Employee Scheduling Software

Reduce scheduling effort by as much as 95% with Schedule Xpress.

Employee Scheduling Software

An Employee scheduling software is a powerful tool that allows you to manage your workforce digitally, in place of manual tracking or Excel.

Supervisors can manage their employees (alerted to people who are late, find replacements when someone can no longer work, and more) while being out of the office by using the mobile app.

The system’s rules based engine supports many different scheduling approaches including traditional scheduling (one by one or autofill), self-scheduling, rotations, shift bidding, and more. Our staff scheduling software will allow you to manage your workforce more effectively, while eliminating overtime and improving communication

The Celayix platform includes Team Xpress, Time Xpress, Schedule Xpress, and Voice Xpress – that can be used separately or in unison so your employees can retrieve and confirm their work schedules online, through web, phone or mobile.

Quickly make one-off or bulk updates to schedules using drag & drop, cut or copy, delete shifts and much more.

A Versatile Employee Scheduler

Celayix can support many different approaches to scheduling employees and staff shifts. Although using our employee schedule maker will improve the overall efficiency of your operation and allow you to focus on other approaches, the more automated an approach is, the higher the return on investment will be. Celayix does not restrict you to using one approach – many different approaches can be combined together to create the perfect staff schedule.

Some of the supported approaches include:

Shift-by-Shift Scheduling

The one-by-one approach is where the scheduler goes through each shift and assigns an employee to the shift. This allows the scheduler to control the assignment but takes longer than other approaches.

Bulk Update and Assign

The bulk update and assign process is where the scheduler can select multiple shifts and assign to employees. Additional ways to enhance the workflow with this approach is to create a shift template that contains all of the shifts that need to filled. If the employee does not change, the template can be saved with the assigned employee. Otherwise, the shifts can be left as open and once the template is inserted, the scheduler can quickly assign the employee(s) to their shifts for that time specific period.

Autofill

To further automate the shift assignment process, schedulers can use the available exclusive Autofill feature. Autofill works as the name implies. Once the shifts have been created and entered into the schedule (or inserted via a shift template), autofill can be run to fill the shifts. Essentially this is a set-and-forget strategy or more likely a “set and go do other tasks” approach. Once the system has gone through and filled each shift based on your company rules, the scheduler is provided with the results of the Autofill run including those shifts that could not be filled due to a potential rule violation. These shifts can then be filled independently where the scheduler can knowingly override any business rules. This approach can save the scheduler a significant amount of time as they do not need to fill each shift themselves but rather lets the system automate the assignment process.

Self-Scheduling

Self-scheduling is an approach where employees take the responsibility for managing their own schedules. There are numerous benefits of allowing your employees to self-schedule.

First, you, the business owner or operator, save time. You should be spending time growing your business and taking care of things that can grow your bottom line. Why deal with the unnecessary stress of figuring out your employees’ availability and trying to juggle it with your business’ needs? That alone is reason enough to let your employees self-schedule.

The second reason is that it creates a better working experience for your staff members. Your employees will be empowered to take control of when they work, on their terms. Also, self-scheduling promotes greater transparency in how your employees are scheduled, which can help avoid conflicts between team members. This improved working environment will lead to greater employee satisfaction, which in turn can lower turnover. Self-scheduling can also help you differentiate your business from other companies competing for talent, which is especially important for service focused businesses.

Employee self-scheduling takes your workforce management processes one step further by empowering your entire, or segments of your workforce, to select shifts as opposed to being assigned shifts.

Administrative staff or managers release available shifts with predetermined business rules put in place as to what staff are allowed to work specific locations or work classifications.  Staff then enter into the system and select shifts they qualify for, empowering employees to work when they would like, and decreasing time consuming workforce management processes.

This process is similar to that of an online  reservation system, where the user (the employee), has the ability to make a selection. The administrator (the employer) has the option to release selected blocks of inventory with predefined criteria.

