Author: Gurmit Dhaliwal, CEO
For many companies, gone are the days where employees are given verbal or paper schedules and told to simply show up for their shift. Some companies opt to gather employee availability and other preferences through email or web apps and use this information to try and reduce scheduling effort.
However, even the collection of availability is becoming a cumbersome task for schedulers. Working with each employee and their personal schedules, making calls or emails back and forth is not only a waste of your scheduler’s time, but a waste of your employee’s time. With the growing work-life balance, these complications are likely to increase rather than decrease.
A new up and coming solution is “Self-Scheduling.” The idea behind self-scheduling is to release shifts to your employees. With powerful rules engine in the back end, employees would only be able to see shifts that match their qualifications, hour restrictions, and more. Employees would only be able to schedule into shifts that match the business needs and fit into their personal schedules. For many businesses, this automated employee scheduling process offers by far the greatest benefits in cost reduction and employee satisfaction at the same time.
Not sure if self-scheduling would work for your business? Let’s walk you through the process. Imagine if you could input the needed shift coverage for a particular time period and have an automated system push this demand out to your employees.
Employees with the right qualifications would be able to select the work they would like to and are able to work, all with minimal supervisor or administrative effort. In the employee scheduling industry, this process has been named self-scheduling or self-booking.
This method of employee scheduling offers even greater benefits if you have a pools of on-call, causal or part-time workers. All the selected shifts are then communicated back to supervisors, giving them real time knowledge into which shifts are scheduled and by whom.
This process works particularly well with part-time or variable workers. It gives them the ability to manage their schedules, giving them greater work-life balance.
An effective and reliable method of automated self-scheduling will allow employees to self-select shifts whether they are union or non-union workers and whether the company work rules are simple such as no double-booking, overtime or exceeding budget hours. Take it a step further by basing release of shifts on more complex rules, such as seniority, rotations, time-off, etc. This will ensure shifts are made available to the right people at the right time.
An effective employee self-scheduling system should save you up to 95% effort and improve employee retention.
To learn how self-scheduling can help your business, contact us today!
Celayix Software has over 20 years of experience developing value driven workforce scheduling, attendance monitoring and time capture workforce management solutions for planning and deployment that reduce effort by as much as 95% and saving up to 8% of the payroll costs for the organization. The Celayix Automated Self-Scheduling System has been used organizations both large and small since 2009 with great effectiveness and reliability.
