Author: danwhitehead

Summary

• Vacation, sick time, PTO banks, and unpaid leave are only a few forms of employee time off — More

• There are multiple things to consider when building and implementing an effective time off policy — More

• Use a variety of software tools and best practices to properly manage employee time off requests — More

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As a business owner or human resources professional, managing employee time-off requests is a balancing act that you’re likely to perform on a daily basis. 

On the one hand, you need to respect and value your employees’ personal lives. You must give them the opportunity to take time off work to rest, cover sick days, or handle last-minute emergencies. 

On the other hand, you need to find a way to manage leave requests in a way that won’t jeopardize your company’s productivity or the quality of service you give to your clientele due to staff shortages. 

The only way to strike this balance is to develop a clear time-off request policy. This ensures that you align your business’s needs with your leave management process. It also helps you streamline the process in a way that is clear to your HR department as well as your staff. Your time-off request process and procedures should be clearly outlined in your employee handbook.

Employee time off comes in different forms

Before you start designing your policy, it’s important to understand the different types of time off and how they apply to your business.

Paid time off (PTO)

In the United States, employers are not legally required to give employees paid time off, unlike other developed countries. However, 12 states and Washington, D.C., currently have additional laws in place mandating paid time off.

Taking time off is good for both productivity and employees’ mental health. Offering paid time off can also help you retain talented employees and promote work-life balance for your staff. Some companies that offer paid time off choose to group PTO under one umbrella, and others break it down into different categories. PTO categories might include:

• Vacation time: time off from work for employees to rest and take a break.
• Paid sick leave: days set aside for when employees are ill, caring for a sick family member, or attending doctor’s appointments.
• Bereavement leave: leave offered for the death of a close family member, often to attend the funeral.
• Maternity/paternity leave: paid leave for new parents.
• Jury duty or voting time: paid time off to cover jury duty or to vote.

Unpaid time off

As the name implies, this is time off that employees don’t get paid for. If your business doesn’t offer PTO, all the requests for time off that you deal with as a manager will fall under this category.

While the United States doesn’t require paid medical leave, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) does require that businesses offer 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave every year for certain family and medical reasons.

What to include in your time-off policy

Once you know what kind of time off your business offers to hourly employees, you can build your policy accordingly. Your policy should be shared with all your employees (via an employee handbook or equivalent) and be easily accessible for them to consult at all times. Here are some of the key things your policy should include:

How much time off employees receive

Your time-off policy should not only outline the different types of time off that employees get but should also include details on how much of each type that employees receive. For example, does the number of days employees can take off increase the longer they have worked for you? Do they get zero time off during their probation period?

How to request time off

Do you prefer to receive requests by email, through an app, by text, or even by having your staff fill out a time-off request form and drop it on your desk? Any of these options are fine just so long as you’re not regularly forgetting time off requests and scheduling the wrong staff members. But even without obvious mistakes, manually requesting and tracking PTO requests limits your organization’s overall efficiency potential. 

Make sure to create a system to file and review time off and vacation requests. You can use a calendar to block out requests or an email folder to keep all requests in one place. You can sort them by status to make it easy to browse between pending, denied, or approved requests. They can also be sorted by employee name, making it easier to spot if one person requests a lot of time off compared to their co-workers.

You can also use workforce management software to handle these requests automatically.

How far in advance requests should be made

Incorporating clear rules into your time-off and vacation policy can save you hours and make scheduling much easier. It’s much faster to create a weekly schedule without including absent employees than it is to try to redo a schedule and find coverage for them at the last moment.

You can also decide that you need more advance notice for longer periods of time off. Maybe you only need two weeks’ notice to grant someone two days off but would prefer to have two months’ notice before approving a full week of leave. Make sure to include that, too.

How often employees can request time off

Communicate to employees if there are limits to how often they can request time off and use their vacation days. If you can only grant time off twice a month (or twice a year), make sure to include that in your policy, too.

When are time-off blackout periods?

Finally, spell out any blackout periods for your business. These are times of the year when you generally won’t be able to grant time-off requests. For example, retail businesses are often very busy during the holiday season and need all hands on deck, and restaurants in popular vacation spots experience their busiest periods in the summer.

