According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), productivity losses linked to absenteeism cost U.S. employers $225.8 billion annually, or $1,685 per employee. For your hourly workforce, unscheduled absenteeism costs roughly $3,600 per year, per worker.
Complex scheduling environments that require labor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week run on the hope that positions are never understaffed. How confident are you that your current workforce management strategies achieve this?
With our Smart Backfill™ tool, you can achieve scheduling nirvana—even during times of crisis.
Improve Your Employee Scheduling Processes
Absences happen, and they can’t always be planned. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t plan for them.
When an employee is unexpectedly sick or simply a no-show, you need to find someone to replace them, and quick—without an automated vacancy-filling tool, however, the process is anything but.
You find yourself wasting time flipping through rolodexes and dialing numbers until your fingers are sore. While you are busy leaving voicemails, you may not be taking into account the person’s ability or qualifications to fill that shift; the more contacts you go through, the less mindful you may become. In the event that you cannot find someone to cover the shift, other employees may need to be paid overtime to get all the necessary work done and meet deadlines.
Here’s what the process would look like had you used Smart Backfill™, a module that integrates seamlessly within our automated employee scheduling system. The system will automatically call or text your contacts on a pre-configured call-out list, sequentially or all at once, to solve scheduling vacancies for you. All you need to do is click a few buttons to initiate the automated reach-out.
Now, you can focus on business-driving initiatives instead of leaving voicemails.
Improve Your Shift Scheduling To Ensure Compliance
There are repercussions to asking just about anyone who picks up the phone to cover a position that they aren’t qualified—or allowed—to fill. Without automation, this can happen very easily; especially if you’re just looking at papers and spreadsheets with a list of names and phone numbers and no certifications associated with them.
For one, you risk slowing down (or sometimes even endangering) the rest of the team when an unskilled person fills in for a job that requires certain credentials. For another, you risk employee grievances and dreaded fines that not only hurt the organization’s wallet, but its credibility.
With Smart Backfill™, you ensure that the system will call only qualified employees to fill in any scheduling gaps. What’s more, each action is auto-logged for future traceability and auditing, allowing you to easily settle grievances with a centralized system of record.
Improve The Work/Life Balance For Your Employees
You can improve both process efficiencies and employee satisfaction.
Rather than having a sick employee or someone dealing with a personal emergency feel pressured into finding their own replacement, the automated call-out list can be initiated in seconds by the manager or scheduler. Now a once aggravating process has never been easier!
You’ll also find that you’re empowering employees because you’re providing them more flexibility to approve or deny that automated call or text. It eliminates the discomfort of having to say “no” directly, whether to their coworker or management. Since Indeavor announced an open shift opportunity, no one feels directly called out and pressured to say “yes” to someone asking them if they can fill in. On the flip side, all qualified and available employees have the opportunity to fill in for a shift, meaning that someone who isn’t close to or doesn’t know the person who is absent gets an equal chance of being asked to cover.
There’s no better way to ensure scheduling fairness.
The Indeavor Solution
You can fill a schedule vacancy in minutes with Indeavor’s Smart Backfill™ tool. Easily call or text qualified employees to meet any need based on your pre-set compliance rules. Integrate with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Click here to request a demo, and we’ll show you how it works!
