Finding a new employee is easier than keeping a good one. Scheduling problems have been discovered to be one of the significant factors contributing to workers’ dissatisfaction and invariably a part of the main reason they could decide to quit.
Preparing employee schedules is also a nightmare for many Human Resources (HR) managers. The schedule is expected to be fair to all staff without a slight bias for any of them.
Below are some of the common employee scheduling problems and tips on how to solve them;
Labour laws
Employee scheduling must comply with the labor law in your company’s area of operation to avoid lawsuits and fines. Meanwhile, these laws may not cover some industries, leaving the management of companies in the industry to figure out things themselves.
It is also important for the management to keep abreast of the law.
If your work demands longer hours than normal, you may provide incentives for your staff such as offering bonuses and higher pay rates. Also, providing a friendlier work environment will help boost their morale and willingness to commit more time.
Do not hesitate to give compliments when due and always let them know how important they are to the business while explaining the reason for the need for long work hours, unlike in other industries.
Employees’ competence and availability
Workers have varying areas of competence and availability. An effective employee schedule will assign the best staff with the most skillset for particular tasks, and at the best time, they are most likely to be available.
Improper scheduling may assign an employee with no skills for the task or assign it to a competent staff with health conditions or family issues at the time.
To solve this kind of problem, you may want to request all workers submit their most available time to work and if it is a 9-5 job schedule, take notice of those that would be unavailable due to emergencies such as sickness.
Workers’ CVs can also be evaluated to identify those with closer skill sets so they can be shuffled whenever the need arises.
Scheduling delay
It is understandable that as a management staff, you may be responsible for lots of other tasks in the company. This, however, does not justify any delay in the employees’ schedule announcement.
Always dedicate a specific date as a deadline for preparing employees’ schedule roaster. When the schedule is released on time, it allows staff that might be unavailable to inform in adequate time.
Understaffing
When the business is understaffed, no amount of scheduling can help except if you plan to overwork your staff.
The best solution to resolve this scheduling problem is to interview and hire more employees.
Failure to do this will take a hit on your productivity which will invariably affect the business and customers’ satisfaction.
For instance, a retail store with lots of customers schedules just four staff to attend to them, but this is not enough. There is a long queue, and the customers are impatient and angry, then they leave while your staff is stressed out.
Overstaffing
It is possible to overstaff, especially when you are expecting increased activities. This is prominent in the hospitality and restaurant businesses, where managers place workers on “clopen” shifts.
Clopen implies the scheduled staff work till closing shift one day and then resume to work an opening shift the next day. Such workers may have less than 6 hours to rest and refresh until the next shift.
Such a shift schedule can become a nightmare and cause disgruntlement to employees when it becomes regular.
The solution to this is scheduling in advance and evaluating the list to see which employee is overworked and those that need to be taken off the clopen shift.
Lack of backup staff
Despite announcing a schedule early, emergencies happen and could result in the unavailability of an employee.
Likewise, some employees, for reasons best known to them, may fail to appear without prior notice via call or text.
To prevent the negative impact of such development on the business, always request submission of interest to work overtime from employees.
This set of employees could be your backup whenever there is a shortage of manpower.
Absence of live updates
The management in charge of employee scheduling in some companies still relies on paper and pen. This is not efficient for handling a task that could be rigid and requires live updates.
Most of the problems faced during the process can be solved using Employee Scheduling Software.
The developers of this kind of software take into consideration all the expected ups and downs of the tasks with algorithms that offer instant solutions and live tracking to observe what is working and what is not.
They are also designed to adapt to any industry and company size.
