The shift schedule is the most important point of contact between the employee and the employer. Without a roster of who gets assigned to what, where, and when, the entire operation falls apart.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to give your scheduler some much-needed kudos.
We surveyed 149 schedulers across complex, shift-reliant industries to assess their labor management practices. The results gave us insight into just how complicated the daily nuances of scheduling can be.
They Deal with Time-Consuming and Scattered Processes
More than half of the respondents surveyed claimed they were stuck using non-automated processes to schedule employees and shifts. 34% of those relying on paper or spreadsheets are spending over 5 hours creating shift schedules each week.
Assigning employees to each required job for each shift seems straightforward. Scheduling, however, is not as plug-and-play as you might assume. Here are just some of the factors any scheduler needs to account for, for each employee, when assigning jobs:
- Previous hours worked to prevent unnecessary overtime, fatigue, or both
- Qualifications and certifications to ensure safety and compliance
- Current leave balances and upcoming PTO to confirm there are no foreseeable gaps in the base schedule
Unfortunately for schedulers who are dealing with paper and Excel processes, all this employee information is in disparate locations. Rather than looking at one screen that centralizes all employee data, they have to consolidate multiple spreadsheets and forms to ensure that an employee is qualified, available, and under their 40 hours. If HR houses this data in a separate system, the scheduler needs to coordinate with them, only adding to the inefficiency.
‘Have any certifications expired?’ ‘When did you last update the employee hours?’ ‘Is overtime accounted for on this Excel tab, or tracked on another?’ You can see how quickly those hours spent on creating the straight time schedule can add up.
Yes, all that work is… just for the straight time schedule.
They Handle Your Overtime Coverage, Too
28% of those relying on paper or spreadsheets are spending over 5 hours dealing with overtime coverage each week in addition to the time spent on creating the regular schedule.
Overtime can help companies two-fold; the employer ensures that deadlines are hit while the employee gets an opportunity for extra pay. Fair and balanced opportunities for overtime can increase employee satisfaction so much that many union contracts will stipulate overtime guarantees, making this a very necessary part of a scheduler’s responsibilities.
But a scheduler dedicating ten, seven, or even five hours of their workday to OT distribution is excessive. When your schedulers are still in the office after hours juggling union contracts, time and attendance sheets, and overtime request forms, remember to thank them on your way out.
They Handle Real-Time Employee Requests—Manually
The majority of survey respondents rely on paper forms, emails, or phone calls for handling employee requests like overtime, leave, and job swapping.
A shocking 37% of those who have manual employee request processes claim to have an automated scheduling software.
This is because real-time management is not integrated within their automated platform. The automation stops at the creation of the original schedule. This leaves out a huge opportunity to streamline the way schedulers are incorporating employee requests, as they are still stuck with paper forms in one way or another.
This could explain why your schedulers are still so busy, despite your organization’s investment in an automated time and attendance tool.
The Indeavor Solution
The majority of current Indeavor customers were using Excel and paper-based systems before realizing scheduling nirvana—the one that addresses the entire scheduling spectrum of forecasting, real-time management, and payroll.
Show thanks to your scheduler by giving them software that reduces the time it takes to create schedules and integrate employee requests. Give them an Indeavor Schedule.
Click here to request a demo.
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.