With employee self-scheduling organizations have the power to,

• Drastically reduce the amount of time spent scheduling by eliminating collection of employee availability and preferences, and communicating employee schedules
• Increase the fairness of your workforce management processes, watching employee satisfaction and turnover rates improve
• Create employee buy-in and enthusiasm for your company’s workforce management process

“Now it takes me just one day to create schedules compared to nearly two weeks before. It’s like a dream.”
~Bill Looker | Admissions Staffing Manager

Portland Center for the Performing Arts

Employee self-scheduling has proven to be most successful for venue management, short term staffing and casual or part time workforces. Integrating employee self scheduling, rules based scheduling and collaborative scheduling can be a comprehensive strategy to managing different segments of your workforce.

By using the “scheduler” feature in our software. This feature will create as many shifts as needed and set to them to an open state. Once published, employees can login to Team Xpress, the employee app, and select whichever shifts they want. Celayix provides schedulers with the ability to set certain rules including how many shifts can be selected at one time, when people can access and more.

Giving employees the ability to manage their own schedules has been shown to increase satisfaction and retention while reducing absenteeism. This approach can lead to significant time savings.

In addition, you can release available shifts with predetermined business rules to ensure you get the right employees with the right qualifications at the right place. Once the available shifts have been released, employees log in to the scheduling software and select shifts they qualify for.

This type of system works best for venues, hospitality businesses, short term staffing, and casual or part time work forces. Celayix has a proven track record of bringing value to our clients with best of breed staff time management software, throughout many industries.

Rotation Scheduling

Rotation based scheduling (sometimes called wheel scheduling) is an approach where employees, at the outset, are put into a specific sequence. Once the sequence is created, to maintain fairness to everyone, it does not change. When the rotation first starts, shifts are assigned from the employee in position 1, next to employee in position 2 and so forth until there are no more shifts available. At this point, Celayix will place a virtual marker on the employee who will receive the first shift when the next batch is available. If you go through the full rotation and shifts are still available, you start back at the top of the list. If an employee has indicated they are not available to work, they are skipped in the rotation and will have to wait until it comes back around to them. This approach ensures that all employees in the rotation group are treated equally when it comes to assigning available shifts. The rotation concept also has the ability to be combined with Autofill creating a powerful scheduling tool where shifts are assigned automatically with little scheduler intervention.

To learn more, click here. 

Shift Bidding

Shift bidding is an approach where schedulers create their schedule and then ask for staff to indicate if they are interested in working (bid). Before the bid process starts, schedulers create the groups of employees who will see the shifts as they may not be available to everyone. Once these groups are created, the scheduler sends out a notification that bids are now being accepted. Employees who are notified can indicate their interest or decline to bid by using Team Xpress, the employee app. Once the deadline for bid submissions has passed, shifts can be allocated based on predefined rules. Employees are then notified whether or not their bid was successful.

Labor Forecasting

Celayix also offers a Labor Forecasting tool that can help create open shifts based on the size of the event that is being held. The forecasting module will also take into account any minimum staffing levels that are required regardless of the event size. Once the labor ratios have been created, the scheduler only need enter in the number of attendees for the event at which point the labor forecasting module will generate all the necessary shifts. Once the shifts are created, they can be assigned to employees using one of the methods above (ex. Autofill or self-scheduling) providing huge time savings and flexibility over having to manually create and assign shifts. Using one of the automated approaches also ensures fairness in shift allocation.

To learn more, click here.

Rules

Celayix is a powerful, user-friendly scheduling solution that can accept all your business rules and allows the scheduler to control whether the rules will be followed or relaxed for specific scheduling situations. Some of the rules supported include:

• Overtime rules based on number of days and/or hours worked
• Defining weekday/weekend overtime rules
• Union / collective bargaining rules specifically outlining how employees will be assigned to shifts
• Ensuring only qualified and available staff are scheduled
• Age restrictions on certain shifts
• Employees not being sent to sites they are blacklisted from
• Ensuring employees are not double-booking
• Balancing work hours across employees helping to eliminate unscheduled overtime hours

Celayix can handle all of the above rules along with many, many others.

