Emuparadise

Staff scheduling is a complex business process. You need to balance your financial goals (avoiding overstaffing or losing business due to understaffing) with keeping your employees happy and productive.

While there may be some one-off situations where you need to make a scheduling adjustment or ask someone to be on-call, if this is a regular occurrence it can cause morale issues and lead to turnover.

Assess Your Staffing Needs

Today’s technology means there are a lot of ways you can accomplish work tasks without a large workforce. That frees up time that can be better spent growing your business.

You can also use staff scheduling software to automate the time-consuming process of building and managing employee schedules. That makes the process easier and more accurate, saving you money in labour costs.

It’s important to take the time to assess your current staffing needs and determine how much you need to grow your business. This can include reviewing historical data to spot trends, looking at the number of employees who quit or were let go, and factoring in upcoming changes like retirements and new hires.

Another way to assess your staffing needs is to perform a ratio analysis. This is an excellent technique for project-based businesses, as it looks at how many people you have available to perform specific work functions compared to your projected demand.

Determine Your Staffing Needs

In order to make accurate staffing projections, you must know what tasks your employees perform and who is responsible for each task. There are many ways to develop a list of tasks, including calculating ratios and using the Delphi method.

Use a time-tracking software to see how much each employee works on a daily basis. This will help you identify patterns and determine peak periods of work. Use the results of this analysis to forecast future workload and staffing needs.

Another way to estimate future staffing needs is to look at the skills and expertise of your current workforce. Performing a skills inventory is important because it allows you to see what your employees’ strengths and weaknesses are, so you can better assign projects.

You can also use data from past project completions and customer feedback to create a more precise skill-based model. This will help you predict the number of project managers and team members you’ll need for each type of project.

Create a Schedule

Whether you use an off-the-shelf solution or build your own, using the right tools makes creating a schedule easier. Even tools that were designed for other purposes, like Word or Excel, can streamline the process.

Having an availability chart can help you avoid two common scheduling pitfalls: not enough staff on duty, resulting in poor customer service; and having too many employees on duty, resulting in higher than necessary costs. The ability to track employee availability lets you easily offer extra shifts to those who want them.

Honoring work preferences and time off requests is a good way to boost team morale and reduce turnover. Keeping a record of these preferences in one location, rather than in multiple places (like a bulletin board or individual files), is the most efficient way to manage them. It also ensures that you can easily find the information when needed. This keeps everyone informed and on the same page, no matter where they are.

Update Your Schedule

It’s essential that you have the right number of employees working at any given time. Without enough staff, the quality of work will suffer, and customers could be affected. Additionally, if employees are working when they don’t have the skills required, the business will lose revenue.

The best way to ensure that a schedule is up-to-date is to utilize an employee scheduling software solution. This will take the guesswork out of scheduling and make it easy to keep all shifts filled.

The system will help you match the right people with the right jobs by considering availability, skill level, seniority and pay rate. In addition, advanced features like automatic shift swapping and standby filling are often included. To edit a published shift, navigate to the calendar view and click on a day. The shift will be highlighted in green if it has been adjusted by you or the employee. You can also create a time block to reflect your business’s closure for an entire week.