How to actively manage time off requests

Now that you have a clear policy in place, let’s look at how you can put it into practice and use it to manage requests in a way that’s clear, fair, and compliant with legal regulations.

Create a process for overlapping requests

Acknowledge to yourself that even in a perfect world, you won’t be able to accommodate all time-off requests, especially if they overlap and risk leaving your business short-staffed.

Create a system for yourself to manage overlapping requests. Different systems have different advantages: For example, you could allocate time off on a first-come, first-serve basis. This encourages staff members to make their requests far in advance and makes it easier for you to plan your schedule. You could also decide to prioritize time-off requests from employees with more seniority or who make requests less often.

Leave space for managerial discretion

Whatever you decide, it’s important to leave space for managerial discretion. If you need at least one bartender on every shift and none are available to step in, granting a time-off request will leave you in a bind. But be aware there’s a risk that your most valuable team members may resent you if you deny all their requests because your business can’t function without them. Use your best judgment to keep things running smoothly.

Always strive to be fair

At the same time, strive to be as fair as possible. Most employees are sensitive to favoritism in the workplace, and creating an unjust dynamic in the workplace will tank morale.

Don’t grant exceptions only for one employee, for example. Try to rotate which team members cover the most undesirable shifts, both throughout the month and from one year to the next: You may not remember who covered Christmas Eve last year, but the employee who worked that night certainly does. Consider incentives for harder shifts, like offering weekends off later in the year to whoever covers the holidays, for example.

Allow shift swapping

If you can, consider allowing your employees to swap shifts, and create a clear system for them to do so — make sure they know to run it by you for final approval, so you don’t end up short-staffed or lacking the specific skills you need on a busy shift. For example, you can request that employees email you their shift trades. By giving your team more autonomy to trade shifts, they can help manage their schedules and create less work for you.

Workers using Workforce.com’s employee scheduling software can submit shift swap requests from the mobile app; you and your managers can quickly review and decline/approve shift swaps from one place within the platform.

Expect the unexpected

Even with the best policies in place, always expect the unexpected. Unavoidable emergencies will come up, and even your most reliable employees might have to call out without warning. Build up a trusted roster of part-timers who can fill in, especially during your business’s busier periods.

Communicate clearly to make managing time-off requests easier

It’s important to communicate with your employees so they understand how time-off requests work at your company. Being transparent and fair are key to maintaining morale and creating a positive work environment for everyone.

The best way to find employees who can follow your time-off policies is to explain them upfront during the hiring process. That way, prospective employees can figure out in advance if they can work within those requirements, and you can save time by hiring people who are the best fit for your business’s needs.

If you can’t grant an employee’s time-off request (you’re short-staffed that day, or too many people are requesting the same day off), sit your team member down and see if you can reach a compromise or offer an alternative. Would a different day that same week work, or a different weekend in the month? Showing your team you’re willing to work with them when possible goes a long way toward creating goodwill and encourages them to be flexible in turn.

Bolster your time-off policy with Workforce.com

Besides a robust time-off policy, workforce management software like Workforce.com makes implementation easier. Tools like scheduling and time and attendance automate and streamline processes related to overseeing and approving time-off requests and ensuring that things are done in a transparent and fair manner. 

For more information on how to level up your employee scheduling, check out The Complete Guide to Employee Scheduling, or, get in touch with our team today.

For many managers, the option for workers to swap their shifts can seem like a recipe for chaos. You create a schedule that does everything you need and letting employees tamper with perfection can only make it worse. Except that’s not true—and in a forward-thinking company, approaching shift swapping with the right managerial mindset not only makes your life easier, it means happier workers who are less likely to churn unexpectedly.

Follow these steps to ensure that shift trades work for your company.

Care about shift trade planning

The first and most fundamental change has to come from the top. Ditch the skepticism, stop viewing shift trades as a combative interaction, and understand the ways that a properly managed shift trade policy will benefit the company.

Poorly handled shift trading, or shift trades that are granted rarely and grudgingly, can result in the loss of managerial confidence in staff, loss of respect for management, and in the worst-case scenario, patchwork schedules that leave you understaffed with no fall-back plan.

