Employee shift scheduling challenge ranks among the top difficulties that HR managers face. It contributes significantly to job dissatisfaction and increased employee turnover. Often, businesses such as hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and others face employee shift scheduling problems. 

Whether it is a customer support process for a manufacturing unit or a mid-sized healthcare facility – each requires a round-the-clock availability of personnel.

Floor managers and supervisors are primarily responsible for allocating shifts to employees. They in turn ensure that productivity levels are maintained, work life balance requirements are met and morale is not affected. Moreover, they need to take care of resource utilization, risk management, roster allocation, absenteeism, rescheduling and skill balance. They are further required to fix problems and improve productivity.

It has been seen that manual workforce scheduling creates problems:

• » Managers spend 20% of their time on scheduling tasks inefficiently
• » Manual scheduling errors lead to a 174% increase in employee turnover

Our sales team recently came across a customer support desk organization where the floor managers were facing challenges in allocating shifts manually.

21% of managers consider this a top challenge.

Managers often rely on spreadsheets, calendars, and paper to handle employee scheduling across multiple shifts. This may be a familiar approach, but often results in many employee scheduling challenges. 

Firstly, manually managing shift allocations can be inefficient, as it often involves time-consuming processes that require constant adjustments. Secondly, the manual method can negatively impact overall performance, as some employees may be overworked or underutilized. Thirdly, cost management is negatively impacted. Ineffective employee shifts allocation lead to unnecessary overtime and understaffing ending up with more spent on labor costs. Lastly, work-life balance suffers when scheduling is not well- managed. It may even lead to burnout and dissatisfaction. 

Is your organization stuck in a similar situation where employee scheduling issues never seem to end? Are your managers spending too much time  in manual employee shift scheduling?

HR managers must design shift patterns that along with employee needs. They should further establish clearly defined work schedules to maintain an efficient and satisfied workforce. 

Creating an effective employee shifts schedule, communicating schedule changes to employees, and ensuring adherence is thus important. Let’s look at a solution that will help an organization achieve these goals and more.

Most organizations now use cloud-based employee scheduling software to automate shift allocation and rostering, facilitating last-minute changes and saving time.

How a Web-Based Shift Management Solution Overcomes Scheduling Issues at Work?

With numerous vendors available in the market, it’s essential to choose the best solution tailored to your organizational needs. A highly configurable shift scheduling software, Empxtrack, offers flexibility and robust features to meet these employee shift scheduling challenges. It offers powerful employee scheduling features, enabling shift managers to make informed decisions on staffing requirements, overtime and on-call hours, labor costs, and more. 

The software helps in managing shift schedules for the week in less than 15 minutes. It’s intuitive design ensures that managers can quickly adapt to last-minute changes, minimizing disruptions and maintaining productivity. 

Empxtrack assisted a global mining company by implementing a workforce management solution that addressed employee shift scheduling problems efficiently. As a result, the company was successfully able to optimize resource utilization, increase operational efficiency, and reduce financial losses. Moreover, the availability of multiple reports empowered the company to analyze issues in real-time and take proactive corrective measures. 

In short, Empxtrack provides control on shift scheduling at a granular level, while allowing managers to focus on workforce scheduling with minimum supervision. 

Features of Empxtrack Workforce Scheduling Software

• » Generate work schedules automatically using industry-specific shift patterns or user-definable schedule plans
• » Schedule adequate staff with the right skills in each shift successfully
• » Allocate shift patterns for a group of employees with start and end dates
• » Define non-working days, start and end shift times, and applicable weekdays for each shift
• » Capture employee check-in and check-out time accurately
• » Allocate shift patterns for a group of employees with start and end dates
• » Monitor overworked and understaffing conditions based on skills, position and assignment
• » Publish work schedules and calendars easily in multiple formats, or even email work schedules to the employees
• » Define employee preferences, including availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and time off requests
• » Get alerts on availability conflicts, overlapped shift assignments, duplicate shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off, as per company rules
• » Assign relievers in case of emergencies or when fixing last minute reschedules
• » Set overtime policies where employees work overtime and pay accurately
• » Get reports on tasks for cost control and payroll purposes
• » Ensure company rules are abide by all employees 

Effective Employee Scheduling Can Help an Organization Grow. How?

Decrease in quality of work and productivity, low employee morale and workforce turnover, are the results of ineffective employee scheduling.

With capabilities to manage shift schedules effectively, managers can save on time and effort, track attendance and time accurately, improve employee communication and boost accountability among staff. Employee work life balance can be enhanced. Thus, a reduction in employee turnover and an increase in overall profitability of the company.

Frequently Asked Questions