Employee scheduling can be a nightmare, especially when you have a large team and many customers. Chances are you spend hours every week to schedule your employees to make sure you have enough people at all times to meet your customers’ needs.
This application can help you streamline the process and save a lot of time and headaches down the line. It can help you boost productivity and sales and even avoid cost overruns.
But what does scheduling have to do with sales and productivity? A lot, actually. Let’s have a look before exploring the best ways to schedule your employees effectively.
How Does Employee Scheduling Affect Productivity and Sales?
If scheduling at your workplace is unpredictable, your employees probably don’t have a good work-life balance. If you practice on-call scheduling to increase sales when there’s a rush of customers, then your workers have even less control of their free time.
That can easily make them disengaged, dissatisfied with their job, and downright frustrated. If they have no idea when they’ll have a day off or they have to be available at all times for an on-call shift, they can become stressed out. Employee morale suffers, and burnouts and a high employee turnover can easily take place.
We all know that happy employees are productive employees. When you make your teammates happy in the workplace, they’ll go the extra mile to satisfy customers and boost your sales.
Effective scheduling is just one way to achieve that. Here’s how to do it.
1. Make Weekly or Monthly Employee Schedules
As you know, unpredictable scheduling can frustrate employees and prevent them from making the most of their free time.
Some may even want a second job to supplement their income but can’t apply anywhere because they don’t know when they need to come in for work.
Instead of making schedules for one or two days in advance, you should create weekly or even monthly schedules to help everyone plan their time correctly.
That way, your employees can make vacation plans or know when they can take time off work to do some errands or simply recharge their batteries. Those looking for additional income can understand when they have time to work someplace else.
Employee scheduling software can help you make employee schedules way in advance and provide all workers with full visibility into their schedules. You can also set notifications to remind everyone of upcoming shifts or send updates regarding any necessary changes.
2. Determine the Busiest Days/Hours to Avoid On-Call Scheduling
We’ve said it already – on-call scheduling is not a good motivator. It may seem good for business, but it’s not in the long run. It makes employees dissatisfied, which reflects on their quality of work.
That’s why you should determine your busiest days and hours to make employee schedules around that information.
Use an analytics tool to see when there’s a rush of customers to determine your staffing needs. Many tools can provide you with historical data to give you a clear insight into your busiest times.
Planning your scheduling around that data will also help you cut costs, as you won’t need to have on-call people for extra shifts. You can plan your budget better and make employees happier at the same time. It’s a win-win.
3. Build a Shift-Swap Policy to Give Employees More Flexibility
Building a shift-swap policy is one of the best things you can do for your employees, and ultimately your productivity and sales.
If someone asks for a shift change, you may need to spend hours trying to find an available worker and update the entire schedule. That’s one of the reasons why many employers don’t even allow shift swaps.
But that kind of flexibility will make your team happier and more productive. With the right tool, you can swap shifts seamlessly, without any business disruptions.
If you utilize employee scheduling software or a similar tool that provides full visibility into everyone’s schedules, your employees can even swap shifts without your intervention.
They can simply open the calendar in the app, select a particular shift, and put a replacement request. Anyone who finds the shift suitable can claim it with a single click, and the schedule will update in real-time.
The Gap, Inc. conducted a shift-swap app experiment several years ago to determine how effective shift-swap policies are. The retailer found that 95% of employees were satisfied with the app, saying that it made their lives easier.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, scheduling employees doesn’t have to be challenging. With the right tools at your disposal, it can be a breeze. If you do it right, you’ll keep your team engaged, happy, and productive, and ultimately boost your sales and revenue.
