The Definitive Guide to Shift Scheduling From best practices to inside tips, explore how to become a shift scheduling expert
THE ROAD TO BECOMING A SHIFT SCHEDULING EXPERT Effectively planning, managing and communicating your team s shifts can be like trying to complete a 5000 piece puzzle without knowing what the big picture looks like. You need to ensure that you not only have coverage but have the necessary skills to operate your businesses successfully. In addition to being a best practices guide, this ebook also includes exclusive tips for ShiftExpert ClickSoftware s premiere shift scheduling solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. From a chain of coffee houses to charity organizations and hotels, many business owners and shift managers struggle with creating and managing a schedule that not only meets the needs of their business, but also that of their employees. Managers want to take into account regulations, absences and company policies; employees will want to have the freedom to trade shifts, request time off and have shift preferences. Your business like each of the employees you are looking to schedule is unique, with its own set of goals and challenges. However, there are some cross-industry best practices that you can apply to improve your shift scheduling efficiency, visibility and employee happiness. This guide will walk you through the various stages of shift scheduling: understanding your needs, building, communicating, managing, tracking and reviewing.
UNDERSTANDING THE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE Before we can start to assemble the puzzle that is a working shift schedule, it s important to understand the pieces that we re working with and how they impact the overall schedule. Below are the four basic building blocks to shift scheduling: 5. Business Rules ShiftExpert comes pre-loaded with example rules and legislations that can be edited, turned on or off based on your own business and local legislations. These rules can either be set by the organization or by local legislation. This can include rest periods or maximum hours per shift. Unique rules can also come into play, including: how long a shift is before it is considered overtime, or limits on the number of weekend shifts per month. 1. Job Types or Skills Your first step will be to break down the different types of jobs or skills that are required to run your business. If you run a coffee house this could be someone who is trained to run the coffee machine or till. For a hotel, it could be someone skilled in staffing the security station or understanding the booking system. Not all companies will have employees with different roles or skills for example volunteer and charity groups. Perhaps you just need three people on site to hand out goods. 2. Staff Types Many organizations will have a mix of staff types including: part-time, full-time, temporary or volunteer (zero hour contracts). Understanding the mix and what business or individual rules impact each type is key to putting the full puzzle together. 3. Shift Types These types include a combination of shift times (i.e. morning or night), shift activities (i.e. on call ) and perhaps locations. 4. Shift Patterns Patterns can consist of fixed, where employees always work the same shifts, or rotating shifts; where they rotate through different days and time of day, for example: from days to nights. These rules often get converted into what is known as a shift scheduling policy.
MEETING THE NEEDS OF YOUR EMPLOYEES Keeping your team happy is just as important as meeting the needs and goals of your business. While you can t please everyone, here as some simple tips to keep in mind while building a shift schedule. ShiftExpert allows each employee to set his or her working preferences, including preferred shifts. This will then be taken into account when the schedule is created. Consistent Shifts In most cases employees desire a consistent shift. This stability of always knowing when their shift is allows them to better plan their personal lives. Personal Preferences Along the same lines as consistent shifts, can also be favorite shifts, where an employee prefers to work on a certain day or with a certain person. While these requests can often have an adverse effect on the complexity of creating your schedule, each employer or shift manager has to weigh the benefit of being flexible to employees wishes, against efficiency and overall business operations. The important thing is to be fair and not show favoritism towards one or more employees. Weekends & Consecutive Time Off Employees will often prefer to have weekends off. Again, while not always possible, you may want to include a rule into your scheduling policy that only has an employee working one weekend a month. After pay, having weekends free is one of the highest sought after benefits for shift workers. Next up in terms of importance is having two days off in a row. Even if this is a Wednesday/Thursday, you ve given your team member a chance to rest and come back to work refreshed.
