As a business owner/manager, we can confidently assume that one of your goals is to grow your business. This, as we know, is easier said than done. Business owners or managers often get tied down with administrative tasks or micromanaging, which prevents them from using their valuable expertise and knowledge to improve operations. An important part of being a successful manager is knowing where to invest your time. Spending lots of time on tasks such as employee scheduling is neither productive nor efficient from a manager’s perspective. However, workforce scheduling is a crucial element of a successful business, so it can be hard to find a balance.
Productivity and efficiency are absolutely essential to growing a business. Both of these are directly related to your workforce and can be drastically impacted if your workforce scheduling isn’t perfect. Managers shouldn’t have to waste time and effort to get a schedule to be fully optimized for productivity and efficiency. What can they do instead? They can invest in and make use of workforce scheduling software.
Automated workforce scheduling software can help you recover up to $59,692 per month to reinvest into your business.
What is Workforce Scheduling?
Before we dive into how workforce scheduling can help grow your business, let’s break down what workforce scheduling is.
Workforce scheduling is the process of assigning shifts to employees in order to meet the current and future demands of the workplace. A series of assigned shifts is a workforce schedule, which ensures that operations can continue as needed, even during the transition from one shift to another. Several factors affect workforce scheduling processes;
- Demand for products/services provided by the business
- Employee availability
- Skills, qualifications and certifications of employees
- Budget limitations, and more.
When you look at all of these factors, you can see how much consideration goes into creating an optimized workforce schedule. Making use of workforce scheduling software is the best way to expedite this process!
Why is Workforce Scheduling Important?
Workforce scheduling is a crucial business function. As mentioned above, your workforce directly impacts both productivity and efficiency. When you consider how productivity and efficiency contribute to profitability, you realize how truly important workforce scheduling is.
Aside from that, your workforce scheduling process also directly impacts your employees. Poor workforce scheduling practices often result in decreased employee engagement, increased employee absenteeism or turnover, and scheduling conflicts that can impact operations. Workforce scheduling software can reduce these risks, while also reducing the time spent on scheduling tasks. This will, in turn, lead to an improved bottom line for your business.
How can Workforce Scheduling Grow your Business?
Workforce scheduling software is the best way to improve your workforce scheduling processes. Below, we will break down the benefits of using it, and how it can be used to grow your business.
One of the main ways that workforce scheduling software can help grow your business is by saving you money. The best way to illustrate this is by showing you exactly how much money can be saved, based on an organization with 100 employees.
Excessive time spent scheduling
As the saying goes, time is money. Owner/manager time is generally the most expensive, right? Creating workforce schedules manually can take anywhere from an hour to 7 hours for larger companies scheduling lots of employees. With automated workforce scheduling software, this time can be cut drastically, and actually save you $3,085 per month. Bear in mind, the software will speed up the process, but also improve the quality of the schedule. The free time of managers can now better be spent improving operations, recruiting new employees, and interacting with employees. Win, win right?
Unbillable overtime
Are you resorting to overtime to fill schedule gaps? Workforce scheduling software can prevent that. With a rules-based engine, managers can create rules that prevent overtime from being scheduled. Overtime is very costly to employers, particularly when it cannot be billed to clients/customers. Based on the 16 hours that are averagely assigned to employees every month, you could save $6,000 per month by cutting it out.
Staff turnover
As mentioned above, poor workforce scheduling can result in increased employee turnover. Aside from impacting morale and disrupting operations, turnover is extremely expensive. Workforce scheduling software allows you to introduce scheduling initiatives such as self-scheduling that can provide improved work-life balance to employees, and reduce turnover. Based on the average cost of turnover per employee at 16% of earnings under $30,000 per year, and a 22.8% improvement in turnover from implementing self-scheduling systems, you can expect to save $8,885 per month.
Absenteeism
Perhaps one of the most expensive workforce scheduling-related expenses, absenteeism can cost you up to $2,660 per employee, per year. Workforce scheduling software provides you with the tools you need to reduce absenteeism, such as shift confirmations, flexible scheduling features, and a find replacement feature to reduce no-shows. Using these features to reduce and eliminate absenteeism means you could save up to $22,167 per month!
Payroll Fraud / Time Theft
We recently broke down time theft, how much it costs and how it can be prevented. Time theft generally occurs when systems/processes are easily manipulated by employees, or when morale/engagement is low. Workforce scheduling software improves processes around time collection and attendance monitoring, while also improving morale through flexible/fairer scheduling. According to the American Payroll Association, time theft can cost you up to 7% of your total payroll. For a company with 100 employees, workforce scheduling software can save you $17,049 per month.
Payroll Errors
Manually creating schedules and collecting time data is bound to lead to mistakes here and there. Human error is inevitable and unfortunately, it adds up. Workforce scheduling software automates the entire process, including schedule creation, time collection, attendance matching, and data transfers. According to the American Payroll Association’s low-bound estimate of 1% of payroll and IRS estimates of $845 in annual penalties per organization, payroll errors can cost up to $2,506 per month. The automation and accuracy of workforce scheduling software can eliminate this cost completely!
Taking all of the above points into consideration, you can see the unnecessary expenses related to scheduling inefficiencies. Automated workforce scheduling software can eliminate these costs, and for a company with 100 employees, recover up to $59,692 per month! This money could be re-invested into the business, whether its R&D, new technology, extra personnel, or other important resources. If you’d like to see how much money your company could save from switching to Celayix automated workforce scheduling, check out our Cost-benefit analyzer here!
How Celayix helped Genesis Security Grow
Celayix offers best-in-breed workforce scheduling software. We’ve been working to help businesses grow for over 20 years, by improving their employee scheduling processes. Canada-based security guard company Genesis came to Celayix with 500 guards, and a manual scheduling process. With the introduction of Celayix, Genesis was able to build better schedules faster, track guard time and attendance, and remove errors from their processes.
Since working with us, Genesis quickly grew from 500 guards to 1,400. Not only were they able to save and re-invest money to get to that point, but they were also able to scale their processes with ease. Celayix thrives on complexity and allows you to produce the same great results regardless of how many employees you have. You can see the other benefits that Genesis experienced from switching to Celayix here.