Fail to take shift trading seriously, and you risk:

• Experience gaps where workers end up filling shifts they are not qualified to perform, leading to systemic inefficiency.
• Needless expenses if you lose track of your costs, trading workers who are on different hourly rates or are working overtime.
• Lost productivity if the most experienced staff aren’t on the schedule for key periods.
• Poor morale if trading shifts is chaotic, leading to employees calling in sick or simply quitting rather than navigating your schedule.
• Staff resentment if some workers take advantage of shift trades while others are not able to.

Almost all shift trading problems are the result of an outdated employee scheduling system. Shockingly, out of 740 companies surveyed in the latest Workforce.com Management Survey, almost a third still used paper and pen to schedule staff. Of course the prospect of shift trades seems daunting when rearranging shifts means writing them all out again by hand.

The long-term pitfalls are clear. Harvard Business Review studied a grocery store where the manager often ended up at the register because their inflexible labor model meant people simply didn’t show up for inconvenient shifts. Yet the benefits are just as apparent: Manufacturing Business Technology reports a case study where automating the scheduling system at a Midwest manufacturing facility produced a savings of almost $5 million over three years.

Create a shift trade policy

Once attitudes to shift trading are settled at a managerial level, it’s time to set the rules for everyone. Make them clear, fair, and accessible, and apply them equally.

The key things to address are:

• How much notice does the company promise to give employees for upcoming schedules? Depending on where you do business, this may already be a legal requirement under predictive scheduling laws.
• What is the timeframe in which employees can request a shift trade?
• Make it clear that trades are not guaranteed to be approved.

A good shift trade policy imposes structure and clearly details the responsibilities for both the company and employees. Everyone knows what is allowed and expected, which in turn leads to happier and more productive workers. Research carried out for the Staples Advantage Workplace Index found that not only do 35 percent of employees want more flexibility in their schedules, almost half now say that flexibility is their top priority when job hunting.

Think strategically when approving trades

Knowing the best time to allow shift trading will make a big difference in how effective it is. Josh Cameron, Workforce.com’s Chief Strategy Officer, explains: “Shift trading is ideal for later changes to shifts that are caused by an employee needing to change the shift they’ve already accepted. Managers should consider encouraging the use of shift trades in any situation that is employee created, where other workers might be more likely to pick up a shift for their absent friend.”

It’s important to remember that allowing—and even encouraging—shift trading does not mean entirely delegating control of scheduling to employees. What is temporarily convenient for two workers may not work for their department or the business as a whole.

Managers should consider all the potential impacts when approving shift trades, taking into account the specifics of the employees in question.

• Do their roles or skills match up? A trade won’t work if the shifts in question require specific skillsets. Allowing a waiter and bartender to swap shifts may not be a great idea.

• Do the shifts overlap? Be careful when approving trades between shifts that don’t line up, or you can easily create a dead spot in the schedule with nobody working.

To do this, you need complete visibility across your workforce. This is particularly important for companies using Excel or other spreadsheets to organize their schedules. Spreadsheets are not designed for staff scheduling, and since a reported 88% of all spreadsheets contain human errors from the way they were set up, any discrepancies still need to be spotted by managers.

Empower employees with accessible information

The best shift trading system in the world is worthless if changes to schedules aren’t easily accessed and understood by everyone. Clear communication is essential in making the system work.

Employees need plenty of notice of when, where, and who they’ll be working with so that they can request shift swaps in time to be implemented. Managers also need to have long-term clarity on who is working and when, allowing them to plan shifts effectively and approve any shift trades with all the relevant data at hand.

This is another reason why managing schedules, let alone shift trading, using spreadsheets or pen and paper systems is becoming dangerously outdated. Communicating changes to individual staff becomes a chore if it means printing and distributing new paper timetables or emailing files that may change again by the time they are opened.

Don’t do it all yourself

Manually managing a modern shift work schedule is possible, but it requires constant vigilance and is more time-consuming than it needs to be. Shift trading works best when using shift swap software included in a workforce management solution like Workforce.

For managers, automated scheduling software means that shift trading can be accommodated without disrupting more important tasks, while employees see that their needs are taken seriously and decisions are carefully considered. Incompatible staffing and conflicting shifts are automatically flagged before schedules are finalized, and changes are automatically communicated to everyone in question.