Celayix Software Employee Scheduling Module includes:

• Scheduling
• Time Xpress – a supervisor app
• Employee availability
• Time-off requests
• Control meal breaks
• Custom reports and budgeting

Availability

Many companies ask their employees to submit their availability manually or via email. Celayix can help save you time and reduce errors by automating the process of collecting availability. This frees up time for the supervisors to focus on more important tasks rather than collecting and compiling the information they receive from employees.

Using Team Xpress, the employee mobile app, employees can submit their availability. They can use the app to change their availability as their personal life changes. This saves supervisors’ significant time by not having to collect and then put the information in a format that can be easily viewed.

When scheduling, Celayix allows you to search by availability first ensuring that only those employees who are able to work, are offered the shifts. In the case where someone calls in sick and a replacement is needed, Celayix will also take into account availability before providing a replacement employee.

With Celayix your organization can:

• Enable employees to submit their availability electronically (partial or full days) meaning no more manual processes
• Have schedulers see the availability information in the schedule view when creating schedules
• Allow schedulers to automatically take into availability when looking for someone to fill a shift along with qualifications, seniority, specific skills, and more

In addition, our software can help you:

Reduce No Shows

When an employee doesn’t show up for work, it can be a hassle. The no-show can cause contractual compliance problems, hurt your company’s reputation, cause additional work for those employees who did show up, and cause additional chaos for the managers who need to quickly find a replacement.

It is easy to prevent many or most of no-shows, however. They are often caused by confusion or lack of communication around an employee’s schedule, and they can be mitigated by an appropriate employee scheduling software.

An staff scheduling software gives the managers the tools to create a work schedule quickly and cheaply. If you were scheduling one week in advance when you were scheduling manually, you may be able to bump that up to three weeks or more in advance with all the time that an staff time management software will save you. Employees will thank you for giving them a clearer picture of when they need to work.

With Celayix’s Team Xpress, employees can log in online to see their schedules. They don’t need to rely on their memory to know when their next shift is and they don’t need to phone their manager or their co-worker, which can be error-prone. Not all of your employees may have easy access to internet, however. With Celayix’s Voice Xpress, employees can phone in and our software will read their schedule to them over the phone.

Become More Competitive

With so much competition in the modern age of business, your organization must be as competitive as possible in every aspect of your operations. One aspect that sometimes gets overlooked is employee scheduling. If you are using paper & pen or Excel to schedule your workforce, you are putting yourself at a great disadvantage. Your greatest asset is your workforce, so why are you not optimizing how the time of your single greatest asset is spent through a scheduling system?

Employee scheduling software is a solution that optimizes the efficiency of your workforce, while reducing overtime, reducing payroll errors, improving employee engagement, ensuring you have the right people in the right roles, and much more. But most importantly, it frees you up to do more important things – like growing your business. Don’t spend all your time running your business, spend time working on it. According to a study published by the Aberdeen Group, an organization that utilizes a workforce management solution can increase revenue per employee by up to 10%, while simultaneously reducing overall operating costs. Depending on the size of an organization, this could mean millions added back to the bottom line; capital that can be used to further the growth of a company, or greater profits distributed to shareholders.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

It is no secret customer satisfaction is the key to not only getting new business, but ensuring existing customers stay committed to you. When you are outsourcing a service, for example, security for a venue or servers for a catering event, employee satisfaction becomes almost completely dependent on the success of your staff to meet and beat client expectations. Beating their expectations not only leads to continued business, but reference-able customers to get more business.

To see how automating your employee scheduling and time collection can help take your customer satisfaction to the next level, take a look at our list below. Implementing automation into your workforce will not only make your life easier, but improve the satisfaction of your clients from start to finish ensuring continued business and a strong reputation.

