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Through all industries that revolve around shift work there’s one common challenge that never goes away and constant drains on time and resource.
We're of course talking about schedules.
Creating schedules and shift patterns in Excel can take hours, and adjusting it through the working week in response to operational challenges can take even more time.
Your schedules might be weekly, fortnightly or monthly; the frequency doesn’t matter. All that matters is that shifts need to be scheduled and communicated to employees in time. Unfortunately, employees will call in sick or want to be off, meaning that your awesome schedule might need another round of updates.
Does it sound familiar? Here's we're answering how you can solve the most frequent questions that your staff might have about their schedules.
‘What shifts am I working next week?’
This is one of the most common questions asked to line managers. Whether it’s a restaurant with 50 waiting-on staff or a superstore with hundreds of employees, your staff always want to know when they’re working next.
Think of the time it takes to answer that question for one employee. Maybe it's just 5 minutes. But let's say 50 employees ask the same question. All of a sudden, 250 minutes (or a little over 4 hours) will be taken from a manager's time.
With a workforce management system, this problem will never exist in the first place.
Instead of seeing the shift on a printed spreadsheet stuck on a notice board, your employees will see and access it all in one place, wherever they are and they know it’s going to be published at the same time every week.
With an online workforce management system and mobile app you can start saving time, saving money and increasing productivity.
‘I want more hours this week.’
This usually happens after a schedule has been handed out and someone isn’t happy. With a workforce management system this can all be put under one roof where requests for more hours can be automatically queued so when someone can’t work, the system will allocate the shift to the member of staff who has indicated they want to work longer.
‘We’ve swapped our shifts.’
Happens a lot, doesn’t it?
Most of the time staff change shifts with each other without asking or forgetting to tell management. The nice clean spreadsheet that you once created, will then gets scribbled on. Names are crossed out. Hours are changed. Everything looks a mess.
Imagine if this process could all be done in one place, either online or through an app, and all the manager has to do is approve it with one click. Well, it's possible.
A multi-platform solution
Technological advances and a tech savvy workforce mean you can say goodbye to Excel and scribbled out schedules. With an online workforce management system and mobile app you can start saving time, saving money and increasing productivity.
So say goodbye to those spreadsheets and let the software do the hard work for you.
Want to find out more? Talk to one of our WFM consultants.
