Tag: Employee scheduling software

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How to Schedule Employees Effectively: 6 Proven Steps

live wage tracker, analytics, schedule employees

Summary

  • Employee scheduling is more than just filling shifts. It’s about balancing profitability with employee experience.  
  • Labor laws govern schedules in some cities and states, which can pose compliance issues for large hourly teams. 
  • Employee scheduling software can streamline shift assignments, but truly efficient systems can also factor in demand and compliance when managers fill shifts.

Creating and managing an employee schedule is a complex process that can take up hours out of a manager’s week.

Yet employee scheduling can have massive impacts on a business, especially for                  organizations with a large hourly workforce and significant labor costs. 

Poor scheduling can lead to overstaffing, which inflates labor expenses, or understaffing, which strains employees and impacts productivity. An unpredictable schedule can also contribute to burnout and high turnover, forcing you to constantly recruit and train new members.  

Many factors go into the scheduling process and creating the most effective schedule, including having the right expertise on your team, communicating with your frontline staff, and using the right employee scheduling software.

Here’s exactly how to schedule employees effectively.

1. Understand the laws that govern schedules in your city or state 

Scheduling employees effectively, at its most basic level, requires compliance with labor laws.

Over the past decade, different cities and states have passed their own predictable scheduling laws regulating shift work, starting with San Francisco in 2013. See if you are in a jurisdiction with predictive scheduling laws here.

Depending on the specific law, employers may have to schedule employees up to two weeks in advance. Further, these laws may levy employer penalties for unexpected employee work schedule changes, regulate “clopening” shifts, and define schedule recordkeeping requirements for business owners. 

These laws address the challenges many hourly workers face, including unpredictable, unstable, and insufficient hours. Certain staff scheduling practices, like on-call scheduling, make it difficult for employees to hold second jobs or plan for other responsibilities in advance.

However, employers may find it difficult to make last-minute scheduling decisions given the perceived lack of flexibility the laws impose on them.

Here’s where employee scheduling software like Workforce.com can help. Beyond tracking employee attendance and reliably scheduling employees in advance, it’s kept up-to-date with legal rules and regulations. Plus, managers can set their own employee scheduling rules.

The software notifies managers if they’re about to break a law or rule when placing people in open shifts, scheduling staff beyond their maximum hours, assigning minor workers for hours they are not allowed to work, or under other conditions for which they would be at risk of non-compliance with the rules.

how to schedule employees, shift work

2. Use labor forecasting to create optimal schedules 

Labor forecasting is a powerful tool in employee scheduling. 

Two main types of data go into these predictions. There’s data on external factors like the time of year, weather, or events happening nearby. Then, there’s data on your specific business’s conditions and operations, such as your historical sales data, booked appointments, busiest times, foot traffic, and employee availability. 

While no prediction is 100 percent certain, the more accurate and relevant data you connect with labor forecasting, the more confident you can be in your forecasts and identifying scheduling needs, reducing your chances of overstaffing, understaffing, and incurring unnecessary overtime. 

Workforce.com’s labor forecasting system factors in all the relevant data, both internal and external, to calculate staffing ratios that will equip managers to create the most productive schedule, ensuring that you have the optimal number of employees in every shift.

Imagine you run a retail business and intend to optimize your staff scheduling throughout the year. With labor forecasting, you can analyze past sales trends and customer traffic to predict busy and slow periods. For instance, if your data shows that holiday shopping spikes in November and December, you can plan ahead and hire seasonal and part-time employees to help with the increased demand. On the other hand, if January tends to be slow, you can scale back part-time hours to control labor costs and avoid overstaffing.

shift ratings, how to schedule employees

3. Match the right employees to the right shifts

Filling open shifts is complicated beyond just legal compliance and predicting business needs. Employees have different preferences and limitations, while managers aim to assign shifts fairly and efficiently. The challenge? Creating a schedule that works for both the business and its people.

Using a combination of scheduling algorithms and employee input for filling schedules can be a good strategy. This allows a business to benefit from advances in technology while also taking real-world human considerations into account.

So, how do you do that exactly?

