For a manager, assigning or understanding the team’s task holds the utmost importance. As a company’s success depends on your team’s KPIs and their daily performance, this is where the work schedule comes in.
Working on employees’ schedules can be tiresome, especially if you manage your employees through multiple job sites. You have to get an update for each field worker to find out which tasks they are assigned, the status of previous/current tasks, the estimated time of completion, and many more inputs.
Numerous tasks need to be done to maintain a balanced team schedule. The tasks can vary from account management, financial management, marketing, and sales as well as other operations activities in the company.
There is no denying that time spent on task scheduling significantly impacts your business, especially when done manually. It can be tedious and time consuming with a high chance of error.
If it’s not done right, it might affect how well your staff does their jobs, how productive they are, and even how much money you make. You don’t want to fall behind or leave things till the last minute or face any other penalties like delayed deliveries or lost clients.
Thus, a staff schedule is a crucial piece of a business management system. With the help of a work schedule app, you can get timely updates from your employees and can monitor their performance. Also helps your team achieve their goals more easily by giving them an outline of what they need to accomplish each day.
According to a report in 2020, it showed that staff spent more than 44 minutes on social media every day. Another report states that 39% of US employees face stress due to high workloads.
The benefits of a job scheduling app are many: It makes it easy to plan and manage your employees’ time, boosts productivity, and improves efficiency, as well as keeps everything in order throughout the day and week of running your business. Let’s dive into how working efficiently on an employee schedule can help your business.
- Monitor Pending Tasks
Scheduling and delegating a task is an essential aspect of management. It helps to ensure that each member of the team has assigned responsibilities and targets, in terms of their availability and productivity.
There might be times when your employees are overburdened with tasks or go for unplanned leaves. This increases the number of pending tasks in our inboxes or calendars. A proper scheduling system can help with this and alert a manager when a project is running late which can help avoid the problems that may occur if nothing is done. When these are labeled and scheduled properly, matters will be resolved quicker than otherwise, keeping your business in check and on time.
- Efficient Project Planning
Project management techniques are used to determine critical requirements and develop an effective strategy to complete the entire project efficiently. Another goal that can be achieved with job scheduling is to maximize productivity while controlling costs.
Job Scheduling is an important part of planning and perfecting a project process. It helps in setting up projects as per employees’ timetables which will not only avoid any unforeseen delay but also maximize performance and meet the deadline.
Scheduling with human oversight can be difficult, but having a scheduling software system can help you keep track of your workers’ availability so that you don’t end up losing clients or business loss due to unmet deadlines.
- Manage overtime hours effectively
Scheduling is a critical task for managing overtime hours. Employers need to identify the employees working night shifts, double shifts, holidays, and all other similar situations that may lead to an increase in their hours.
With the help of the work schedule app, it will be easier to recognize employees who work beyond their scheduled hours and improve efficiency at the workplace by reducing their workload.
- Preventing cost overruns
Traditional scheduling can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, which can drive up your payroll costs. To avoid a cost overrun or missed deadline, it is essential to establish an accurate schedule that identifies tasks and employees who are available to perform them.
An automated software program can ensure that all employees are working within their skill and knowledge level across different tasks. This helps to guarantee that each employee is accountable for outstanding results, and can complete the tasks accurately and efficiently. It can also generate a flexible, customizable scheduling solution that pulls out all the stops to ensure costs are kept as low as possible.
- Expanding Skill Sets
An employee’s skills, knowledge and abilities have a direct impact on your organization. When it comes to your employees and the skills they have, it is important to identify gaps between their skills and the skills required in specific job roles.
While an automated work schedule app tags the task as per the skill set, it can further identify key gaps where more employee development is needed. For example, if an employee has been trained in one type of job but needs additional training to perform their duties correctly, then this could be a gap that can be addressed by your team through training.
- Reducing Manual Tasks
Scheduling employee hours manually is one of the most labor-intensive tasks in any organization. As the number of employees increases, managing staff schedules can become highly challenging.
Scheduling systems help alleviate some of the manual tasks associated with scheduling; such as generating activity reports, accepting time off requests, processing shift changes, and building schedules.
