Top employee scheduling mistakes to avoid

Managing your workforce can be an incredibly complex challenge – especially if your business operates in shifts. You need to balance having enough resources in place to keep up with customer demands, without overspending on staffing.

Add in the complication of incorporating part-time employees and contract workers into your shift plan, and it’s easy to see how errors get made when managing employee scheduling.

To help you make better use of your talented team, WhosOffice has put together a list of the top 5 employee scheduling mistakes – and how you can avoid them:

Mistake #1: scheduling too many people per shift

As the saying goes, many hands make light work. But the more people you’ve got working each shift, the greater your business overheads – and any productivity gains could be offset by the size of your payroll.

One of the reasons that companies are overzealous with employee scheduling is they simply don’t know how many people are required each shift. Plans are made on gut instinct rather than formal calculations. And that’s because they don’t have any kind of formal tools in place to manage their staffing requirements.

The quickest way to avoid overstaffing is for your company to invest in employee scheduling software, so you can gain complete visibility over staffing allocation. This way, you can clearly document shift patterns and review them against your cash flow; refining your rosters until you have the optimum amount of people working each day.

Mistake #2: scheduling too FEW people per shift

In contrast to excess staffing, sometimes companies roster too few people per shift. This leads to under-production, high levels of stress, and a greater risk of mistakes being made.

We often see businesses that have previously over-staffed go the opposite way with their employee scheduling; reducing numbers to counteract spiralling people costs until they cut back too far.

Learn more about planning shifts on skeleton staff.

Managing your employee scheduling via online software is an effective way to plan daily workforce requirements in detail, giving you a template for running a profitable operation.

And once you’ve optimised your shift patterns, if you have employee scheduling software in place you can simply duplicate those patterns whenever you need to produce a new rota – transforming shift planning from a complex process into a job that takes a matter of minutes.

Mistake #3: not putting enough senior staff on duty

It’s not just the number of people working that can determine the success of your employee scheduling; the mix of skills and seniority also plays an important role. If you’re not including enough senior staff on the rota, for example, your teams may lack the leadership and strategic decision-making capabilities needed to get on with their job.

Employee scheduling software can help here as well, as it allows you to set rules and restrictions around the type of employees working each shift. In addition to helping you find the right seniority mix, it can also ensure you’re running a fully compliant business – for instance, making sure that you assign a first aid qualified member of staff to every shift.

Mistake #4: forgetting to factor-in annual leave, which requires the rota to be changed

Even when you’ve got employee contract terms logged and adhered to, scheduling challenges don’t stop! Every time a member of your team goes on holiday, you’ve got a gap to fill.

Many shift-based businesses face producing staff rosters before people book time off, so a schedule that worked initially suddenly becomes out of date. This isn’t easy to pick up if you’re manually creating employee schedules; some companies don’t discover the mistake until the person who’s on holiday doesn’t turn up for work that day.

To solve this problem, forward-thinking firms have invested in employee scheduling software that includes an integrated staff holiday planner. By managing shift patterns and annual leave through the same programme, it’s easy to highlight conflict between an employee’s rota and their approved annual leave.

Mistake #5: managing staffing gaps as a separate task

Once you’ve got an accurate overview of who’s in and who’s off, there’s only one thing left to do to build a watertight employee schedule: replace the staff who are off on holiday. But filling shift vacancies is often treated as a separate task – something that falls to team leaders or HR – and this can make it a complex and time-consuming process.

Ideally, staffing gaps should be filled as seamlessly as possible, and employee scheduling software delivers benefits in this area too. Market-leading solutions like WhosOffice enable senior personnel to message relevant, available employees when there’s an opportunity to earn overtime or time off in lieu.

Whoever volunteers to take those extra shifts is immediately integrated into the online shift plan, and details of their additional hours can be sent directly to accounts. The whole process is effortless, paperless, and supports smooth-running business operations.

Ensure every shift is resourced correctly with WhosOffice

As you can see, there are many ways in which simple mistakes or miscalculations can lead to serious staffing issues, which can affect both your productivity and your profit margin. But employee scheduling software can help you to optimise staffing plans and spot errors immediately, to ensure every shift is resourced correctly.

WhosOffice employee scheduling software includes shift planning, staff holiday and overtime management tools in one web-based platform – along with loads more useful features including online task management and secure HR document storage. As everything is digital it’s quick to learn and use, and team members can manage their holiday from any location using WhosOffice’s mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Start your free WhosOffice trial to eradicate scheduling mistakes and plan employee shift patterns more effectively.