Creating the perfect employee schedule is essential to running a successful business. But this task is hard to execute flawlessly every single time, especially when you have multiple employees at your company who are working multiple shifts.
Fortunately, there is one solution that can make things easier for you. This is rostering software.
What is rostering software?
It is a software that makes it easy to create an employee schedule. Rostering software can save you time by automating the process of employee scheduling. On the dashboard you will have access to information like staff availability, legally compliant drag and drop templates and AI monitoring. These features make it easy to both create and manage the schedule.
The software also comes with apps that simplify the process of sharing the schedule with your employees.
How can you use the app to improve employee productivity?
Upload the employee data:
The first step to getting the most out of employee scheduling software is to add data from the employee. You can add information like staff preferences, experience, skill level, productivity rate, leadership ability, availability, etc. to your rostering software.
This will make it easy to prepare the schedule later as you can just view this data and assign tasks accordingly right from the dashboard. So, make sure you add this data to your software.
If you don’t have this data, you need to collect it through interviews, surveys and observations. You will only get the best out of your rostering software if you have this information. So, put in the effort to collect accurate information.
Use the templates already available or create a custom one:
After you upload the data, you can create the schedule. You have two options here. One is to use an already available scheduling template created by the software company itself. These templates are legally compliant and are built taking the local laws. You will find things like optimal break times already built-in. You can either directly use these or modify them with the drag and drop editor.
If you aren’t satisfied with the template structures, you can go with the other option and create a custom template from scratch. And you can save it for later use.
After you create the schedule, you can share it with your employees. This can be done via the app provided by the software or through email, SMS or push notifications. For best results get all your employees to install the app on their mobile devices. As they can view the schedule better here and they can also turn on mobile notification as they will be alerted every time their schedule is available.
Also, some advanced rostering software allow employees to communicate with each other and the managers and request shift swaps. This will simplify the job of the management as they won’t need to spend a lot of time looking for replacements every time an employee wants to take some time off.
Make use of AI:
Several rostering software now come with built in AI that take historic employee activity, sales, foot traffic and bookings and forecast future activity. As they can also extract data from third party software. They then develop custom employee schedules based on this.
You should make use of this special feature to create better employee schedules for the future. This takes guess work out of the game and ensures you get more out of your employees at a higher ROI.
If this method works out better for you, you can use it every week to create more accurate schedules on a regular basis.
Conclusion…
Now you know what a rostering software is and how to get the most out of it. So, get yourself one today. It will help you create better schedules for them. This will boost their productivity, which will in turn help your company make a better profit without sacrificing employee happiness.
But be careful about the one you pick as not all of them are equal. You can use this post as a checklist to make sure you pick one that helps you execute all the tasks listed above and more.