The Advisor

SEVEN BEST PRACTICES for EMPLOYEE SCHEDULING
by Nancy Berger

Managers in the retail and service business often spend countless hours working out timetables and employee rosters, trying to get their shifts and schedules just right. Getting it "just right" is critical to maintaining proper service levels, satisfied customers, and quality employee retention. If you're one of those managers you'll be interested in the following best practices for scheduling employees.

1. Consider peak hours and high season; dead hours and low season when allocating the number of employees per shift. You want to ensure your customers are getting proper attention. Understaffing creates havoc for customers and employees. Not only can you lose customers but also employees. Overstaffing, on the other hand, is costly.

2. Plan for vacations, time-off, holidays in advance. Why wait till the last minute? Ask your employees to fill out a time-off request form at least one month in advance. Your employees will appreciate working for a business that cares about their leisure time.

3. Take your employees' preferences into account when scheduling. Some actually prefer night shifts or weekend shifts while others might not particularly like them but want them for their higher wages. Distribute highly sought after shifts evenly among employees as much as possible. Again, you need to know employees' preferred days and hours. Make sure you also ask them which days or hours they have problems with in order to avoid "violating" their preferences.

4. Employees' skill set, seniority, and experience play an important role in ensuring that each department/shift/station is allocated an optimized team. A skill set could be any ability required for the job such as knowledge of a foreign language (important for contact centers), certification or ability to operate certain machinery. In a team/crew scheduled for a particular shift, you really must have at least one experienced member who can guide the others or mentor the newer members. You should put together a chart will such valuable info for scheduling purposes. Group your employees according to qualifications so that in case of a team member's absence, you know exactly who can fill in.

5. Always send your employees a copy of their schedules at least one month in advance for their approval. Ask them to check that schedules do not conflict, fill their weekly hours/quotas, and are in keeping with their preferences. Also request a confirmation from your employees. You can do all this via email using a template you can update monthly. Equally important is to save all scheduling history - you might have to deal with an employee that feels s/he hasn't been adequately scheduled. If you have an automated scheduling program, you can send a report to all your employees instantly and maintain a database of retrievable scheduling history.

6. Schedule days-off for training in advance. If your company offers training courses and seminars, you must factor those into your scheduling. Make sure that you know who is registered for training throughout the year to make allowances for their absence.

7. Create a stand-by list of employees. There's no need to scramble looking for replacement; prepare a list of employees willing to replace absent employees who call in sick at the last minute. This is a common occurrence so there's no reason not to be equipped with a list. Expect the unexpected to happen at the most inconvenient of times.

Following those seven best practices can make employee scheduling more effective. True, there are many factors to consider if you want effective scheduling but the rewards outweigh the effort. If you schedule the old-fashioned way on paper or on a simple spreadsheet, it's time to move on and get a good scheduling software program.

A good scheduler, such as DRoster, will not only save you time but it will optimize your staff to guarantee good service levels, satisfied customers, happy employees with a higher retention rate and an all-round positive work environment. Most of all, you can implement best practices for staff scheduling quickly and in a headache-free way.

Author: Nancy Berger – http://www.kappix.com, provider of free employee scheduling software DRoster.