4 Reasons Why You Need to Schedule Your Staff With An App

It is possible for managers to spend anywhere from 5 – 8 hours or more every week, just on employee scheduling. 

Despite the high cost and risk around manual rostering, many companies are still using an Excel spreadsheet.

But automating the process to schedule your staff with an app is one of the quickest ways to the most profound impact on your bottom line.

It’s the number one way to see results fast. 

And this is why: 

#1: Saves time and cost; increases productivity

The goal of every business is profit and cost reduction; the company and all its entities depend on it. Scheduling your staff with an app means that daily, tedious and repetitive tasks are automated.

The time it takes for managers to manually schedule staff, and the expense per hour wasted, increases cost instead of reducing it.

A staff scheduling app reduces expenditure by improving workflow, productivity, and reliability, all of which lead to cost reduction. 

A company’s workforce is its most expensive asset and cutting out wasted time from repetitive tasks that can be automated, frees up their time to do work that provides greater value to the business.

At the same time, scheduling software allows managers to make changes quickly and communicate them via the app, eliminating the need for paper

[and confusion]

.

 For Tradies, scheduling the right number of staff together with the right experience is vital to maintain good customer service.

A company can save approximately $30 000 per year by automating their employee scheduling. Joumana Jacob, COO at Tradies, says, “All in all, the level of admin around managing our work scheduling and time and attendance tasks was almost a full-time job; in fact, it was taking four full days each week.”

Scheduling your staff with an app saves time and expenditure by:

• Dramatically increasing productivity in the company as a whole
• Enhancing workflow
• Quick scheduling
• Circumventing scheduling conflicts
• Automating scheduling
• Integration of clocking technologies
• Merging with payroll systems
• Digitizing overtime
• Being able to locate staff in various locations within seconds

#2: Makes managing staff performance efficient

Scheduling software optimizes employee management by highlighting issues and trends, like a lack of resources or recurring absences. 

Scheduling your staff with an app means performance management is significantly improved because it cuts out all manual aspects, and once again saving significant amounts of time and as a result, cost.

Reports are instantly available and accurate.

Managers can effectively monitor individual progress on organizational goals and ensure the right people are working on what they should be working on.  

Find trends of behavior or other issues in order to address them or prevent them in the future.

Keep on top of leave and absences, at the touch of a click, or with an automatically generated report.

#3: Allows flexibility and convenience; cuts risk

Scheduling your staff with an app allows relevant parties to access information 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world because the app is in the cloud. 

That means greater flexibility and convenience for managers and employees.

Management does not need to be in the office to publish schedules because it can be done from a mobile device.

Rostered staff can check their scheduled time anywhere at any time. 

Risk is also eliminated because of this – no need to print out messy or revised schedules or worry about miscommunication or human error when changes are made. The onus to check published schedules is on the employee, and this simplifies things tremendously.

Complying with regulations is easy. When you using a scheduling time app, it’s simple to schedule meal and rest breaks, work out shifts according to qualifications and so on. And the system contains proof for any auditors.

Some software allows you to schedule with various filters, for example, roster staff by experience or skill.

You may be able to set a limit on the number of hours each staff member works, so the system works out alternatives.

#4: Easy forecasting of requirements

Forecasting is essential to reduce costs and avoid issues that can be detrimental. Precise forecasting with an Excel spreadsheet is difficult, if not impossible, even when using Excel data hacks. 

A forecast is really about creating a model, and for an accurate model, historical data is necessary. But you can’t get accuracy from manual scheduling.

Planning and forecasting become simple and problem areas can easily be identified as all information is stored in the system. For example, managers can search operational inputs, and analyze time and attendance, and amount of hours worked per staff member, and then forecast for the future.

By using a scheduling app, forecasting becomes a piece of cake; just one click allows you to retrieve managerial reports that offer informed decisions around:

• Leave and absence of employees
• Details about each location
• Each employee’s overtime, breaks and so on.

In conclusion

When a business schedules staff with an app, it drastically decreases expenditure because it saves time, ups staff performance management, allows for flexibility to both employee and management, gives the ability to make better decisions, and it becomes much easier to identify problems.