It enables business owners to reduce the burden of day-to-day tasks that take up an entire department manager’s attention, freeing them up to focus on more strategic initiatives. To scale your business and keep costs low, it’s crucial to automate these manual tasks.
Factors to consider while selecting a job scheduling system
Job scheduling makes it easy for you to keep track of your employees’ work. You can even schedule for specific days, times, and locations. You can review the responsibilities of each employee and have a look at the status of their job-related tasks. This means that you’ll be able to cut down on time spent on assigning and communicating tasks for each employee on their time.
Finding the right employee scheduling software for your business is not an easy job. There are so many such apps in the market, but choosing one is really important. But before you go through all this confusion, it’s better to have a clear idea about factors that need to be considered while selecting an apt app. Here are some factors that you should take into consideration before making a decision:
- User-friendly
When choosing the right employee scheduling software, you should look for one which is easy to understand and use. You need to have one that automates the scheduling process with zero hassles. An easy-to-use software also helps you save time, reduce errors and increase efficiency in your office.
Employee scheduling software should allow you to take full control of time and skip the cumbersome filling of forms, entering data, and making a number of changes. With such a tool, you can schedule the employees working in the field with a few clicks.
- Work schedule app customization
There are many factors involved when it comes to scheduling and managing employees. Some businesses have a simple workflow that involves only a handful of staff, while others have hundreds of employees with dozens of different workflows.
Whether you’re new to the workforce management world or looking to differentiate yourself from your competition, customization is key. A custom application that can meet all of your needs will provide the best support and functionality while reducing errors and hassles in the process.
- Connect teams with easy communication
Communication is another important aspect when it comes to handling employee schedules. You need a platform that provides you with an inbuilt communication option that works across teams and departments.
This way, you won’t have to deal with individual schedules as well as shift changes being announced at the wrong time. You may also want to look for scheduling software that includes features like SMS (Text Message) notifications, email communication, and push messages to keep your team on track. You can also focus on the ease of sending timesheets, schedules, invoices, and other related information.
- Mobile-friendly User Interface
One of the biggest challenges of using scheduling software is that it requires users to have access to a computer, desktop, or laptop. Businesses want to provide their employees with the flexibility of changing schedules on the go and accomplishing their daily tasks effortlessly.
With a mobile-friendly app, a manager can view and manage employee schedules anytime, anywhere. Employees on the other hand can get notifications about their scheduled activities even when they are not at their work location. This feature also makes it easy for employees to share schedules with others or change them when needed even when they are not at their job location.
- Customer support
Software solutions are filled with technical details and intricate settings, but this only makes your job easier. Not everything is convenient for the user. At times, you may require assistance, so software customer support is a must while onboarding a software solution.
Additionally, you need to configure the solution properly and know how to use it effectively. It is also important for customer service representatives to assist customers in case any problem arises during the use of the solution. A great vendor should also have excellent content resources and a helpdesk that explains in detail the process of using their products.
- Compliance with Labor Law
Non-compliance is the process of failing to comply with a regulation, plan, or standard. Once you have gotten past this stage, you will have to face legal action by government agencies. This can be stressful and lead to fines or penalties.
The most common reason for non-compliance is a human error — either from your side or from something beyond your control such as equipment failure or poor planning or bad weather conditions. You can avoid these kinds of issues by ensuring that the selected scheduling software has an understanding of various labor laws in your state to assist with compliance.
- Dynamic Reporting
Scheduling software has proved to be a great business productivity tool. It helps businesses to take better control of their workforce, schedule employees, and avoid any errors. However, scheduling software should also be capable of serving dynamic reports and providing managers with insights that help them in making better staffing decisions.
Automating your scheduling process is not just about assigning tasks. It should be capable of also generating dynamic reports that can help managers get accurate information about employees’ performance.
Conclusion:
In a nutshell, job scheduling apps can help any business that needs to assign jobs to workers—be it a mechanic, contractor, car wash, or any other type of ‘on-the-job’ placement. In all cases, job scheduling apps are the solution for keeping jobs organized, on time, and on budget – and will save you both time and money.
Before selecting the staff schedule app, ensure the software is robust and provides you with everything you need to run your business smoothly. The app needs to be secure and have a user-friendly interface.
There are different types of scheduling systems available today and each one comes with its own set of unique features. Start smart scheduling for your business today!