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Making an efficient work schedule is a core part of ensuring your business runs smoothly from day to day. But as any small business owner knows, there’s a lot more to it than just jotting down some hours. In fact, keeping your team members happy while also meeting business needs can be downright anxiety-provoking — not to mention time-consuming. Fortunately, with the right approach, sorting out an employee schedule can become the easiest part of your day. Here are our top tips for getting it done in no time!
Key takeaways
First, it’s worth refreshing why it’s important to have a watertight schedule in the first place. A well-thought-out employee schedule ensures:
- Streamlined workflows: Everyone knows what’s expected, and when, keeping operations running smoothly.
- Higher productivity: Knowing their work hours in advance helps employees to plan their workweek and maximize the time they have available.
- Minimized attendance issues: A clearly defined schedule can help you to manage tardiness and absenteeism. Or to track those issues when employees are performing poorly.
- Employee satisfaction: A fair and predictable schedule boosts employee morale and retention, helping you to hang on to great employees. Not to mention allowing everyone to plan their life outside of work — you included.
- Improved customer service: Scheduling workers ahead of time can help you prepare for peak hours or periods, so customers aren’t left waiting.
- Meeting legal obligations and compliance standards: A clearly documented schedule means there’s never any question about whether you’re adhering to compliance standards and labour laws, which helps you avoid potential legal issues.
- Optimized labour costs: By ensuring your schedule matches up to business needs, you can avoid under- or overstaffing, saving money and optimizing how employee time and resources are used.
Steps to making a work schedule for employees
When creating a work schedule there are a lot of different things to keep in mind, such as how to make a schedule that’s fair and transparent, and how to handle absences or open shifts. But while those are important factors to consider, it can be easy to get lost in the details so it’s worth taking a more strategic approach to creating your perfect schedule. A great way to get started is to break things down into four broad steps before adding additional detail later.
Step 1: Choose how you’ll schedule employees
There are a lot of options when it comes to how to determine employee shifts and work hours. One of the most common choices for small businesses is time-tracking and scheduling software.
Scheduling with time-tracking software
The benefits of time-tracking software are that they often come with a lot of other useful features in addition to recording and tracking hours. For example, if your business requires employees to sign in on a job site in real time, software that comes with location and geofencing services can make a huge difference and can even automate the sign-in process. You can also easily record time off and make fair and efficient schedules much faster.
Choosing the right time-tracking software
Time-tracking software shouldn’t be complicated to use. It’s no good if you find yourself spending as much time trying to figure out the software as you were scheduling everything by hand!
“I have peace of mind knowing that Time is tracking employees’ work time accurately, so I can pay them for the exact hours they’re on the farm — even if they arrive early.”
– Kristi Mercier, Owner of Harmony Meadows Alpaca Farm
That’s a principle we’ve kept firmly in mind when designing Time by Wagepoint. Time by Wagepoint keeps things simple and straightforward, while still offering all the functionality a small business needs. That includes creating schedules, sending reminders, clocking team members in and out, and reviewing and approving work hours.
That intuitive and easy approach also means it’s software your employees will actually want to use, making it that much easier to maintain a single point of truth for everyone’s work hours.
Manual scheduling
It’s also possible to keep track of things in a spreadsheet, or even using pen and paper. For many small businesses that’s the starting point, and while there’s nothing wrong with either of those methods, they aren’t always the best tools for creating an efficient schedule.
The fact is doing things by hand takes a lot of time, and if you’ve got more than a couple of employees, it can quickly get tedious. Not to mention that having to flip through sheets of paper to correct a scheduling or payment error also adds unnecessary stress to a task that should honestly be the least of your worries as a business owner.
Step 2: Use what you know about your team
As a small business owner, you know your team inside and out. For most of them, you’ll already have a good idea of what their strengths and weaknesses are, which tasks they excel at, which ones they need more experience with, and how their personalities complement one another.
Leverage that knowledge when making your work schedule to ensure you have the best person for the job on duty at the right time. That might mean scheduling someone with great interpersonal and communication skills during the specific times when you expect to see a lot of customers. Or making sure you have your best “attention to detail” team member on the job for inventory management or installing new systems.
An added bonus is that matching your employees and their skill sets to specific tasks that you know they prefer will also build motivation and boost employee morale.
Step 3: Create a list of employee availability
An important step in creating an effective work schedule is to confirm when each employee is available to work. That’s fairly straightforward if you only have a couple of staff members, but if you have multiple employees working shifts, it can get a bit trickier.
Points to consider are preferred working hours, any recurring commitments that your staff have outside of work, and any time-off requests they’ve submitted. You may also have some workers who are just naturally morning or evening people, so collecting those preferences can help you optimize your work schedule in a way that keeps everyone happy.
And while it can be daunting to collect all the relevant information when you’re just getting started, once you’ve got a good system in place it becomes much easier!
