Planning for the quiet moments is an essential part of running a successful business. Yet skeleton staffing gets far less time and attention than optimising people during busy trading periods.
Finding the right balance of people is just as important off-peak as when your company is moving full speed ahead. To help firms make each day count, WhosOffice has put together some guidance on skeleton shift planning – so fewer numbers on the schedule don’t result in lower productivity.
Not just a numbers game
Skeleton staffing is a quality versus quantity challenge; with fewer hands on-deck, you need the right combination of people to continue essential work.
During quieter times, the first thing your business needs to decide is who should be on shift for things to function smoothly. This isn’t just a numbers game – you must find the right mix of skills, as well as the right amount of people. Look holistically across your business at employees’ seniority, unique strengths and job roles, to decide which personnel are pivotal.
Don’t forget health & safety and compliance requirements either. Make sure you cover basics such as ensuring first aid trained staff are on duty, in line with government guidance, for each shift.
Striking the right balance between people and profitability can feel like a fine art, which is why many companies decide to invest in staff scheduling software. Online shift planning will help you to match up staffing requirements with people’s contracts and availability, in a cost-effective manner.
Plan ahead to find the right people
While no two working days are the same for most companies, working out your minimum requirements will create a framework for you to map out skeleton operations far in advance.
One benefit of running operations through shift planning software is that you can create templates or patterns for different trading periods, including quieter times. You can even have two or three variations, based on your experiments finding the right mix of people.
Then, when a shift pattern ‘just works’, you can duplicate it for weeks, months or years in advance – whenever you know it’s likely to be a quiet day – reducing the time it takes to put staff rosters together.
In addition to cutting down on admin, planning ahead enables you to make sure pivotal people are available to work. A good shift planning platform will have built-in communication tools, so you can notify teams when new schedules are live, and enable them to log in and check what shifts they have coming up.
Mind the gap
When operations are quieter than usual, it’s tempting to worry less about people’s availability to work. However, factors such as annual leave, time off in lieu, sickness and other absences can massively impact productivity when there are minimal staff on shift.
To successfully run skeleton staffing, your business needs to clearly identify when a key team member cannot work, and work quickly to fill that gap. This is something that online shift planning tools can support with.
Rather than having to manually coordinate the holiday calendar or remember who’s off sick, running all day-to-day operations through a central system keeps essential information in one place. Some digital shift planners like WhosOffice have integrated leave management systems, so that time off is recorded alongside shift plans.
By bringing shift planning and leave management software together, the two parts of the programme work symbiotically to identify gaps in the schedule. This way, team leaders and managers will immediately see where key personnel are missing for skeleton shifts, and they can send notifications out to available staff, to fill that role as quickly as possible.
Make every shift count
The key to running an efficient business is making every shift count – even in the quieter moments. Your company doesn’t have the benefit of strength in numbers during skeleton shifts, so it’s vital that the right people are on duty to run a profitable, productive operation.
Analysing the exact combination of people you need to keep work moving forward (and no more) is the first step towards successful skeleton shift planning. Looking ahead to ensure those people are available, and filling the gaps if they’re not, is the second. Both of these steps can be achieved easily and cost efficiently with shift planning software.
WhosOffice shift planning tools already help a broad range of businesses to manage peak and off-peak staffing requirements. Get in touch to find out how we can help your company improve staff scheduling for every single shift.
Book a free WhosOffice trial to explore our shift planning software.
Photo by Vienna Reyes of Unsplash.com
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on Tuesday, 01st Dec 2020