How to Schedule Employees Effectively

By Cierra Campeau 5 September 2023 10 min read

Balancing the needs of your business and your employees is like orchestrating the perfect melody, ensuring everyone is in sync and hitting all the right notes. Here we’ll dive into the essential steps for creating top-notch employee schedules, explore the qualities of great schedules in various industries, and discover how workforce management software can elevate your scheduling game to a whole new level.

Get ready to unlock the secrets of scheduling mastery and watch your workforce thrive!

Balancing Business and Employee Needs
10 Steps for Effective Employee Schedules
Qualities & Best Practices of Great Schedules
How to Use Software to Schedule Employees

Balancing Business and Employee Needs

Organizations from manufacturers to hotels and hospitals must be fully staffed during opening hours to meet their objectives. They must keep their employees safe, sharp, and engaged enough to deliver exemplary customer, guest or patient services:

Factory workers must be safe, alert and productive, whether a millwright, quality inspector, or machine operator.
Retail workers must be energetic, attentive, and patient while stocking shelves, ringing up orders, and presenting products to busy shoppers.
Hotel concierge staff, valets, and restaurant servers must be conscientious, charismatic, and cordial.
Nurses, doctors, and hospital support staff must have stamina, a sense of urgency, and plenty of empathy.
Theme park, sporting arena, and concert hall staff must be knowledgeable and gregarious but be prepared to “fade into the background” when the show goes on.

Knowing how to schedule employees effectively is critical to ensuring employees in these roles have the energy, intellect, and emotional resources necessary to meet these requirements. They need the financial security from working enough hours each week and the physical strength from getting enough rest and relaxation.

Using a bottom-up scheduling approach and enabling employees to request the shifts they want might work for some businesses. Yet many organizations that rely on staff schedules that operate 24/7 may struggle with covering graveyard shifts and weekends.

Balanced, predictable, and consistent scheduling makes employees feel valued and appreciated. These sentiments can lead to improved productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Having enough employees with the right skillsets on each shift is vital to maximizing each workday and meeting short- and long-term goals.

Create Workplace Harmony with Competent Scheduling

Whether your business or institution operates 24/7 or 8/5, scheduling large shift crews or medium-sized teams requires effective organization and close monitoring. Orchestrating full and part-time staff to cover each week and weekend day is like conducting a symphony. Management needs a reliable, diversely skilled mix of administrative, customer-facing, and operations employees to meet each day’s objectives.

Are you a music lover who loves when a guitar, drum, or vocal solo kicks in during your favorite song – right on cue? You would likely want the anaesthesiologist to be just as timely when you are about to have surgery. For the automotive assembly team building your next car or SUV to be as in-synch and mentally focussed as a Formula One pit crew. Or if the chef de cuisine of your favorite restaurant is under the weather, a suitable replacement is called in to take her place.

How to Recognize Effective Employee Scheduling

As the saying goes, it’s hard to find good help these days. Fostering and maintaining employee loyalty among top performers and promising new hires is critical. Creating and maintaining a fair schedule without bias or favoritism goes a long way toward building loyalty. Let’s say an employee falls ill or requests paid time off (PTO) for a family vacation with advanced notice. Granting that employee the time to heal or recharge can motivate them to cover their counterparts on other shifts in the future. One good turn deserves another.

Ineffective scheduling can result in absenteeism, late arrivals, and poor employee morale. Denying employees time off with their friends and family can create the kind of resentment and disengagement that leads to quiet or loud quitting.

Using a workforce management platform like Evolia to expertly schedule shifts and time off goes a long way to fostering employee loyalty. It also motivates them to refer their skilled friends and family to join your ranks or buy your goods and services. Be sure to adopt a solution that enables employees to communicate with each other and with your scheduling administrator.

10 Steps for Effective Employee Schedules

Align your shift rosters with the tasks and responsibilities of each job role and skill set required. If a shift is missing a product specialist or a shift lead for any reason, it can cause employee stress and leave customers dissatisfied.
Empower employees to take control of their schedules and coordinate their own backups — as long as it won’t incur excessive overtime or create a skills gap on a shift.
Make schedules predictable, fair and consistent.
Ensure you have coverage for break times and typical ebbs and flows in traffic or demand. Monitor trends so you can predict changing needs and adjust staffing. Factors to be aware of include spikes in demand for new products, virus outbreaks increasing emergency room visits, or entertainment spectacles that draw large crowds.
Document and communicate employee roles, responsibilities, and policies for PTO, sick calls, on-time arrivals and early departures.
Eliminate physical clock-in punch cards and paper timesheets. Invest in the digital transformation of your employee scheduling workflows by implementing a scheduling platform. Harness the power of automation to streamline processes like onboarding new hires onto the schedule and offboarding departing employees.
Gather input before adopting a scheduling format and after implementing it.
Analyze employee reports to identify trends and anomalies like consistent lateness, absenteeism without notice, or early departures. Use this data to coach employees and identify if schedule flexibility could solve the problem.
Integrate your scheduling application with HR, payroll, and benefits software to create efficiencies and seamless workflows. Mitigate human error and give employees peace of mind they will be compensated for their hard work.
Gamify employee schedule adherence with incentives like gift cards, management recognition, or promotions. Create leaderboards to motivate and reward crews or individuals who meet their time and attendance KPIs.

