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What is Workforce Scheduling?
A business needs to know it has the right staff and skills available at the right time, and that’s where work scheduling comes in.
Workforce scheduling is the term used to describe managing your team to ensure employee schedules are aligned with business demands. In short, it’s like safeguarding your team from ever being caught short. Even with time off, sick days, and leavers to contend with, solid workforce scheduling can ensure there’s never a drop in productivity or quality.
Who uses workforce scheduling?
This sort of team planning is most common in industries that use shift work and hourly wages, for example:
• Hospitality
• Warehousing
• Call centres
• Retail
Why is Staff Scheduling important?
Workforce scheduling not only ensures that you’re never short-staffed, it also helps with:
Proper planning means your team will never be short-staffed, so they’re not forced to over-exert themselves.
Lowering Turnover
Work scheduling lets you give teams an idea of their work timetables ahead of time, so they can plan their personal obligations around it. Poor scheduling has also been shown to severely hurt staff retention.
Managing Costs
Proper work scheduling means you’ll not end up with more staff than needed on any given shift.
Legal Compliance
Employment laws, such as those around shift breaks, must be adhered to, and forward planning means you’re not denying anyone their legal rights by demanding too much of them.
What is the Shift Scheduling Process?
Organising your work shifts will depend on the sort of shift scheduling you use, these can include:
- Fixed shift: When everyone has specific set hours
- Split shift: When a shift is split over two periods of the day e.g. early morning and evening
- Rotating shift: When shifts change on a week-by-week (or monthly, or even daily) basis
- On-call shift: When employees aren’t scheduled to work, but must be available if needed
- On-off shift: When employees work a set number of days, followed by just as many off
Depending on how your team works, you might need to have more communication and be a bit more organised, but the key thing to keep in mind with workforce scheduling is what your demands are, and what the requirement is to fill that demand. Here’s one possible way to start work shift planning:
1. Check your availability and work calendar
Look at staff calendars, are there any absences coming up? Do you have a large work event or recent incident that will likely require more staff on hand? Knowledge is always power when it comes to answering the needs of your business.
2. Make sure you have the correct team set-up
Assigning shifts is one thing, but if only less experienced staff are available, there may be a bigger risk of things going wrong. Make sure you’re basing your schedule on building an efficient team and not just having enough people in the workplace.
3. Assign shifts
Your first assignment of shifts is unlikely going to be your last. Draft up an ideal schedule that fits everyone’s availability and then communicate it to your staff. Some might be willing to switch or do more hours, others might have a last-minute issue they need to request absence for.
4. Don’t forget about staff morale
Check your schedule is fair. Is everyone getting an even number of hours? If your staff switch between roles, are they getting an equal amount of time as both? If there’s one job that’s a little less desirable than others, make sure you haven’t scheduled for one person to be stuck on it continuously.
5. And remember contracts, too
Make sure you’re not giving part-time staff too many hours, similarly, remember you are giving full-time staff the minimum number of hours outlined in their contracts.
6. Be on schedule with your staff scheduling
Don’t drop tomorrow’s schedule the morning before, even available employees need time to prepare for work and you should never make your team feel like they’re scrambling just to do their job.
7. Make it easily accessible and consider delegating
Put your schedule somewhere clear in the workplace (and online if you use staff scheduling software or digital tools) so employees can easily refer back to it or check things like which senior is on-shift for them to report to if things go wrong. You might also want to give some scheduling authority to these seniors so they can call in staff or quickly re-jig the plan if needed.
What are Workforce Planning Tools?
Bigger teams especially can benefit from the use of staff scheduling software. From assessing past data to inform new schedules to creating reports and overall streamlining the process, you may find that workforce scheduling software may be an essential addition to your team. You might also want to look at the software you already use — a shift scheduling tool, or something similar, might already be available as a secondary function, for example, in your HR software.
There are plenty of options when it comes to workforce scheduling software, though essentially the most important shift scheduling tool is good communication. Make sure your team is always aware of what’s upcoming but also endeavour to create an open and positive work environment where employees never feel awkward about requesting time off or flexibility.
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