate a service company with multiple staff providing different services, such as beauticians, nail technicians, and estheticians. For example, if you know that traditionally, consumers don’t book many hair appointments in July but do book more nail appointments, you should be able to adjust your calendar appropriately.
4. Distribute Shifts
You may start assigning shifts after you’ve done compiling and evaluating the information you’ll need to plan your staff for the forthcoming period. Make sure you have a healthy mix of employees depending on their skillset and performance. For example, don’t plan all of your new hires at the same time. Make sure to include some veterans so that your new hires may learn the ropes from more seasoned coworkers.
Scheduling is simple by using software like Homebase, which may be done online or through a mobile app.
To effectively schedule your employees, you must first understand what your company’s usual staffing requirements are on a daily basis. Ten waiters and waitresses, four chefs, and five hosts? When creating an employee schedule, use this as a starting point; on days with greater sales volume, increase the number, and vice versa on days with lower sales volume. Always begin the scheduling process with a clear understanding of which and how many roles you need to cover each day.
After then, go through each person’s availability. Based on the information on your personnel reference list and calendar, you can quickly start generating a schedule.
Another consideration is each employee’s demonstrated performance level. Some employees will certainly be more productive than others. Each shift should have at least one top performer (or more, depending on the size of your company).
5. Collect feedback from employees
It’s critical to gather employee input when you complete the initial draft of your schedule. Situations such as a sick kid, a missed doctor’s appointment, or an approaching family function may inevitably arise. Meeting your employees’ requirements increases their job happiness and decreases the likelihood of no-shows.
After you’ve gotten all of the employee input, go through it to determine if any modifications to the schedule are necessary. Use your employee information list to find out which employees are most likely to be available on the day and time in question if you need to adjust the staffing lineup. You may also empower your staff to locate their own substitutes ahead of time; they can submit that information with their input, leaving you with just the schedule to alter.
6. Make a final schedule and publish it.
You may finalize and publish your schedule after integrating and/or responding to any schedule modification requests. Consider releasing your Excel document as a PDF and sharing it with your team. They won’t be allowed to change it, and this will prevent anybody from mixing up the final and draft versions. It’s also a good idea to put the schedule someplace in the office, such as the breakroom, if possible. Google Drive may be a better option if your workforce is more tech-savvy and/or dispersed.
When there are shift swaps, keep an eye on your calendar and change staff names as needed.
You could believe that once you’ve published your timetable, nothing else will alter. In an ideal world, that would be the case, but in reality, you’ll need to keep an eye on it on a regular basis so you can make any required changes right away. Employees become ill, cars break down, and the list goes on. Employees may get confused if your schedule is not as realistic as feasible and does not always represent your current staffing strategy; otherwise, they may not show up for work when they are supposed to.
Software for Employee Scheduling
Although manually creating and managing your workers’ work schedules is possible, it is not the most efficient method. You may use a variety of free or low-cost staff scheduling software, and most of them offer specific features that help you minimize overtime charges, rapidly identify shift replacements, make adjustments from anywhere using a mobile device, and so on.
We’ve already suggested Homebase, but here are some more options:
- When I Work: If you have less than 75 workers and require free employee scheduling software, try When I Work. You may also use your mobile device to control the complete schedule online.
- Humanity: Humanity provides tools to assist you in managing your labor expenditures.
- Deputy: Because of its facility scheduling capabilities, Deputy is ideal if you have many locations and task sites.
- 7Shifts: 7Shifts is perfect for bigger restaurants since it allows you to view just workers that are eligible for shifts and jobs that need to be scheduled.
You can switch between the schedule, location data, reports, and other displays in Deputy.
Unusual Circumstances
Some unusual situations may necessitate the recording of extra information about your personnel. For example, if you assess your productivity by customer appointments rather than continuous hours on the job, or if your company operates in an industry with a fluctuating work schedule, you’ll need to include this into your personnel scheduling.
Other issues to consider while scheduling includes the legality of hiring minors and the qualifications necessary for particular sorts of labor. The weather might also affect your company, particularly if you perform it outside (such as with an auto detailing business).
