Any manager who oversees shift workers knows the challenges that come with scheduling. You must account for individual employees’ availability, company needs, business cycles, and the payroll budget. For many managers, this process takes up much more time than it should.
Do you still attempt to do this job with a pen and paper? Then what you need is a scheduling app. How can this simple tool revolutionize shift management? Here are four distinct ways a scheduling app can help you and your business.
- Let Employees Schedule
What happens in your organization when one person has a change of availability? Do you end up having to spend hours remaking the whole schedule? Does the person email the whole team to find someone who can cover? Do supervisors bear the brunt of the responsibility? Do they sometimes not even know what is going on with their shift workers?
With a scheduling app, employees can connect with one another to make their own swaps or reliably notify supervisors of emergencies. You may have them input things like blackout dates, schedule preferences, and skills certifications.
Allowing employees to self-schedule their time as much as possible is more than a time saver. The more employees can control and manage their own schedules, the more empowered they feel. This simple and free benefit may help reduce turnover and boost morale.
- Use the Power of Data
The variety of elements in good scheduling are occasionally too much for one person to manage. What are everyone’s preferences? What does the upcoming business cycle look like? Who will run into overtime? How much payroll budget is left?
An app can do all these calculations much more easily and quickly than just about any human manager can. If you let it do the analysis based on data from prior shifts and pay periods, you can then focus on other matters.
- Automate Communications
Do you have a workforce that tends to show up late, forget their shifts, or fail to respond to attempts to reach them? You can partially overcome many of these challenges with an automated scheduling system. Set reminders through push notifications or text alerts about when employees are to be at work. Rather than someone calling or texting workers, your system can take care of the need automatically.
The advantage of a mobile-based scheduling system over traditional web-based ones is that most employees have their phones on them nearly all the time. Using a mobile app lets you harness this connectivity and get more immediate results.
- Link With Finance
Scheduling connects with payroll as well as other aspects of the company’s finance department. But if you schedule on paper, you do not get real-time information on how the week’s numbers look. And you still end up entering data into the payroll system separately.
Look for an app, instead, that tracks payroll expenses on a per-shift or per-day basis and offers reports to see how your schedule holds up against the payroll budget. Senior managers can keep an eye on payroll and performance data without investing too much time. The app’s data should also be downloadable into your payroll system or provider’s software so no one does redundant data entry.
Which of these features could make the biggest difference for your company’s scheduling challenges? Whether you need a time-saving device, the ability to empower shift workers, or stronger data analysis, a scheduling app could be the answer. At JACAPPS, we design customized apps for businesses of all types and sizes. Call today to make an appointment, and let us help your business help itself.
Originally published by Jacobs Media