Ensure Attendance

The easiest way to disappoint a client is by having your staff fail to show up. With an automated system, you will be able to confirm ahead of time with employees that they are able to work the shift. This leaves little room for error in communication, drastically reducing any potential for accidently missed shifts.

Find Replacements

Whether it is a sick day or a family emergency, at some point or another you will need to quickly find a replacement for a shift. With an automated system have employee submit their availability ahead of time so you can quickly find a replacement for a missed shift. These replacement employees have already submitted their availability and are likely eager to jump on the opportunity to add a shift.  Instead of calling your whole workforce, do a quick availability search and find a replacement. Send an automated message or call the available staff to find a replacement in a matter of minutes.  Disaster averted and business is back to normal without your customer ever knowing a difference.

Make Schedule Adjustments Quickly

With any business that is dependent on external factors, such as event attendance or store traffic, the number of staff needed tend to vary from day to day and week to week. In fact, it is not uncommon to need to make last minute changes from anything to earlier shift start time to extra staff. With an automated scheduling system, this is far from a hassle. Communicate and confirm new start times quickly as well as add and cut shifts ahead of time and have employees confirm. Set automated reminders to ensure they acknowledge any changes to the schedule.

Prove Staff Attendance

Provide reports to customers with shift check-in details proving attendance and accuracy of billable hours. This gives clients peace of mind that they are giving their business to an organization they can trust.

If you’re still not sure, find out the best way to pick the right employee scheduling software that fits your needs.

Cloud Hosted

This greatest benefit of a cloud hosted environment is that you have less worry. You will just be provided with credentials to login and other than, that you don’t have to worry about where the software is installed, whether or not it is running, or maintaining it. You essentially are paying for a service which allows you to use the software to help you run your business.

Furthermore, there is no issue if you do not have an IT department. Cloud hosted environment means that you do not have to worry about maintaining a server, running backups, or any of the other regular IT duties that you would perform if you owned the server. You also do not have to concern yourself with security. The security of your data is in the hands of the vendor. This can be a benefit or a drawback depending on your point of view.

In a cloud based environment, as long as you have an internet connection, you will be able to connect and access the software. This means that wherever your employees go, as long as they have a connection to the internet, they can login and use the software.

Implementations in a cloud based environment generally do not take as long to implement. That is because organizations that provide a cloud based solution usually have an implementation process in place and they will be primarily responsible for ensuring that you get up and running as quickly as possible.

The cost associated with a cloud based solution is usually stable and predictable. You will likely end up paying a monthly or yearly subscription fee, but there won’t be any sudden spikes in cost like there might be in an on premise solution, such as when a server crashes and you have to replace it.

Simplify Your Life

Nowadays, everyone has a mobile phone, and some people even have more than one! There is no doubt that mobile phones will be more and more common and functional as time goes on. Cell phones are making peoples’ lives easier and improving the way they work. Imagine that you are a part time worker and you are fortunate enough to work for an employer who utilizes employee scheduling software. Through the combination of your mobile device and scheduling software, you can easily check your future scheduled shifts, clock in and out, communicate with your supervisor, request time off, and so much more. All these actions can be done in just one employee scheduling app.

With the help of Team Xpress from Celayix Software, part time workers can not only enjoy those basic functions, they can also check shifts details like start and end time, work content and site addresses with a map, which are always up to date. Also, if any aspect of your job or shift changes (like start/end time), the app will automatically notify you with a push notification. It is also possible to submit your available time period or your time off requests to your manager through the Team Xpress application.

One of the most useful functions of Celayix’s employee scheduling software is self-scheduling; you can check the application to see if your supervisor posts any new open shifts. If you are interested in one of them, you can request it immediately and wait for manager’s decision.

If you would like to learn about how employee scheduling software, please contact the Celayix team and we’ll be happy to help.