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Discover the Surprising Ways That Modern Tech Tools Help You with Staff Scheduling

Staff scheduling may be even more difficult to handle as we get into summer, especially considering the existing labor shortages at many companies. Here are 5 top scheduling challenges your organization may face this year, plus tips on how new technologies can help solve them.

5 Top Staff Scheduling Challenges & Their Solutions

  1. Availability

If your company is already having trouble filling shifts, you are probably not looking forward to the upcoming season of summer vacations and family trips. Even your employees who plan to stay in town may have limited availability while young kids are home from school.

In the past, your managers may have found themselves scrambling to fill absences or cover shifts that were mistakenly scheduled during times when employees were unavailable. Now, new technologies can significantly reduce this problem.

Using group scheduling features in modern scheduling tools, your managers can have employees enter their availability and preferences directly into the system. Your software will then take those factors into account automatically when scheduling shifts, resulting in better attendance with less stress.

  1. Last-minute changes

Maybe it’s the long days or the heat. Whatever the reason, we’ve all experienced the uncomfortable fact that employees are more likely to show up late or at the wrong work locations during the summer months.

Employee no-shows in prior summers may have harmed your customer satisfaction ratings or put your business at risk of non-compliance. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to happen anymore. Modern, high-tech solutions are now affordable for businesses of all sizes, which means your staff can rally in response to last-minute changes.

Modern staff scheduling software provides managers with real-time notifications about absences and restricts employee punches to approved GPS locations. It also empowers employees to share critical shift information quickly and easily using secure collaboration tools.

  1. Labor laws and regulations

Summertime staff shortages can put your company at risk simply if your managers mistakenly approve one too many shifts that a hard-working employee offers to fill in on.

It can be difficult to avoid this issue, but the best way to stay compliant with evolving labor compliance laws is to use scheduling software that relies on set rules and policies for each shift.

Tech solutions make labor compliance easier by showing your managers visual cues when shifts are over- or understaffed and highlight when employees are at risk of overscheduling. They also help make sure you don’t overlook important staff scheduling restrictions like breaks or lunches.

  1. Skill levels and expertise

Maintaining appropriate levels of customer service requires that you always have the right staff at the right time, but this can be hard to ensure when critical staff members have limited availability or make last-minute changes.

You certainly don’t want to end up in that common summertime situation where it turns out that the employee who agreed to fill in on a shift does not have the necessary skills or experience to complete required job duties.

Today’s latest scheduling tools help you avoid headaches like these by building schedules or allowing shift swaps based on employee availability, qualifications, proximity, rating, cost, or other critical factors that meet your business needs.

  1. Communication

The fastest, easiest way to handle the challenges of summer staffing is by empowering your employees to solve issues themselves. However, that requires clear lines of communication.

Here are some questions to consider: Can your employees reach a manager in an emergency? Can they reach each other? Will they know their upcoming shifts if they are out of town? Can they easily manage staffing issues on their own by swapping, dropping, or picking up shifts from each other? If you answered “no” to even one of these questions, your business is at risk of staff shortages this summer.

Fortunately, tech-based scheduling tools can help clear all these issues up at once. Modern solutions feature virtual “shift boards” that employees can view on demand from their mobile devices, and the best tools make those shift boards interactive. By working with these tools, employees can quickly drop, pick up, or swap shifts on their own, which will make your scheduling tasks easier all summer long.

Clear Up Staff Scheduling This Summer with Attendance on Demand

Attendance on Demand is a workforce management solution with automated, human-centered products that intelligently solve challenges and integrate with the best payroll and HCM platforms. The software provides a variety of workforce management capabilities, one of which is scheduling.

As a leading scheduling tool, Attendance on Demand includes all the capabilities listed in each point above to make your summer scheduling tasks easier. Better yet, it also reduces your company’s administrative burden related to complex pay calculations, leave scheduling, and in-depth labor reporting.

Attendance on Demand is compliant with federal, state, and local labor laws and includes a wide range of capabilities such as time and labor tracking, leave management, the very exciting Pay on Demand function (which we’ll talk about in another blog soon), integration with data collection tools and, of course, scheduling automation.

 

Learn More About Attendance on Demand Scheduling

 

Since 2003, PeopleSense has established itself as the definitive ERP and single source workforce management solution provider for businesses of all sizes throughout the U.S. and Canada, offering consulting for Made2Manage® (M2M®) and Intuitive®, Sage HRMS, time and attendance solutions, Acumatica, and related services and products. PeopleSense provides clients with the peace of mind that comes from working with experienced consultants dedicated to customer service, who are affordably priced with no annual contracts. Reach out to get your business software questions answered.