First, let’s look at the facts. Before assigning shifts, ensure employees meet the necessary qualifications. Does a role require specific certifications? Is there a minimum age requirement? Workforce.com simplifies this by sending managers real-time notifications, helping them assign shifts only to qualified team members.

Next, factor in employee preferences. Employees can submit feedback through Workforce.com’s shift rating and feedback, sharing insights on staffing levels, engagement, and management after each shift. By analyzing this feedback, managers can build schedules that align with business objectives and employee preferences.

Using these insights, you can also make less desirable shifts more appealing, especially if you’re operating 24/7. Late nights, early mornings, and weekend shifts can be more challenging to fill. To encourage coverage, consider offering shift deferential pay for employees who would take on these odd hours.

4. Plan ahead for last-minute scheduling changes

Unexpected absences can happen, but they don’t have to disrupt your operations. A reliable shift swapping or replacement system ensures you can quickly fill gaps caused by no-shows or last-minute call-outs. 

Managers can use Workforce.com to reassign vacant shifts. Available and qualified employees can claim open shifts, either through a manager’s direct offer or a system-wide notification. Depending on your settings, employees can trade shifts and have those changes automatically apply to schedules or with manager approval for added control.

5. Apply automation to reduce admin work and avoid scheduling conflicts

Employee scheduling goes beyond assigning team members to shifts. It requires balancing different, and without a proper system in place, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.

Beyond operating hours and number of staff members, managers also need to to look at time-off requests, employee classifications, labor forecasts, and compliance requirements. Ensuring all of these factors align each work week is challenging, but Workforce.com’s scheduling app simplifies the process.

With Workforce.com’s scheduling tool, creating schedules will not be as time-consuming. It offers powerful functionality to speed up the process. For instance, recurring work schedules can be saved as schedule templates. Instead of creating schedules from scratch, you can simply copy, paste, and adjust the templates as needed, saving you time and minimizing errors.

6. Actively reassess and adapt

The common thread running through these steps is that nothing about employee scheduling is static. 

Laws change, individual employees may become more or less productive over time, and the most efficient ones may leave if they’re not getting sufficient hours or good shifts. 

Continually use the resources and data you have to understand what’s successful on your front line. The same old employee shift scheduling patterns might stop working over time. And your employees’ needs and levels of engagement will change. Effective employee scheduling requires that you’re aware of these developments and adapt to them.

Going beyond employee scheduling

Employee scheduling is significant, but true workforce success goes far beyond just filling shifts. Managing an hourly team requires integration between scheduling, time and attendance tracking, hiring and retention, and payroll.

That’s where Workforce.com comes in.

With Workforce.com, you don’t just schedule shifts. You hire the right talent, track time accurately, schedule employees strategically, and ensure accurate, on-time payroll. Everything is housed in one unified system, giving you a single source of truth for workforce management and HR.

Workforce.com has transformed employee scheduling, HR, and payroll worldwide. But don’t take our word for it—see it for yourself by booking a demo today.

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4 proven steps for tackling employee absenteeism

Summary

  • Identifying the cause of employee absenteeism not only helps uncover deeper-rooted issues — More

  • Establishing an employee attendance policy promotes transparency across your company — More

  • Keeping your employees engaged makes them more likely to be productive and present at work — More

  • Implementing a scheduling process that is reliable and flexible will tackle a number of issues that would otherwise increase the likelihood of employee absenteeism. — More

A common yet highly disruptive issue any business owner or human resources professional has to deal with is employee absenteeism. This sort of employee absence refers to unscheduled absences beyond what is acceptable and planned within a company’s policy. Acceptable absences include things like paid time off (PTO), sick leave, or unpaid time off someone might take as part of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

Having regularly absent employees results in lost productivity, as unplanned absences create extra pressure and more work for other team members. This extra work could lead to burnout. The causes of excessive absenteeism can also be indicative of deep-rooted issues, such as low employee morale or a toxic work environment. 

Employee absenteeism is a perennial problem, but it is particularly damaging in the shift-based service industries. According to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, service industries have the highest absenteeism rate in the US economy. Workforce.com’s own research backs this up. In our 2021 survey, 31% of businesses listed disruption to shifts caused by employee absenteeism as one of their biggest problems.

