As you can imagine, our mission here at Celayix is to make employee scheduling as easy as possible. We understand that your time and effort could be better spent elsewhere than spending hours putting together one weekly schedule. One of the best ways to make schedule creation as fast and easy as possible is with schedule templates!
What are schedule templates?
Schedule templates allow you to take any number of selected shifts (a whole day, a full week, etc.) and save them to re-use in future schedules. This works particularly well for industries where shift patterns are similar week-to-week. This provides more flexibility than copying shifts, as it means you can avoid going between multiple schedules. Simply create templates, and access them easily from within the Scheduler at any time.
Shift templates can be applied with a simple click, and your schedule will be filled with the necessary shifts. Of course, this can be tweaked to suit current business needs. With Celayix, you can create schedule templates with open shifts, or with shifts pre-assigned. This is particularly useful if you have a core team of staff who work the same shifts every week. Why waste time assigning those shifts manually? If you really want to save time, you can fill your open shifts using autofill, self-scheduling, or shift bidding.
Why use schedule templates?
Let’s take a look at just how useful schedule templates are:
Less time spent on scheduling
Of course, the first big benefit of using schedule templates is that it will massively reduce your scheduling workload. The most time-consuming part of creating employee schedules isn’t always assigning employees to shifts. Often it’s planning and creating the right number of shifts to suit business needs! With schedule templates, you can create templates for busy periods, quiet periods, night or day shifts, and even events themselves. The possibilities are endless, meaning you may never have to create a schedule from scratch again!
Consistent schedules
A big part of scheduling success is consistency. Think about it, the schedules you create will impact everything from productivity, to customer satisfaction. When you find the right balance, why risk losing it? Schedule templates allow you to save and re-create your optimum schedules once you’ve found what works for your business needs. Not only will this benefit your business, but employees truly prefer consistent scheduling. Studies show that there is a strong correlation between consistent scheduling and the length of time an employee spends at a company. Of course, this isn’t always possible with shift work, but templates definitely bring you one step closer.
Total Flexibility
The real beauty of shift templates is how flexible they are. Whenever you apply a template, you are free to edit and adapt it however you need. When doing this, you are not altering the template, meaning it is still fine to be used in another schedule. After applying a shift template, you can swap out employees, or add/remove shifts as needed. Also, if you use a template with employees pre-assigned, but one of the employees is off for the week you are scheduling for, the system will pick up on this and remind you. You can use the “Find Replacement” feature to swap that employee out for an equally qualified, available employee.
Easily handle multiple locations
Scheduling for multiple locations can be complicated, and time-consuming. Once you have created a schedule template with schedule templates, everyone in your team who can schedule at the location(s) it covers can access and load that schedule. You can create master templates, and ask your Location Managers and Supervisors to use them. This can be a great method of budget management.
Schedule templates have the potential to truly up your scheduling game. Whether you use them every week, or for special events, there is an opportunity for every scheduler to make use of schedule templates. If you’d like to hear more about how they can help you or any of the other features you’ve read about here, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our solution advisors today!