Step 4: Know the peak times and scheduling needs for your company
As much as creating a work schedule is about keeping your employees happy, be sure you’re also scheduling appropriately to keep the business running at peak efficiency. There may be some give and take here, especially when it comes to balancing your employee’s preferences and the business’s needs. But at the end of the day, it’s in everyone’s best interests to ensure business carries on booming, right?
Pay attention to trends in when you get busy, whether that’s on a daily, weekly or seasonal cycle. And be sure to have adequate workers scheduled during peak periods. The key point being that you want to be proactive about handling customer demand, rather than reactive!
Tips to make scheduling even smoother
The four steps discussed above should cover you when it comes to creating any type of work schedule — whether it’s for full-time or part-time employees. But keeping a few additional tips in mind can ensure even smoother sailing.
Be mindful of the different types of work schedules
There are a number of different types of schedules to work with, such as:
- Full-time work schedule: Typically means an employee works between 35-40 hours a week.
- Part-time work schedule: Typically means an employee works less than 35 hours a week.
- Flexible work schedules: This type of work schedule gives employees the power to choose when they start and end their work hours.
- Fixed work schedules: This applies to employees who work the same schedule each shift.
- Shift work schedule: Shift work is typically broken up into morning, afternoon and evening or night shift time slots, and an employee would work somewhere within those time frames. Some businesses have employees working rotating shift work, too, where the shift they work might change from time-to-time.
These are just some of the common ones. There are also seasonal schedules, on-call schedules, floating schedules and even more. Creating an effective employee schedule means knowing your options and finding what’s best for your entire team (including you!) and your business.
Get the schedule out as soon as possible
The sooner you get that schedule out, the sooner your employees can let you know if they have any problems. That means you’ll have more time to account for absences, and your staff will have clarity around when they’re expected to be at work.
Post open shifts
Posting open shifts where everyone can see them, or sending electronic notifications as shifts open up, allows team members to come to you when they’d like to fill an extra slot. That’s a lot easier than having to track people down one by one to ask them.
Honour time off requests as much as possible
Honouring requests for personal time off is an easy way to keep your employees happy and committed to the business. It also shows your team that you value their wellbeing and work-life balance. This is another area where having your schedule planned out in advance can really help, because it gives you more time to find ways to accommodate requests.
Encourage open communication
Be sure to encourage employees to speak up when they think they’re going to have schedule conflicts or won’t be able to make a shift. Doing so makes it a lot more likely that you’ll know about potential problems in advance and can plan accordingly.
Be flexible (when you can)
Life happens. Sometimes, despite your (and their) best efforts, your employees are going to need time off at short notice to handle something in their personal lives. Accommodating those requests can go a long way to building trust and motivating your team. Bonus points if you can offer flexibility around starting times or an option between different shifts for your part-time employees.
Ensure fairness and transparency
Nothing erodes trust and teamwork faster than if people feel like their work schedule isn’t fair. So have clear guidelines and policies in place that dictate how employee shifts are assigned, and how shift changes and time off are handled. Make sure everyone knows what your policies are, and that they can easily access the schedule to check their shifts.
Plan for emergencies
Make sure you have a contingency plan in place for emergencies. That might include having some of your employees on call on a rotating basis, or having a list of temp staff who can fill in during a crisis.
Review and adjust
An important part of maintaining a perfect work schedule is reviewing and adjusting it as business needs change. This is especially important if you have a mix of full-time and part-time employees or need to accommodate shift work across different job sites or locations. Identifying potential problems or bottlenecks in advance can go a long way to ensuring your business runs efficiently.
Use the additional features in your scheduling software
Great scheduling software should make your life easier by including functionalities like alerts, posting open shifts, and marking off holidays and office closures. It should also allow you to filter your schedule options by employee availability, role or job location. Familiarizing yourself with all those functionalities can make it much easier to manage employee time and your business effectively.
Simplify how you make a work schedule for employees
Okay, so that’s everything you need to know about best practices for creating employee work schedules that are fair, efficient, streamlined and tailored to the skills and preferences of your team — while still being great for the business. All that’s left is to choose how you’re going to get started.
As mentioned at the start of this article, there are a lot of different options. For very small businesses, good old pen and paper may be all that’s needed. For others, an Excel spreadsheet may have all the tools they need to keep an efficient weekly or monthly schedule. But for the majority of small business owners, the truth is that figuring out a schedule manually is a task that takes up way too much time.
If you’re ready for a solution that takes all the hassle out of scheduling, Time by Wagepoint is the way to go.
“It just works! Wagepoint is a breath of fresh air.”
– Nicole Spinney, Manager of Olson’s GLO Estate Home for Special Care
Our streamlined software gives you all the functionality you need, without frills or fuss. This makes it a breeze to create a work schedule that matches the needs of any organization. You can also manage time off, monitor attendance for part-time or full-time team members, and send out notifications to keep everything running smoothly.
If that sounds like the best thing you’ve heard all week, schedule a demo or reach out to us to start your 14-day free trial and see for yourself how much easier scheduling can be.
