Employee scheduling or staff scheduling is a challenge that every retailer faces and attempts to tackle using various approaches. Although it may appear complex to schedule the work hours of a team of numerous people, it may be a quick win to enhance productivity and optimize your spending if you discover the correct employee scheduling tools and approaches.
Any smart firm strikes a careful balance between keeping staff happy and productive while keeping an eye on the bottom line. The right technique and tools can accomplish this much more easily. Software that can help with employee scheduling and a range of other responsibilities to guarantee you are maximizing production while raising employee happiness is one of the best tools your business can invest in. This blog will look at the Employee Scheduling Tools that Celayix offers to schedulers, which can help save them time and money!
What is employee scheduling?
Shift Automation Scheduling is a digital method of managing a business’s employees. It’s a strong tool that reduces your reliance on manual scheduling with simple templates like Excel. Managers and executives have little real-time visibility over scheduling and reporting, which makes mitigating potential difficulties and making proactive changes and informed decisions challenging. But what kind of change should they expect?
The workforce situation is constantly changing, putting managers under added strain. Fluctuating demand and higher absenteeism during the recent pandemic have made scheduling uncertain. Despite the confusion, the rise of automated labor scheduling has provided organizations with a platform to consistently schedule competently. Let’s look at these employee scheduling tools that can save you time and money.
Celayix’s Employee Scheduling Tools
Employee scheduling is the core of the Celayix platform. Under this platform we have _ features integrated that will improve user experience and make scheduling easier and more effective. Let’s look at them
Rules-Based Engine
The Celayix rules-based engine‘s brilliance is the amount of control it affords the scheduler. It’s highly powerful and easy to use, and it can be tailored to any number of business rules. Consider it a specific search filter that you can use to schedule your personnel. The rules in Celayix are created by the scheduler, who then makes decisions on when the rules should be observed, softened, or ignored. Some of the rules that scheduler’s could set could be:
- Overtime Rules
- Qualification Rules
- Availability Rules
- Union Rules
- Legal Requirements
Artificial Intelligence
At Celayix, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more than just a marketing buzzword. Celayix’s scheduling automation method has been a long-term investment. The cutting-edge Machine Learning technology helps analyze prior employee schedule performance and determine which employees are better suited for a new shift plan. Essentially, it’s an easy-to-use, automated employee scheduling tool.
Celayix’s objective is to make employee scheduling simple. That aim is at the heart of every feature we add to our software, including AI. Aside from making scheduling easier, AI has a variety of other scheduling benefits:
- Data Management
- Improve Schedule Quality
- Reduce Time Spent Scheduling
- Ensure Scheduling is fair and unbiased
Find Replacement
The Find Replacement tool provides you with an easily searchable roster of available, competent staff. As an added bonus, Celayix powers this feature using both our Rules-Based engine and our Artificial Intelligence. A scheduler will be able to hit the locate replacement button and view a list of available staff members who fit all business standards, are not previously scheduled, and meet required conditions. This gives employers a list of the best-fitting and most cost-effective employees, reducing the hunt for a replacement to a matter of minutes.
Instead of repeating a problematic manual process, Celayix allows Employee A to simply drop the shift, and Celayix supplies the supervisor with a fully compliant and best-fit substitute in seconds – one that is in the best interests of the business. That is where the true benefits of Celayix Find Replacement are found. It not only alleviates the agony of looking for the employee, but it also finds the greatest potential replacement. Because of the quickness with which Find Replacement operates, last-minute scheduling changes are simple to manage.
Mobile App
The Celayix Mobile App is intended to help employees manage their calendars, communicate with their bosses, and act as a mobile time clock. Employees will see their forthcoming shifts as well as open shifts for self-scheduling or shift-bidding. They can establish their availability to get more control over their schedules, and they can utilize the app to seek time off.
Other benefits of Mobile App include:
- Robust features for rerouting calls on the fly
- Seamless switching between desktop and mobile
- A flexible work toolbox at your disposal
Self-Scheduling
Allowing employees to choose their own shifts, is referred to as self-scheduling. The scheduler produces open shifts, and employees can then self-select into shifts that they are qualified for and available to perform. Self-scheduling relieves schedulers of their responsibilities and provides employees far more liberty, while also offering flexibility for everyone involved and ensuring shifts are only filled by qualified people who meet business requirements.
Basically, self-scheduling does two things:
- Allows you to create schedules much faster
- Give employees more freedom to achieve a strong work-life balance.
This tool can provide several benefits to schedulers:
- Improved employee morale & retention
- Increased productivity
- Reduced absenteeism
- Save time scheduling
Autofill feature
To fill open shifts with appropriate staff members, the autofill tool employs algorithms that examine any set of requirements. Each organization sets its own requirements, which might contain any number of criteria. Qualifications, experience, overtime, seniority, availability, and other factors are examples. These rules allow schedulers complete control over which staff autofill suggestions are generated. Autofill ensures that all business requirements are followed. Also, with autofill, schedules can be filled in seconds.
Schedulers have complete control over any autofill suggestions. Once confirmed, they can submit the new shifts to employees for confirmation. The entire process of creating shifts, auto filling them, and releasing them to employees takes only a few minutes. Benefits of the autofill feature include:
- Eliminate unnecessary overtime
- Faster Optimized Scheduling
- Less risk of understaffing or double booking
- Eliminate Scheduling conflicts
- Fully Customizable
- Comply with labor laws and union rules
Shift Bidding
Shift bidding is the process by which one or more employees express their desire to work an open shift. It is an automated scheduling alternative that allows the scheduler to retain complete control while simultaneously providing employees more influence over their schedule.