BUILDING THE PERFECT SHIFT SCHEDULE Now the fun begins! Creating a schedule that takes into account all of the defined job types or skills, shift types, shift patterns, business rules and compliance with regulations is no easy task. Add in any additional complexity around employee preferences and you ll have your hands full for some time! ShiftExpert incorporates all of the regulations, company policies and employee working contracts to schedule shifts that maximize the efficiency of your staff. Using your employee s skills and defined shift patterns, ShiftExpert can automatically create a schedule, ensuring you not only have enough coverage, but cover the right skills to be successful. You can plan for weeks to months ahead with complete visibility into who works when, and how this planning affects the service, position coverage and budget. Your first step will be to select the medium that works best for you and your business. Some organizations will chose to keep it old school and use a physical board or paper-based schedule. Most organizations use some sort of electronic medium, including: shared digital calendar, basic spreadsheet or software-based solution. The inherent benefits of choosing a software-based solution are numerous given its highly flexible and efficient nature. Taking into account your business rules, the skills you need to cover, demand, the shift types and patterns, as well as any absences, holidays or training your employees have taken; you can then start to build your schedule. For most new managers or business owners, this is a process of trial and error and it may take some time before you get your schedule just right. Selecting a solution such as ShiftExpert will go a long way in helping you build a schedule that best suits your business by automating the shift scheduling process and maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of your business.
SHARING YOUR SHIFT SCHEDULE Shifts can be published one-by-one or all at once via: email, SMS to their phones or posting a print friendly version of the full schedule. Now that you ve built your schedule, it s time to share it with your team. Organizations have a wide variety of ways of sharing, and it depends on how the schedule was created, but these are the most common methods: Physically printing the schedule and posting it in a common space Emailing individuals a copy of the schedule Phone and SMS Shared digital calendar Keeping the method for sharing your schedule consistent will have a significant impact. Your team should know where, when and how the schedule is shared. It s also important when publishing your schedule that you do it far enough in advance to give your team enough time to plan. This also will help them feel settled and not nervous and unable to plan events and activities in their personal lives. There is nothing worse than finding out late on a Sunday night that you have to start first thing in the morning. By far the most efficient way of sharing a schedule is electronically, either via a shared electronic calendar, or by using a software-based scheduling solution such as ShiftExpert. Because as we all know a schedule is never set in stone.
MANAGING THE EVER CHANGING SHIFT SCHEDULE As anyone who has ever created a shift schedule knows, it never stays complete for long. Whether you are scheduling three employees or three hundred, changes are bound to happen. Each of these cases impact your schedule and threaten its stability and potentially your effectiveness and efficiency during the business day. However many employees you have, it s imperative to have a documented process that is openly shared and agreed to by your team. Shift Swapping Most employers will allow the swapping of shifts, but leave it up to the employee to find someone to swap with. It is then up to a manager to approve and update the schedule. Vacation and Time Off Employees will often request vacation or time off, which should be done with plenty of notice when possible, giving the manager time to approve it and find a replacement for that shift. Absences and Sick Leave When employees call in sick or have an unplanned emergency, the manager responsible for the schedule is faced with scrambling for replacement. They ll often have a go-to employee, someone they know who will fill in a pinch, or if local legislation and business rules allow it, they can ask one or two employees to add additional hours to their shifts; either before or after, to cover the absence. Promotions and Special Events Shift swapping, time off requests and sick leave can all be requested by the employee in ShiftExpert all from a mobile app. This means the employee can manage his or her schedule remotely from any location, at any time. All requests are then sent to a manager for approval. On occasion you will be faced with a need for additional staffing in order to cover a time planned high demand, for example during a marketing promotion, or during a special event. Plan ahead and ensure your team understand the circumstances for the need in extra shifts. Again, given the flexibility, it is recommended to keep the schedule in an electronic format, so updating it when the need arises (and it will) is as painless as possible.
EFFECTIVE TIME TRACKING AND ATTENDANCE An extension of managing the in-day schedule is the tracking of employees working hours and attendance. This is important for ensuring the hours requested are being worked and covered, as well as compensated for. ShiftExpert also includes time tracking and attendance allowing timesheets to be generated based on the employees clock-in and clock-out times on their mobile devices and wearable technology. This added feature means your employees only need one solution for their shift management and timesheet needs. ShiftExpert also has the capability to warn shift managers that a shift is in jeopardy due to an employee not clocking in. Traditional clock-in / clock-out machines require manual processes on both the employees end and by payroll or HR, where all of an employee s hours are transferred from the timecard to some sort of formal record, totaled and then paid accordingly. Today, these machines provide a more real-time approach to the process. Employees punch-in by entering their code into the machine or swiping an ID badge. Some scanners can even register employees through a biometric scan (fingerprint or facial-recognition). Records can then be exported to be used by payroll or HR. Ideally you want a system that works well with your chosen method of shift scheduling as well as with any existing HR or payroll systems.
