You need to schedule your team's shifts. What employee scheduling software should you use?

Scheduling software is used for a variety of reasons normally linked to an organisations industry. At the most basic level scheduling is used to plan employees shifts to their contractual or normal hours. Schedules can include a cost centre or activity assignment to provide insight on how employees time is used to support informed decisions. Most commonly Scheduling software is used to plan employees in line with a predicted or forecast business demand; so that services are delivered or goods are produced by employees in the right place, at the right time and with the required skills. Scheduling also helps organisations avoid planning too many hours or days in a given period to prevent Working Time or company safety policy violations.

Scheduling software helps to create, assign and optimise shifts according to company's requirements and based on provided inputs like past labor/resource requirements, minmum or maximum working hours, skills, operation hours etc. Also, it provide employee self service features like requesting time-off, shift swap, open shift.

If you need to schedule your team's shifts, you might want to consider using a software that can help you optimize your workforce planning and reduce labor costs - One option is the Blue Pumpkin Forecasting and Scheduling Module, which is a cloud-based solution that integrates with your existing systems and data sources -Homebase: A free and easy-to-use app that lets you create and edit schedules, track hours and communicate with your team -When I Work: A cloud-based software that helps you manage schedules, time-off requests, payroll and attendance -Deputy: A powerful and flexible tool that integrates with popular apps like QuickBooks, Xero, and Gusto, and offers features like auto-scheduling,performance management, and compliance

It provides opportunity to generate schedule based on past trends and other customised rules for working hours as per local labor laws and orgainisation policy. So, manager has to just look at the final schedules and adjust them if requires. So, such tools help to reduce cost and unproductive working hours. Also, it helps to consider employee's inputs based on self-services features. Ultimately, it helps to achieve better employee engagement, satisfaction and overall schedule optimisation.

Flexibility so that you can satisfy the needs of your employees and your business, ultimately satisfy your customers. Consider whether you are you scheduling people to shifts or jobs to people and what business drivers are available or required to support the best planning. Do allow your Managers to manage, they usually know their business and people best so give them the tools to assist and engage them rather than try to fully automate everything.

It should be doing AI/ML based past data analysis and use it to automate schedule generation. It should have emoloyee self services features. It should provide configurable features by developers or system administrators, specifically for working hours related rules. It should have ability to integrate with other HCM products. It should have reporting facility and if user can customised, then it would be great!

-Swapping shifts between employees, with or without the manager's approval. This will reduce the traditional problem of missing employees on Monday mornings. => improve employee engagement, Reduce attrition and stress for the manager :-) - Mobile friendly & intuitive app, we are in 2024, it's a must have. -Integrated communication feature => avoid the use of WhatsApp or non compliance tools. -An interesting feature is the ability to schedule automatic reports in your inbox to compare each week the Expected vs. Actual Employees Calendar , labor analysis costs , projected schedule cost...

Flexibility in your Workforce is crucial, for some organisations that means flexible employee contracts or a good proportion of Part Time employees. For other organisations it may mean a multi-skilled workforce or being able to leverage temporary workers. Planning for seasonal trends or unforeseen circumstances works best when you have an adaptable and engaged workforce, thus avoiding increased costs and/or compliance risks.