Staff Scheduling

For your company to run efficiently and hassle-free each day, you need staff to perform tasks. It’s vitally important that you have enough staff assigned to cover any upcoming busy periods, for example, weekends or vacations.

Not having enough staff scheduled could lead to a decrease in productivity, morale and level of service provided to your customers.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what staff scheduling is, how to create your employee timetable and, why it’s important.

What is staff scheduling?

Staff scheduling is the process of assigning staff to tasks during a shift. A clear and concise shift schedule ensures all tasks are carried out and employees are aware of their responsibilities.

The following are some benefits of creating employee schedules:

• An increase in employee satisfaction and team morale.
• An increase in productivity.
• A reduction in safety risks.

How to create a schedule for employees

When you need to create your staff schedule, the following steps are great ways to ensure you do it correctly:

1. Know your team: Make sure you know and understand each of your employee’s strengths and weaknesses. This is vital when it comes to assigning staff to different tasks.
2. Build busy shifts around your best staff: When planning shifts for known busy periods, assign your best staff to the most difficult and important tasks.
3. Communicate with your staff: Ensure you communicate staffing schedules to your staff prior to their shift starting, this creates transparency throughout.
4. Honour any time-off requests: Try and minimize any changes to time off as much as possible. This builds the working relationship as well as minimizes any conflict with future scheduling.
5. Create an availability chart: Allow your employees to state when they are available, this allows for substitutes to be made if emergencies come up.
6. Have a backup for your original schedule: Ensure you have a backup in case you have multiple staff unavailable, make your staff aware of this.
7. Use a trusted shift planning tool: Use an excellent planning tool such as BrightHR’s shift planning software.

Why is it important to create staff schedules?

Scheduling staff is vitally important for many reasons. It creates a consistent order and flows to your business, with staff knowing what is required of them during a shift.

It also ensures that the more important tasks are covered by the appropriate people.

You can team up workers of equal strength, qualifications, and work rate to complete the more difficult and important tasks.

It's also useful for an employer to see how the work gets done and by whom. Moving forward, you can create an employee timetable that works better and more productively.

How to schedule staff fairly

It’s important to create a fair employee schedule. The last thing you want is an unhappy employee who feels like they’re being treated unfairly.

Don’t make any promises you can’t keep surrounding requests to do certain tasks. Similarly, try and assign staff to their preferred tasks where possible.

Be understanding of any employee’s concerns, especially during busy periods.

Can an employer change an employee’s work schedule?

As an employer, you have a right to change work schedules. Emergencies can come up that require changes to be made.

However, try and minimize this as much as possible to avoid any decrease in morale and employee happiness. If you regularly change an employee’s schedule at the last minute, this will have a direct effect on morale.

If you keep making changes suddenly, employees could look to leave their roles.

Get help with your staff scheduling today with BrightHR

It’s important that you get staff scheduling right, this could be the difference between your business running effectively or poorly. You need to make sure you assign tasks to the right employees where possible.

If you need assistance with your employee timetables, BrightHR has a handy tool that will make the whole process easier for you.

Our shift planning software allows you to manage employee schedules in seconds. Your staff will also receive notifications in real time of any changes or updates you make to the staff schedule.

Contact us on 18882204924 or book a demo today.