With the right tools and data in hand, managers can reduce employee absenteeism as well as identify and tackle its underlying causes.  

1. Identify why employees are frequently absent

Your business is a complicated machine. Just as you wouldn’t try to fix a problem with your car or computer by randomly replacing parts, you can’t successfully address persistent absenteeism in your company without knowing where the problem is.

Using employee scheduling software can tie together all of your shift schedules and time clock information. This joined-up approach allows you to query that data in order to spot the patterns of absenteeism and identify the who, where, and when of the problem.

Identifying the frequent trouble spots is important as the root causes of absenteeism can occur at different organizational levels.

  • Specific staff members: If a particular employee is persistently missing workdays, it’s worth checking if there is a valid reason. There may be problems that can be addressed without escalating to disciplinary action.
  • Specific shifts: If you find that absenteeism is a recurring issue only on certain shifts, it could be a problem with a particular shift leader or similar personnel issues that are making employees avoid that shift.
  • Specific locations: If you see red flags for absenteeism at a particular outlet or office, this may be a sign of managerial problems at that location. It could be an indication of something more sinister such as workplace bullying or workplace harassment. There could also be a local or geographical context — is that location particularly hard to reach on public transport?

Now that you know more about the source of your employee absenteeism, you can start addressing it.

2. Establish a clear employee attendance policy

Absences have immediate financial costs for a business. Absences related to mental health issues alone results in a $47.6 billion annual loss to the US economy through lost productivity. There should, therefore, be no ambiguity over attendance.

Employees will always require sick days or will be unable to work due to personal issues. Regardless, they should know what is required of them in such cases through a clearly defined absenteeism policy. This way, they are also aware of the disciplinary procedure that will kick in should they not meet their end of the agreement.

Your company needs a clear and accessible employee attendance policy. A good attendance policy should include:

  • How much notice employees must give if they can’t come in
  • What absence rate or number of absences is considered unacceptable
  • How many days of “no-call” or unexcused absences will be considered grounds for immediate dismissal

When considering attendance data with regard to employee absenteeism, it is especially important to take absence frequency into account rather than just how many days were missed. Ten days of absence in a row caused by a serious illness tells a very different story than 10 days of last-minute absences spread across the year that always fall on Mondays, for instance.

3. Implement incentives like employee wellness programs

Increased workloads and burnout are major contributors to low morale and absenteeism. Therefore, looking out for your employees’ physical and mental well-being has long-term benefits for them as well as your bottom line. 

Implementing employee wellness programs is a great way to achieve this. Such programs promote and encourage your employees to maintain good physical and mental health. 

A wellness program can take on many different forms. Some common examples include:

  • Installing fitness centers at your offices — this might be trickier for small businesses. If you have the space and resources, it’s a great way to help your team stay in shape.
  • Commuting incentives — encouraging your staff members to get to work on foot or by bicycle instead of using their cars keeps them and the environment healthy.
  • Covering expenses for things like gym membership, yoga classes, or even sports equipment.   

4. Create a reliable and collaborative scheduling procedure

Unhappy employees become disengaged and prone to excessive absences, and erratic work schedules are frequent causes of this disconnect. Creating reliable and predictable shifts gives workers more control over their work-life balance and allows them to plan their time with less stress. Research makes the connection clear: lower employee engagement results in increased employee absenteeism.

Implement predictive scheduling

Investing in predictive scheduling will not be optional for companies operating in certain US states and cities. Predictive scheduling laws are already on the books in Vermont, Oregon, San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, San Jose, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Eight states have pending legislation on the subject.

Whether you are legally obliged to implement such a system or not, it’s worth adopting the most common aspects of predictive scheduling:

  • Changes to schedules should be communicated well in advance.
  • Employees should have sufficient rest between shifts — between nine and 11 hours.
  • Avoid the practice of “clopening,” where the same employee closes up at night and reopens the next morning.
  • Offer available shifts to current employees before taking on temporary staff.