Work on-Call
Let’s face it: Some companies cannot function at all if they’re understaffed. A home healthcare business is one of them. You can’t cancel on a disabled elderly client who needs their caretaker to sit with them throughout the day. If your business is in an industry like this, some of the employees you hire should be available for a work on-call. Keep good records of who you can schedule for Work on-Call and who you can’t.
Employee Scheduling Based on Client Appointments
If your firm relies on customer appointments, such as hair salons, how you to schedule personnel will be affected. You actually only need hourly staff on the job when there will be work; otherwise, you’ll be spending more money than you’re taking in unless you’re open for walk-in consumers. Look for an appointment scheduling system that will allow you to offer your staff as much notice as possible regarding their schedules.
The days each person is normally available is another piece of information you may put in your staff list. If a customer makes an ad hoc appointment, you’ll save time since you’ll already have a list of staff you can call who are generally available on that day.
Employee Scheduling for Unpredictable Shift Work
You must be more attentive than other employers if you run a firm that involves unpredictable shift work, which means you don’t know when you’ll need someone for a shift until just before they need to be clocked in. It’s better if you know who is willing to work each shift before you start, so you don’t spend time contacting and asking the incorrect people to come to work in the middle of the night.
Teams’ Employee Schedules
If your workers usually work in groups, you may need to more closely manage schedules to ensure that tasks are finished on time. There may be times when you need everyone on a team to work the same shift.
When workers seek paid time off, it’s also a good idea to think about the company’s demands (PTO). Depending on the nature of your firm, allowing PTO for a full workforce in the same week may be terrible. Make sure you know which team each employee belongs to at all times.
Minors in the Workplace
You’ll need to know the ins and outs of federal rules controlling when kids are authorized to work if you hire them. State rules also apply, so it’s a good idea to check your state’s website for further information.
Minors as young as 14 are allowed to work under federal law; but, if you have 14- and 15-year-olds on staff, you must follow the following guidelines:
- On a school day, 3 hours
- T18 hours in a school week.
- On a non-school day, 8 hours
- In a non-school week, 40 hours.
- Except from June 1 to Labor Day, when nighttime work hours are extended to 9 p.m., between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
If you need to schedule children, you must adhere to all applicable state and federal labor regulations. Child labor regulations are serious business, and violating them may result in fines and time in prison.
Certifications that are required
Some jobs need not just abilities but also recognized certificates. If you tell your consumers that they will be handled by licensed cosmetologists or certified public accountants (CPAs), you must follow through. Keep this in mind when arranging services that need certification from your personnel.
You should be able to quickly locate people who are qualified for the job you need to schedule by looking through your personnel list. You may simply enter each employee’s certification into scheduling software like Homebase and attach the proper certification criteria for each job; the system will only fill with people who are qualified to work that shift.
Weather
If the weather has an impact on your company, you should include it in your schedule. A short Google search will provide a prognosis for the following week.
Furthermore, merely being aware of local weather patterns may make a huge impact. For example, the rainy season in Florida runs from mid-May to mid-October; food trucks and mobile vehicle detailing businesses in the region should keep this in mind so that they’re always prepared for fewer clients during that period (unless they make alternative arrangements to protect their business from the outside elements).
Legal Aspects of Employee Scheduling
It’s critical to understand how to schedule people in a manner that benefits your firm. There are a lot of labor rules to think about, but not all of them will apply to your company. The federal overtime regulation, which states that any hours worked beyond 40 in a seven-day period must be paid at the time and the half rate is a significant factor to consider; to keep expenses low, schedule hourly staff for no more than 40 hours each week. You must also keep copies of all employee scheduling records for a minimum of two years.
While there are presently no federal regulations governing predictive scheduling, several states and municipalities do. Businesses should offer workers enough notice of their schedules so that they may organize their lives around their working hours. Allowing adequate time for your staff to prepare before publishing a work schedule offers their schedules structure and allows them to better organize their daily lives.
Conclusion
Your staff schedules have the power to create or ruin your company. It’s a delicate balancing act to figure out how to schedule personnel so that you maximize earnings (by minimizing overtime, overstaffing, and losing business due to understaffing) while still keeping your employees happy. It necessitates the development of strong front-end procedures, the collecting of the most relevant data to assist you in making the best scheduling choices, and the frequent evaluation of the schedules you generate.
