Pertinent labor data like employee skills sets, current demands, and historical trends should be a part of your scheduler’s decision-making process when creating the shift roster.
Is this real-time data centralized and easily accessible? Across just a few of your sites or globally? It’s not if your enterprise is relying on manual processes, meaning your schedulers are not able to make the most strategic decisions. You need a labor scheduling optimization tool that integrates all this constantly changing information at the point of scheduling.
This helps consistently control labor costs during not just the regular shift, but also during overtime and real-time management scenarios like last-minute vacancy filling.
Ensure Proper Staffing
Deadline-driven environments like manufacturing or public transportation rely on staffing the right amount of people to hit production goals or complete a task.
Scheduling too many employees creates idle workers that need to get paid whether they were needed or not. Not scheduling enough employees creates bottlenecks in production that may require billing unanticipated (and costly) overtime hours. In both these scenarios, these extra costs would have been completely controllable if the scheduler had the right information available to them.
With access to the real-time data that is important to you, your enterprise will be staffed to match only what is needed, across all sites. On top of this, managers can forecast future staffing requirements and generate reports based on trends (e.g., peak and off-peak times) and adjust those shifts accordingly to meet those unique production needs.
Allow Employees to Fix Scheduling Gaps
The majority (55%) of hourly workers surveyed by Software Advice stated that they would use a mobile scheduling app if it were offered by their employer. When asked which scheduling features they would prioritize, 39% picked the ability to trade shifts and 38% would like to pick up shifts.
Clearly, your employees want to be a part of their scheduling process. Letting them do so will take tasks off of management’s plate, so why not let them?
With mobile-based capabilities, your employees can check their schedules, request leaves, volunteer for overtime and vacant jobs, and swap shifts. Mobile capabilities benefit organizations two-fold, improving process efficiencies and employee satisfaction. Your employees can take care of filling long-term and short-term vacancies for you—and they have expressed interest in being able to do so. This allows supervisors to focus on other business-driving initiatives rather than fighting fires caused by scheduling disruptions.
Automatically Fill Vacancies
When an employee is unexpectedly sick or simply a no-show, you need to find someone to replace them, fast. But dialing phone number after phone number hoping someone will pick up is time consuming, with no guarantee that someone will listen to your voicemail; especially on their day off.
Rather than leaving voicemails, you can automate the process. Automatically call or text your contacts on a pre-configured call out list, sequentially or all at once, to solve scheduling vacancies in just a few click.
The Indeavor Solution
Want to stop fighting fires and start setting your organization up for more success instead?
Indeavor’s solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling and absence management system. By integrating with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems, you can leverage a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data. Relieve your supervisors of manual tasks and the constant mental fatigue brought upon by scheduling changes by automating the entire process, connecting the data to all of your existing corporate systems, and ensuring you always have the right qualified employee in each position.