Following these basic rules will encourage a more engaged, happy, and loyal workforce and reduce employee absenteeism.

Offer collaborative scheduling

Absenteeism can also be a sign that employees are unable to work the shifts they’ve been assigned. One way around this is to give employees the ability to have more say in which shifts they work or even swap shifts with colleagues. Allowing this involvement in the scheduling process helps employees fit work around their other commitments.

Not only does this collaboration remove one of the common excuses for missing work or tardiness, but research also supports the idea that offering employees more control over when they work directly addresses the causes of employee absenteeism. A study by Future Forum shows how workplace flexibility means employees are more productive and more connected to their workplace culture. 

There are two methods of introducing more collaborative scheduling to your company — shift bids and shift swaps. With shift bids, the manager puts out a list of the shifts that need to be filled, employees bid to be assigned the ones most convenient to them, and then the manager makes the final choice from those who put themselves forward. With shift swaps, workers are able to trade shifts on an ad-hoc basis while the manager signs off on the swaps to ensure full staff coverage is maintained. In both cases, employees get more control over when they work without undermining the manager’s authority.

The prospect of changing the way your shifts are assigned can seem daunting, but employee scheduling software such as Workforce.com has features to streamline the process for easy implementation.

Employee absenteeism is your alarm call

A high level of employee absenteeism is a sign that something isn’t working in your business. Consider it a warning that staff morale is low, and there are scheduling and managerial issues that need to be addressed to stem the tide. Data from your employee scheduling software will identify these pain points, and the responses listed above will tackle not just the symptoms of absenteeism but the cause as well. Seize the opportunity to make your business work better, and you’ll not only solve your immediate absence problems but also create a happier, more engaged workforce for long-term benefits.

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How to use Excel employee schedule timesheets – and why you no longer need them

Ensuring your employees are at work when they’re supposed to be and work the hours they’ve been scheduled for is at the heart of any business. Without accurate attendance data, your company efficiency suffers and payroll becomes chaotic. Despite this, the 2021 Workforce Management Trends survey found that one in 10 companies still track time and attendance manually. At the same time, 50% of companies reported that their biggest challenge was manual errors in attendance data.

 

A common way of logging staff attendance is on a spreadsheet, such as Excel employee schedule timesheets. Getting to grips with Excel requires a little practice, and it is time-consuming even once you’ve got a system in place, but it’s an improvement over outdated pen-and-paper records. Once you’ve understood how to manually calculate timecards in Excel, there are employee scheduling software solutions that will make the process even easier and more efficient.

How to do timesheets in Excel

Using Excel, or any similar spreadsheet such as Google Sheets, to keep track of employee schedules and timesheets has several advantages over pen-and-paper methods:

  • You can take advantage of formulas so that calculations are done for you.
  • It’s faster than writing entries by hand.
  • All records are easily kept together within a file and easily shared.

Here’s how to get started.

DOWNLOAD THE EXCEL TIMESHEET TEMPLATE

An advantage of Excel is that it has a free timesheet template already set up for basic functionality. That means it has the main formulas already entered, so you don’t need to spend time working those out.

CREATE A NEW SHEET FOR EACH EMPLOYEE

Using the plus icon at the bottom of the screen, create separate timesheets for all your employees and fill in the employee, manager, and pay period details at the top of each one.

It’s always a good idea to keep a blank version of the template on a separate sheet in your workbook so you can copy and paste it to add more new employees later.

FILL IN EACH EMPLOYEE’S SHIFT DATA

Using information from your time clock, or whatever method you use to check employees in and out, start at the top of the data entry section and fill in dates worked, time in, lunch start, lunch end, and time out.

Be aware that for the formulae to automatically calculate hours worked, the Excel employee schedule timesheet template requires time to be entered in the format HH:MM and uses a 24-hour clock—so 5:00 pm should be entered as 17:00. It also assumes lunch breaks – if offered – are unpaid.

GET THE TOTAL HOURS WORKED

If you have entered the data using the correct format, the total hours worked should automatically be calculated at the top of the timesheet.