Companies that embrace staff flexibility are more productive and efficient, and implementing it doesn’t have to be stressful if you use the right tools. As a manager, you have more than enough things to worry about—shift trading shouldn’t be one of them.

 

Creating a shift schedule can be nerve-wracking, especially for new managers. Conflicting advice is everywhere, bad habits endure, and outdated practices are easy to pick up without even realizing it. There are lots of things that can go wrong, and the consequences can be financially painful.

Don’t worry if you’ve just been handed this task for the first time or have been doing it for a while but lack confidence in your process. Simply being aware of the most common shift scheduling mistakes will ensure you’re on the right track and keep your business running smoothly, regardless of your experience.

Create a PTO policy

One of the biggest mistakes in shift scheduling is not having a clear company policy for booking paid time off. Having an ad hoc approach to time off creates confusion, as workers request time off with no clear idea of the criteria for approval, while managers are left to accept or reject requests with no formal structure to guide their decisions. The result is unsustainable on both sides and quickly leads to uncertainty and resentment.

If you think this should be taken for granted then consider that as recently as 2013, 28% of U.S. companies surveyed by Oxford Economics didn’t offer any paid time off. That percentage leapt to 41% in smaller companies with fewer than 51 employees. Creating a robust and reliable shift schedule with no time off policy is an uphill battle, if not impossible, as staff leave for jobs with more benefits, throwing your plans into disarray as they churn.

If your company doesn’t have a paid time off (PTO) policy, then your first priority should be to get one in place to avoid employee turnover and bring stability to your staffing. Never underestimate how important this is to workers — both currently in your employment and those searching for work. A Glassdoor survey found that for jobseekers, vacations and paid time off are now more important considerations than pay raises.

Know your staff’s availability

Another frequent mistake is not to consider a given employee’s availability and their obligations outside of work. Someone might have childcare obligations every Wednesday afternoon, for example, or attend a night school class on Monday evenings. Constantly asking staff to work shifts you should know they cannot attend is not only frustrating, but it also suggests that your company doesn’t care, which can lead to employee churn.

Understanding the personal circumstances of the employees you are scheduling doesn’t mean making constant allowances for them; however, by taking this information into account, you remove the frantic search for available staff by knowing who to turn to and when in the event of last-minute call outs and no shows.

There are two kinds of availability data you should have on hand for your workers.

• Routine availability — what are the regular times and days they are and aren’t available? Acknowledging this in their schedule will make them feel seen and valued.
• Flexible availability — how flexible can they be? Are there days or evenings when they might be available for extra shifts? Knowing this makes plugging those shift gaps much easier.

Not only does this attentiveness make shift scheduling less stressful, but it has long-term benefits for your company as well. It is far more efficient and productive to retain staff than to constantly have to onboard new hires. It’s that simple: companies that schedule shifts that fit around employees’ lives are able to keep them longer. In a 2019 survey 80% of workers said flexible working would make them more loyal to a company.

Think two weeks ahead

If there’s one scheduling trick you absolutely have to master, it’s the ability to plan ahead with confidence. A common persistent mistake is to avoid making schedule plans on the assumption that they will change due to circumstances beyond your control as employees call in sick or don’t show up. The idea that waiting until the last minute to nail down a schedule means you are being flexible is a persistently damaging one. This is simply not true and is a recipe for chaotic planning that leaves managers like the famous animated dog in Wallace & Gromit, frantically laying track in front of a speeding train.

Planning ahead doesn’t just become important around national holidays or seasonal sales spikes. For one thing, predictive scheduling laws already mean it’s illegal not to give workers several weeks notice of their upcoming shifts in multiple cities and states across the U.S. Even if those laws don’t apply where you work, looking ahead and using your company data to predict your staffing needs in advance is simply a more sustainable and efficient way of working than being continually reactive with no clear view of what lies ahead beyond the next staff scheduling emergency.

“I would start with how busy do I think I’m going to be, what numbers can I get to make that a bit more objective than just my feeling for it?” notes Josh Cameron, Workforce’s chief strategy officer. “Can I get the number of meals we’re going to be doing at a restaurant? Or do I need a certain number of people to look after each kid in a childcare business?”