Employers may find it difficult to give employees more control over their schedules. However, we have firsthand experience with the benefits that come with it. These advantages frequently outweigh the advantages of maintaining complete timetable control. The benefits of shift bidding and self scheduling are pretty much the same.
How Employee Scheduling tools can save you time and money
Any smart firm strikes a careful balance between keeping staff happy and productive while keeping an eye on the bottom line. With an ever-growing list of demands on managers and owners, this isn’t always an easy assignment.
However, this can be accomplished much more easily with the correct technique and tools. Software that can help with employee scheduling and a range of other responsibilities to guarantee you are maximizing production while raising employee happiness is one of the best tools your business can invest in. This year, consider these ways staff scheduling software might save you time and money:
Ensure the Right People Are on the Job
It’s difficult enough to ensure that the correct number of employees are on the job — something that managers in retail, call centers, and foodservice situations are well aware of. What if you need to cover specialized activities or field service jobs?
Employee scheduling tools can assist you in staffing effectively for call volumes, keeping remote work shifts straight, or ensuring a master plumber is accessible the day you book a complex installation task. Automations powered by gathered data can make it easier and easier to ensure the correct people are on the job at the right moments. This can increase revenues while decreasing costs associated with bottlenecks, rework, wait times, and customer experience difficulties.
Reduce Overtime Hours
Manually preparing schedules is time-consuming and exposes you to a range of costs, including overtime. It’s easy to miss the fact that you’ve booked workers unevenly while you’re trying to cover all shifts and client needs. For example, one employee may work 30 hours per week while another employee works 48 hours per week.
Employee scheduling tools alert you when someone has hit their weekly hour limit, letting you know that their hours could be reassigned to someone else. In some circumstances, you can even use automatic scheduling tools to construct rulesets that limit the amount of overtime allowed to fit your payroll budget for each week, month, or season.
Understanding your Hiring Needs
Do you have enough people to do the task? Manual scheduling makes it difficult to tell. Oversights can cause employees to spend 10+ overtime hours each week in order to complete unattainable quantities of work.
Employee scheduling tools can assist you in better understanding your company’s requirements. It also allows you to examine future-oriented questions. How many more personnel would you require if you add ten new customers or clients to your list? How many representatives are required to maintain average response time if phone volumes increase by 30% over the holidays?
When you have access to the data that scheduling software collects, you can make hiring decisions ahead of time. As a result, as volume increases, you’ll be prepared with onboarded and trained personnel to meet the demand. Having the correct amount of qualified people on your team can help you increase revenue while reducing costly customer service difficulties.
Reduce Attrition
Thinking ahead and scheduling to best utilize personnel without wearing them out has one key beneficial impact: greater employee morale.
Positive employee morale saves time and money in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples:
- Employees that are happier tend to be more productive.
- Employees with high morale are less stressed, which can contribute to lower error rates and better customer service.
- Because your employees are more likely to stay, you won’t have to hire new individuals to replace them.
- Employee morale is as much an efficiency factor as it is a human relations consideration because it can cost 1.5 times more to replace an employee than it does to keep a good one.
Mitigate Opportunities for Error
Careful planning reduces the likelihood of errors in your organization. For starters, it assures that the correct personnel (in the right numbers) are on the job. It does, however, allow you to incorporate important communication and transition responsibilities into your procedures.
When scheduling manually, it may be challenging to get shift changes exactly correct. If everyone is leaving one shift as another team is starting theirs, communication will suffer. During that brief and frantic transfer, it might be difficult to relay concerns and notes from one team to another. As a result, errors may arise, or clients may be left hanging because the communication ball has been dropped somewhere.
Employee scheduling tools can make it simple to stagger shift changes or other transitions for a smoother handoff. This saves both time and money because you don’t have to pay either to fix the problems. Furthermore, when employees are not required to spend time correcting earlier errors, they are free to focus on new revenue-generating duties. That will undoubtedly benefit your bottom line.
Customer service is another significant savings opportunity when error rates are reduced. When customers receive the correct service or product the first time, they are more likely to return and/or recommend you to others. That’s fantastic for revenue.
Help Ensure Compliance
If you work in a regulated sector of any kind, the last thing you want to do is go afoul of compliance requirements. Many professions, including healthcare and transportation, limit the amount of time individuals can work without respite. And your employer may have its own scheduling restrictions — or be subject to union guidelines.
If you make a mistake on the timetable, you could face severe compliance fines or other problems. Employee scheduling software can help you limit the likelihood of making this type of error. You could also make rulesets out of those regulations, making it nearly impossible to schedule someone who is in breach of them unintentionally.
Boost Customer Experience
You may have noticed that the topic of customer experience comes up several times in this post. That’s because it’s so important. Companies that prioritize the customer experience outperform their competition in terms of revenue. Because other market elements, such as price and product quality, have become more constant, nearly 66 percent of enterprises now compete on customer experience.
The facts are that if you are not providing excellent customer service, you are losing revenue and new customers. However, you cannot provide the best customer service if your employees are overworked or you do not have enough people on hand on any given day. Employee scheduling software can assist in resolving some of these issues.