SEPARATE REGULAR HOURS FROM OVERTIME

If you are updating your timesheets daily and have entered the total weekly hours an employee is contracted for, you will be able to see when an employee is getting close to exceeding their scheduled shifts under the Overtime Hours heading.

REPEAT THIS PROCESS FOR EVERY SHIFT FOR EACH EMPLOYEE

This will be the most laborious part of the process, so be sure to come up with a sustainable system for how and when this information is entered. Keeping daily records is ideal, so discrepancies are spotted as early as possible. Putting aside a large chunk of time each week to enter all the timecard information can also work, but it is not ideal.

Dealing with the disadvantages of Excel employee schedule timesheets

Just because a spreadsheet can do something doesn’t mean it was designed with that task in mind. While Excel employee schedule timesheets will get the job done, there are numerous problems with relying on this method.

It’s time-consuming: Manually entering data for every employee is very time-consuming, and that problem only gets worse the larger your company becomes. Repeating the above process for 20, 50, or 100 staff members or more will eat up a large chunk of your working week—or cost you extra in hiring someone to do it for you.

It’s prone to errors: While a spreadsheet is better than pen and paper, research has found that as many as 90% of all Excel spreadsheets contain errors. Even small mistakes when copying information across from timecards can cost you money, either in overpayments or in damaging wage and hour lawsuits.

It’s reactive rather than proactive: Updating spreadsheets by hand means you do not see real-time attendance data, and if you don’t input the data regularly, you’ll always be reacting to yesterday’s information, and that’s if you update daily. If you only update your spreadsheet weekly—or even less frequently—it’s easy to fall behind and be caught out, for example, if an employee’s hours have already gone into overtime by the time you enter their data.

It’s vulnerable: Spreadsheet files are fast becoming as impractical and outdated as paper files, becoming large and cumbersome over time as you track multiple employees across the financial year. Not only are such files slow and limited in accessibility, saving this much essential data in one place means you’re always one computer crash or corrupted hard drive away from a data catastrophe.

All-in-one attendance and employee scheduling software is the ideal solution

All of the pitfalls of Excel employee schedule timesheets are easily avoided by using intelligent workforce management software that has been specifically developed with both managers and employees in mind. Workforce.com’s employee scheduling software is also a fully-integrated time and attendance system, so you can track staff hours and collect data in real-time without the need for manual timesheet entry. This gives managers an accurate view of staff and shifts minute by minute, freeing up their time to concentrate on the management tasks that really matter.

Still have questions about creating timesheets in Excel? Go ahead and reach out to us. We are here to help.

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Tracking time and attendance a basic but crucial workplace function

time clock, workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

There are some functions that are so elementary to an organization that without them, there is no business.

People need to show up for work. From the single-person hair salon to a 10,000-employee utility company, time and attendance is mandatory for a business to function at its most basic level. And those workers must spend a requisite amount of time to get the job done.

Digitally pairing the perfect couple

Like Abbott and Costello, salt and pepper and peas and carrots, some things just belong together. For employers, time and attendance and employee scheduling software are two workplace basics that fit hand in glove to make an organization go.

Also read: Timesheet rounding isn’t necessary with the right technology

Like many HR functions, tracking how long employees work each day has evolved from pen and paper to a digital process. Today’s time and attendance solutions reach far beyond a punch clock with employees merely clocking in and out. They typically provide employers with everything needed to track and manage all aspects of their employees’ time.

The value of time and attendance systems

These systems record when employees start and end their day, display their weekly schedules and provide a tool to manage time-off requests. 

Also read: Knock out the practice of buddy punching for good

Employees can no longer round up the hours they’ve worked or buddy punch their co-workers in and out. Employees are held accountable for the hours they have worked. Many time and attendance systems will offer other values, including:

  • Payroll accuracy.
  • Simplify paid time off management.
  • Time and attendance mobility features.

Accurate pay

You want to track employee hours and streamline your payroll processes. But you’re stuck in a paper-based payroll system. Save ink and save a tree by taking payroll digital. Organizations typically want to adopt a time and attendance management system that can integrate with payroll systems, and it has never been easier to make sure all employees are paid accurately and on time. Digital time and attendance systems let supervisors expedite timesheet review and approval.

