Although it might be hard to believe, self-scheduling has the capacity to completely transform your business. Here at Celayix, we’ve helped businesses grow, cut costs, and improve operations through automation. What a lot of managers fail to realize is that your employee scheduling process affects almost every area of your business, from employee retention to customer satisfaction. So, taking the time to improve your employee scheduling is definitely worthwhile.
Self-scheduling is a method of flexible scheduling that has the potential to really transform your business and allow you to grow while improving your bottom line. Generally, managers tend to steer clear of self-scheduling as they fear it will cause mayhem on the schedule, but there are ways to avoid that!
What is Self-Scheduling?
Self-scheduling is when schedulers allow employees to essentially choose their own shifts. The scheduler creates open shifts and the employees are then able to self-select into shifts they are eligible and able to work.
Self-scheduling has been growing in popularity over the last decade with the gig economy, the pandemic, and the changing demands of the global workforce. In reality, it is becoming standard practice for hourly workers as technology improves and work-life balance becomes more important than ever. So, how can self-scheduling really help your business?
Using self-scheduling to transform your business
Of course, if you’re going to introduce self-scheduling into your business, you want to know why, right? Let’s take a look at all of the ways that self-scheduling can truly foster chance in your organization!
Improve Employee Engagement & Retention
You may have caught our recent blog post highlighting just how important employee engagement is (if not, we highly recommend it!). As we mentioned above, work-life balance is very important to hourly and shift workers. In fact, one third of workers say work-life balance is the most important of all benefits. Self-scheduling is a great way to help your employees achieve work-life balance without impacting business operations.
Through self-scheduling, employees can take control of their own schedules. When choosing shifts, they can factor in any other commitments, responsibilities, and preferences. With this improved autonomy and freedom, employees are more likely to enjoy their job. When employees are satisfied in their role, they are more productive, loyal, and committed to the role. This of course improves your company output, and will likely improve customer or client relations as employees provide better service when happier. They are even more likely to anticipate and resolve customer conflict much easier too!
Free up management resources
Creating an employee schedule for shift/hourly workers is no easy feat. It is time-consuming and takes resources away from other business areas. When you hired or promoted your managers, you surely didn’t want them wasting time creating schedules? You wanted them to lead a time, improve operations or scale your business, right?
With self-scheduling, managers spend significantly less time creating and managing schedules – meaning they are free to direct their resources into other business areas. They no longer have to spend as much time combing through lists of employees and factoring in overtime, availability, and qualifications. With managers free to focus efforts elsewhere, you should experience improved productivity, smoother operations, and even boosted team morale.
Attract top talent
It’s no secret that the labor market is very competitive right now from the perspective of an employer. Employees are no longer at the mercy of businesses and are much more diligent when choosing where to work. This is on top of the extreme labor shortages on the back of the pandemic. Employers need to put their best foot forward when looking to hire new staff.
Self-scheduling will definitely help you attract prospective employees. In fact, 72% of people looking for a job believe that work-life balance is an important factor to consider. Given that self-scheduling is a sure-fire way to help employees achieve that balance, you might be missing out on some of the top talent in your field by ignoring it! Having the right employees is absolutely crucial to being a successful business. They are the ones interacting with customers/clients, producing the product/service you offer and they essentially represent your business. Using self-scheduling as a bargaining chip when trying to attract new, top talent is a great competitive advantage to have.
Reduce absenteeism
Absenteeism is a huge issue for employers, particularly with hourly and shift workers. As you can imagine, absenteeism causes huge issues for productivity, profitability and efficiency. What you may not know, is that absenteeism actually costs employers between $2,660 & $3,600 per employee every year.
Self-scheduling is a great way to reduce these costs, by reducing the number of absences and no-shows you experience. By giving employees input in their schedule, they will avoid choosing shifts that clash with other commitments, while also avoiding days they generally cannot work. Employees typically engage in absenteeism due to stress, burnout, childcare, family reasons, and illness/injury. Almost all of these absences are avoidable when employees choose when to work. Reduced absences lead to smoother operations, reduced costs, and improved productivity, what more could you want?
Implementing Self-Scheduling
Allowing employees to self-schedule is a big change for both employers, and employees. It is crucial to educate schedulers on how to effectively manage the new scheduling method. Without training and education, the new process will cause more issues than it will solve, which is not the ideal scenario. The same goes for your employees. If they are not given the right training on the new scheduling method, it is very possible that they might avoid picking up shifts at all. This prevents self-scheduling from working how you want it to.
While it technically is possible to manage self-scheduling manually, it is very time-consuming and extremely prone to errors. Most schedulers opt for some form of employee scheduling software with self-scheduling capabilities. This saves time and makes the process extremely easy. With automation, a rules-based engine, and our employee mobile app, self-scheduling has never been easier to implement than with Celayix. If you’d like to hear more about how Celayix can help you transform your business with self-scheduling, get in touch today!