Once you have a good feel for the regular rhythms of your business and how they relate to your staffing, you can concentrate on other variables. Josh explains: “What has changed? It’s going to be a sunny day. It’s going to be a rainy day. I’m going to have less kids in because it’s the day before Easter. That’s the stuff that’s hard to work out. That’s where most time should be spent. Once you know that, the rest of it gets easier.”

In other words, the key to being able to plan ahead is hard data specific to your business performance, which is why it pays to use scheduling analytics to manage your staff. By using past profits over time as a guide, tools such as Workforce mean you can confidently schedule weeks in advance and make changes as needed without the last-minute panic.

Communicate transparently

Failing to clearly communicate company policy, schedule changes, or shift requests is another recurring problem that too many companies struggle with. A 2016 Harris Poll found that 69% of people in management positions felt uncomfortable simply communicating with employees, which can lead to important conversations being delayed or ignored.

There are two types of communication you need to improve in order for your shift planning to work as smoothly as possible.

• General accessibility — are your schedules easily available, and are changes reflected in a timely manner for both workers and managers to adjust accordingly?
• Direct contact — are there mechanisms in place for managers and workers to communicate directly over their schedules and any necessary changes?

Both of these are problematic if your scheduling is still being handled in an outdated way. Many companies still use pen and paper schedules or old Excel templates to plan their shifts. Neither option allows for easy access or instant communication, increasing the likelihood of problems when you least need them. Dedicated software like Workforce.com, however, automatically sends updated shift schedules to affected workers whenever a change is made.

Use tools to make life easier

It’s not cheating to use specialized scheduling software to handle all the intricate parts of the shift planning process, as the most common scheduling mistakes can be prevented these days through automation. Keeping track of employee availability, using past performance to predict staffing needs for the future, and simply communicating scheduling issues to the relevant workers, even if they change, are all things you no longer have to juggle manually. Smart management means freeing yourself up to concentrate on strategic details rather than wasting hours on the basics.

If the prospect of tackling shift schedules has you in a cold sweat, then, hopefully, we’ve put your mind at rest. It may be one of the most important aspects of a manager’s job, but the pitfalls are easily spotted and avoided now you know what to look for. Go forth and plan with confidence.

As a manager, one of your most important responsibilities is creating a schedule for your business. Overstaffing is expensive, but having too few employees working means you risk giving your customers a subpar experience—and creating more stress for your staff. Even when your schedule is perfectly calibrated, sometimes employees call out at the last minute and you still end up short-staffed.

When dealing with staff coverage, your best option is to plan for the worst: employees are human, and everyone has emergencies spring up. The best way to keep staff coverage issues from having a negative impact on your business is to put processes in place that reduce last minute problems as much as possible and mitigate their impact when they do occur.

Here’s a staff coverage checklist that will help you head off issues before they happen and be prepared when they do.

1. Look at past trends to predict staff coverage needs

Your best way to predict future traffic is to look at past trends and extrapolate from there. The first step in preparing for the worst is to have adequate coverage scheduled to begin with, so make sure you know how busy your business gets on a given day, week, or season.

Do you have a clear idea of what your busiest days of the week are and months out of the year? Do you see more foot traffic in the morning or evening? Do you get more calls after 5 pm? One way to find out is to compare sales numbers and look for trends in the data or use a foot traffic analysis tool.

You can also check in with your staff who regularly work on the sales floor and might have a closer view of customer comings and goings. Another option is to use a predictive analysis tool to understand future customer demand.

2. Start your schedule on a busy day

When you design your weekly schedule, it might seem natural to start it at the beginning of the calendar week, on Sunday or Monday. But when you think about coverage and staffing logistics, it actually makes sense to start your schedule on a busy day. For example, if your busiest periods are Thursday through Saturday, create your schedule starting on Thursday and then build it out from there.

Designing your schedule around your peak business days allows you to make sure those busiest shifts are fully staffed first, without risking overtime hours or understaffing because of projections you made based on less busy days.

3. Make the schedule as far in advance as possible

The farther in advance you create your schedule and share it with your team, the more time they have to see it and plan accordingly. It’s especially helpful for employees who have other commitments, like parents who handle childcare or student employees who need to study and attend classes.