REVIEWING THE SHIFT SCHEDULE A continuous review of the schedule is important to ensure you are maximizing its effectiveness. You may choose to re-evaluate your business rules over time, adjusting how they impact the schedule. ShiftExpert comes complete with a wide range of dashboards and reports that measure key KPIs to provide insight into the schedule for productivity gains. At a quick glance using visual charts you can see how many shifts are scheduled to each employee, how many absence requests have been made, reviewed and approved, the total number of planned working hours, planned shifts vs. logged time, and more! You may also receive or elicit feedback from your employees perhaps during annual reviews. It s important to take this feedback on board and consider the difficultly in adjusting the schedule accordingly. Again, your employees happiness with how their shifts are scheduled can go a long way to keeping them properly motivated and engaged on the job. Here are the top items to cover when reviewing your current schedule: Are you covering the shifts needed to maintain successful operations? Are you covering them in the most efficient way can you further maximize coverage or minimize costs? Do enough of your employees have the skills required to cover the necessary shifts? Do you need to provide additional training or cross-training? Do you have a fair and even distribution of work between your employees? Do you need to re-prioritize positions or certain shifts? Can you improve the adherence to employees preferences? Do you need to update the schedule based on any contractual changes with employees or vice versa? Have there been or will there be any new regulations coming into effect that may affect your shift schedule?
BECOME A SHIFT SCHEDULING EXPERT Given all of the complexities that go into effectively planning, managing and communicating your team s shifts it s no wonder that more and more organizations are turning to software-based solutions to this common business problem. ShiftExpert by ClickSoftware the world s leading provider of mobile workforce management solutions optimizes the planning, management and execution of your employees work shifts and timesheets across all departments. ShiftExpert incorporates the rules, regulations, absences, demand and company policies to schedule shifts that maximize the efficiency of your staff. Why not sign up for our free trial today? Start using ShiftExpert within minutes and discover how agile and easy of a solution it is!http://sforce.co/1ni0n2h ShiftExpert the smart, quick, easy and clear way to schedule shifts is now available via Salesforce AppExchange. The mobile component allows for total visibility on the go. Really great App from a very supportive team! I am very impressed with this app. It s quick and easy to use and the shifts are presented clearly and are very easy to manage. As a native Salesforce1 app, ShiftExpert provides employees, shift managers and planners with complete visibility into who works when, and how this planning affects the service, position coverage and budget. Additionally, ShiftExpert allows your business to: Align employee skills to shifts Balance work distribution between employees Specify working rules and employee working contracts Plan weeks to months ahead Publish shifts across all channels, including virtually all mobile devices Integrate timesheet tracking and reporting Take advantage of powerful reports and dashboards
ABOUT CLICKSOFTWARE ClickSoftware (NasdaqGS: CKSW) is the leading provider of automated mobile workforce management and service optimization solutions for the enterprise, both for mobile and in-house resources. As pioneers of the service chain optimization concept, ClickSoftware solutions provide organizations with end-to-end visibility and control of the entire service management chain by optimizing forecasting, planning, shift and task scheduling, mobility, and real-time management of resource and customer communication. Available via the cloud or on-premise, ClickSoftware solutions incorporate best business practices and advanced decision-making algorithms to manage service operations more efficiently, in a scalable, integrated manner. ClickSoftware is the premier choice for delivering superb business performance to service sector organizations of all sizes. The company is headquartered in the United States and Israel, with offices across Europe, and Asia Pacific. Contact Us For more information about mobile workforce management and how we can help you achieve real business benefits contact ClickSoftware: North America +1 (888) 438-3308 South America +55 (0) 11 3900-1151 Western Europe +44 (0) 1628 607000, Central and Eastern Europe +49 (0) 69 489813-0 Asia Pacific +972 3 765-9400 (Tel Aviv), +61 (0) 3 46-6400 (Melbourne), +91 124-4947050 (New Delhi) Visit us online at: www.clicksoftware.com