They can also quickly and easily track that the right person clocks in for the right shift through electronic photo verification and unique pass codes. These, along with payroll add-ons, lets employers do away with lengthy steps and potential errors in computing payroll.

Simplify paid time off management

Time and attendance software often allows employers to record paid time off — sick time, vacation time and other types of paid time off. In addition, employees can use the software to request time off,and managers can either approve or deny those requests. Workforce.com’s intuitive leave management system makes it easy to manage time off by automatically applying changes to schedules and timesheets.

Time and attendance mobility features

Perhaps most importantly, employees have the ability to clock in and out from their mobile devices. A mobile time clock app automates how the staff clocks in while improving the accuracy and efficiency for every manager. Every internet-connected device essentially becomes a time clock. No one has to touch a communal device or handle paper time cards. Spreadsheets and calculators are no longer necessary since a mobile solution streamlines cumbersome administrative tasks. More than a time clock in their pocket, the multi-tool mobile app lets employees use their phones to clock in and out and allows managers to monitor in real time where and when the punch in or punch out occurs.

Time and attendance and employee scheduling software systems offer a huge benefit to your employees as well as their managers. They simplify an employee’s time-keeping responsibilities via clock in using a computer or mobile device.

Investing in digital time and attendance also benefits a business in many ways. Having a system to accurately track an employee’s time simply saves money. It eliminates manual recordkeeping, which reduces errors and more readily demonstrates compliance with labor laws and other regulations.

Simplicity is a key component to efficiency. Make your time and attendance process seamless for employees, and allow your managers to be more effective and focus on the needs of the organization.

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Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

shift scheduling, technology, custom fields

Life is good for an organization when shift scheduling is established and working well. Let scheduling get even a little sideways, however, and that tightly run ship can quickly become an all-hands-on-deck disaster.

Shared calendars, lost emails, hard-to-read spreadsheets, white boards and even Post-it notes are not how to schedule employees. Comprehensive scheduling software tools can prevent a Titanic-like calamity from disrupting your employment schedule.

Effective employee scheduling gives managers immediate insight into how many staff members to schedule at any given time and optimizes planning breaks, setting vacations, adding time for training and addressing unplanned absences. A streamlined scheduling plan also cuts the time associated with onboarding new staff members to full productivity.

Here are some ways that scheduling software can save time, streamline scheduling and control costs. 

Employee scheduling software saves time and money. 

The old Benjamin Franklin adage of “time is money” is as true today as it was in ol’ Ben’s era. It certainly applies to scheduling the right employee into the right slot. 

Whether it’s a 12-hour on-floor hospital shift or a four-hour lunch rush slot, scheduling software is a time-saver when it comes to matching an employee’s skills and availability to the proper shift. Managers will have a real-time schedule that changes with the organization’s needs. Scheduling software also removes the labor-intensive task of constantly rebuilding a schedule to free up you and your staff for other opportunities. In other words, you are saving up Benjamins by freeing up time.

Employee scheduling software streamlines the process. 

Saving time is important, and scheduling software helps you make better use of that time. All schedules can be created and distributed electronically, and employees can use their phone to clock in and out, eliminating the need for onerous back-and-forth emails or missed phone calls. 

This also puts much of the responsibility on the employee to communicate a potential absence or shift swap. Such functions turn the stress of scheduling employees into an HR department win.

Employee scheduling software controls costs. 

A 2017 Quickbooks survey found that 49 percent of employees admitted to time theft, which annually costs companies more than $11 billion. Scheduling software tools cut down on fraud that may be taking place in your company. 

Overtime, while often unavoidable, is another opportunity to save money through scheduling software. You have enough people to get the job done, but not so many that you’re cutting into the bottom line. Scheduling software provides the tools to cut costs in the form of unnecessary overtime by showing which employees are eligible for overtime assignments and who already clocked too many overtime hours.

Don’t be a ship helplessly tossed about in the swirling seas of scheduling employees! Find out about the benefits of Workforce.com’s comprehensive scheduling software today. You’ll see how it can boost efficiency and control costs across your entire enterprise.