Qualities & Best Practices of Great Schedules for Different Industries

Hospitality

Restaurant wait for staff, hotel front desk employees, bartenders, housekeepers and managers generally prefer predictable scheduling. Enabling them to bid on their shifts based on their skills and seniority via a mobile app can build loyalty and trust. Hotels are often huge facilities, making it difficult to see when employees arrive or leave. Don’t install time clocks in conspicuous places. Instead, use geofencing technology to identify employee arrivals and departures via their mobile devices to take the guesswork out of time tracking.

Make it easy for employees to keep in touch with each other with an integrated messaging system if they will be late for their shift or they want to arrange a shift swap.

Manufacturing

Understanding your business needs and choosing a scheduling type that is common in the manufacturing industry will save headaches. This could include rotating shifts or dupont shifts and can be especially helpful in covering roles like forklift driving, assembly, and product packaging. It can also help a manufacturer identify employees with the attitude, aptitude and work ethic to do a job, even if their resume lacks the experience to have been hired directly.

Cultivating a pool of on-call or standby employees can help them gain enough hands-on experience to earn full-time employment. This practice can apply to other industries, like hospitality too.

Manufacturing work also has several different shift patterns to consider, too.

Retail

Many retail employees are young, digitally savvy, and eager to earn money for school or to enrich their lifestyles. Equip them with a mobile app that can help keep them in touch with their colleagues and clock them in via geofence so they can get right to work without delay. If their personal schedules change and they are free for an available shift, make it easy for them to claim additional hours without calling store management.

Schedule your skeleton staff of department heads, senior managers and senior sales and customer services leaders at least three weeks ahead. The availability of other shift crew members may change due to other responsibilities like school or family obligations. A collaborative digital application gives employees more control over their availability and work hours.

Healthcare

Many doctors and nurses have specialized credentials and expertise. Keep track of when these certifications expire or renew so you can legally protect your healthcare institution by scheduling certified employees equitably. Many schedules in healthcare also need to consider night shifts.

Entertainment

Jobs like concert venue security staff, lifeguards, food and beverage vendor teams, and sports arena staff are often challenging to schedule and replace absent workers. Flexibility is paramount, as these roles and others have high turnover, workers often juggle multiple jobs and are often seasonal.

A mobile time and attendance application can make onboarding and scheduling these employees fast and hassle-free. Identify when the employee enters and leaves the workplace radius via GPS trackers. Enable available casual or part-time staff to bid on available work assignments with a few screen taps or mouse clicks. Avoid the hassle and uncertainty of when an employee arrived at work or left their post.

How to Use Software to Schedule Employees Effectively

Employee scheduling software is like a digital command center for orchestrating your workforce. It empowers your HR team to assign the necessary staffing resources to address the needs of your guests, customers, patients, and internal stakeholders. An application like Evolia can automate and enhance processes across the employee lifecycle:

Recruit local workers by posting jobs where motivated candidates are seeking employment.
Schedule full and part-time employees based on their skills, seniority, crew assignment, and availability.
Facilitate team communications so they can switch shifts and keep in touch with their colleagues about lateness or emergencies. Alleviate your scheduling admins from having to find a suitable backup.
Enable managers to assign tasks to skilled employees and to track when these assignments are completed. Eliminate paper notes that can get lost in the shuffle, or missed emails.
Streamline and digitize leave requests and approval workflows. Comply with regulatory requirements by ensuring you have certified and experienced personnel in place when and where they are needed.

Ready to make the switch?

Do you feel better informed about scheduling employees effectively after reading this article?

Can you envision your shift teams being more engaged in their responsibilities by having the latest information about their work assignments on their preferred mobile device? Would they have peace of mind knowing they could be clocked in when they arrived onsite via GPS, or by simply tapping their phone on a web-enabled time clock?

Would your HR team be relieved by their colleagues taking on more responsibility for finding a replacement if they can’t make their scheduled shift? Would your payroll specialists benefit from automated workflow of hours worked transferring directly into integrated systems like Payworks, ADP, and PowerPay?

Can you estimate the potential return on investment about providing your management team with rich insights and visibility into their employee’s scheduling adherence, and task completion time? This is all within reach when you implement the Evolia platform.

Wrapping it up

Congratulations, scheduling virtuosos! You’ve completed your journey through the world of effective employee scheduling, and you’re now equipped with the key to harmonizing your workforce like never before.

By balancing business and employee needs, implementing the best practices in scheduling, and harnessing the power of innovative software like Evolia, you’ve set the stage for a symphony of success.

So, take the lead and conduct your team with confidence, knowing that a well-orchestrated schedule leads to a harmonious and productive workplace.