Depending on where you are doing business, advance scheduling may even be a legal requirement. More and more states are implementing predictive scheduling laws which commit employers to giving employees their work schedule up to two weeks in advance. There are benefits to the business as well. Making and posting the schedule in advance gives your employees more time to trade shifts and find their own coverage, which takes the burden off of you.

If all else fails, the earlier you know that employees won’t be able to work a scheduled shift, the more time that gives you to find an alternate solution.

4. Make it easy to consult the schedule online

The easier it is for your team to consult the schedule, the more likely they are to check it regularly and early. Having it available online is especially useful for part-time staff who might not come into your business more than a few times per week and might not get a chance to see the schedule hanging on a bulletin board until several days after it’s made.

You can email schedules to your team or use scheduling software that allows you to post schedules and make them available to everyone at once.

5. Have an easy way for the whole team to communicate

Make sure you have a convenient way to communicate with your whole team at once and for your employees to communicate with each other.

Having an easy way for you to contact your entire staff in one place can help you find last-minute coverage and communicate unexpected schedule changes, and it can help them swap shifts and know who’s available if they need to find their own replacement. You can use Google Groups or a text thread for this or a workforce management app with communications features.

6. Cross-train your employees

If your team members are trained to cover multiple different jobs, you have more flexibility when you’re creating your weekly schedule, and you also have more options for coverage if someone calls out. Cross-train your employees so they know as many different tasks that your business requires as possible. This could be anything, from working the cash register to answering a specific type of customer query to mixing your bar’s signature drink.

As a bonus, cross-training your team allows them to gain new skills and gives them more options to grow within your business.

7. Allow shift swapping

Once you’ve created the schedule, changing it is a headache. Allowing your team to swap shifts can take some of the burden off of you while still giving them as much flexibility and autonomy as possible. Having employees trade shifts and look for coverage for shifts they don’t want will reduce the risk of last-minute problems —and employees who want more shifts can easily pick them up from their colleagues.

If you allow your employees to swap shifts, make sure there’s a clear approval process, and collect requests in writing so you don’t lose track of them. Otherwise, you might end up having to pay overtime you hadn’t budgeted for.

8. Create an availability chart

An availability chart is a visual tool that can help you see at a glance which employees are available on what days. One option is to make a weekly calendar that you hang in your office or keep on your computer with the names of each team member who is available on a given day. Or you can work backwards and create an exclusion chart, where you only put the names of employees who are definitely not available on certain days.

An availability chart can help you see at a glance who is available to cover a shift and avoid wasting time contacting team members who are not. For example, if one of your employees only covers opening shifts or weekends, calling them to close on a Tuesday is a waste of your time.

9. Establish an emergency window

Set a specific time period each day in which employees should let you know if they have an emergency and cannot cover their scheduled shift. Last-minute problems are annoying but occasionally inevitable.

One way to mitigate their impact is to create clear guidelines around how and when employees should get in touch with you. For example, you might require that they get in touch by X time the morning of their shift or X number of hours before their shift starts. And you can request they let you know by phone, email, or text message—whatever is most convenient for you and ensures you’ll have as much warning as possible to find a solution.

10. Ask staff to request time off well in advance

Take a look at your workplace’s time-off policies and make sure you have a system in place for staff to request time off well in advance. Don’t forget to include clear guidelines on how requests should be made (in person, through an app, or by filling out a form, for example). The farther in advance you can evaluate time-off requests, the more you can plan ahead to make sure all of your business’s needs are covered.

11. Hire part-time team members to cover staff coverage gaps

Consider hiring reliable part-time employees who can help you with coverage and can occasionally take on extra shifts to fill in last-minute gaps in your schedule. Part-time staffers often have other commitments outside of your business, like another job, school, or childcare responsibilities, so make sure you know if/when they are available for coverage, and add that information to your availability chart.

Use the right tools to manage staff coverage

Now that you have the best possible processes in place to manage staff coverage, the next step is getting the tools you need to help you put them into place. The best tools will help you automate most of the scheduling process and flag any issues, like overtime or schedule conflicts, so you don’t have to find them manually.

That’s why Workforce.com features include automatic advanced scheduling, analytics, attendance, and labor compliance—an all in one workforce management solution.