Like a circus juggler, creating the perfect schedule is an exercise in spinning plates, while throwing balls in the air and riding a unicycle. There’s a lot to think about and a lot that can go wrong!
The trick—as the juggler knows only too well—is getting the right balance. This balance is between your employee happiness, business performance, and cost.
But how do you know you’ve got that balance right and how can you measure whether your schedules are a success or not?
In our Playbook For Optimized Schedules, we spoke about some ingredients that make up a great schedule. One of those ingredients was data.
And it’s data that will show you how your schedules are performing.
There are many different kinds of data that you could use for scheduling depending on your business, and many different kinds that Quinyx can show, but in this article we’re going to focus on a few core schedule KPIs (or metrics) that we believe are key to success.
Let’s take a look at them:
1. Number of scheduled employees
Starting with the basics, the first thing you might want to know when looking at your scheduling overview is how many employees you’ve scheduled during the selected time period, or even better, based on your filters. For example, we’ll clearly show the number of employees that have sent in their request for shifts, or those absent. If you can create a filter for it, we can easily save that view for you to recall at any time, along with the total number of employees you’re looking at.
2. Scheduled hours vs Nominal hours
This metric displays the number of hours scheduled for an employee in the selected period vs the number of nominal hours in an employee's agreement (those are the amount of hours they should be working). This will immediately give you an idea if an individual has been under or over utilized. In the case of over scheduling, this could increase your business’ cost and decrease the employee’s happiness, but it's also important to understand why any over or under scheduling has occurred - perhaps it’s been requested or initiated by the employee and could be helping rather than hurting, such as filling a gap in the schedule.
3. Worked hours vs Nominal hours
Similar to the metric above, this one shows which hours have been worked in total against the employee’s agreement hours. An important difference between the two metrics is that, in this instance, if an employee has had to work longer or shorter than the original shift times, that will be captured here, giving a more up to date view of how an employee’s schedule period is progressing and allowing you the adjust their hours accordingly, if need be.
4. Expected hours vs Nominal hours
This one is particularly useful if you want to ensure employees are meeting their nominal hours moving forward. For example, looking at the shifts they haven’t worked yet will give you a forecast of what that employee’s hours will look like based on their upcoming schedule - again allowing you to adjust accordingly if necessary.
5. Forecasted metrics
This is a great segue into other forecasted data. We speak extensively about how demand forecasting can help you schedule more accurately - especially when connected to a lot of the automated functions. Even so, showing data related to what metrics you are forecasting can be key to understanding what manual changes you may need to make as changes occur during the working period. Understanding and seeing the data that dictates how you schedule your workforce, and its trends, is imperative to making the right scheduling decisions.
6. Optimal Headcount
And connected to your forecast is,of course, the ultimate scheduling metric - how many people should you be scheduling to keep the business on track to meet its goals according to the forecast? As the forecast changes, even over the course of the day, so too will the amount of people that need to be scheduled. This metric will immediately give you an understanding of if you are generally under or over staffed and in many cases is the key metric to follow.
There are many other metrics that Quinyx can display or that you as a business may find useful but keeping an eye on these six will ensure you are off to a great start on your schedule optimisation journey.
Smart schedules can transform your business. They make your staff and customers happier. They give you better control over your workforce costs. And they ensure you always have the right people in the right place at the right time.
Using a workforce management solution like Quinyx for your scheduling needs will help you make better decisions, free up your time, save you money, reduce your admin and eradicate errors.
In short, it’s your key to unlocking the benefits of a happy workforce and running a happy, successful and profitable business.
Book a demo and we are happy to tell you all about how we can support you.
