As a business owner/manager, we can confidently assume that one of your goals is to grow your business. This, as we know, is easier said than done. Business owners or managers often get tied down with administrative tasks or micromanaging, which prevents them from using their valuable expertise and knowledge to improve operations.
An important part of being a successful manager is knowing where to invest your time. Spending lots of time on tasks such as employee scheduling is neither productive nor efficient from a manager’s perspective. However, workforce scheduling is a crucial element of a successful business, so it can be hard to find a balance.
Productivity and efficiency are absolutely essential to growing a business. Both of these are directly related to your workforce and can be drastically impacted if your workforce scheduling isn’t perfect. Managers shouldn’t have to waste time and effort to optimize work schedules for productivity and efficiency. What can they do instead?
Automated workforce scheduling software can help you recover up to $14,560 per month to reinvest into your business.**
Before we dive into how workforce scheduling can help grow your business, let’s break down what workforce scheduling is.
What is Workforce Scheduling?
Workforce scheduling is the process of assigning shifts to employees in order to meet the current and future demands of the workplace. A series of assigned shifts is a workforce schedule, which ensures that operations can continue as needed, even during the transition from one shift to another. Several factors affect workforce scheduling processes;
- Demand for products/services provided by the business
- Employee availability
- Skills, qualifications and certifications of employees
- Budget limitations, labor costs and more.
When you look at all of these factors, you can see how much consideration goes into creating an effective workforce schedule. Making use of workforce scheduling software is the best way to optimize schedules!
Why is Workforce Scheduling Important?
Workforce scheduling is a crucial business function. As mentioned above, your workforce directly impacts both productivity and efficiency. When you consider how productivity and efficiency contribute to profitability, you realize how truly important workforce scheduling is.
How can Workforce Scheduling Grow your Business?
Workforce scheduling software is the best way to improve your scheduling processes.
One of the main ways that workforce scheduling software can help grow your business is by saving you money. The best way to illustrate this is by showing you exactly how much money can be saved, based on an organization with 100 employees.
Excessive time spent scheduling
As the saying goes, time is money. Owner/manager time is generally the most expensive, right? Creating workforce schedules manually can take anywhere from an hour to 7 hours for larger companies scheduling lots of employees. With automated workforce scheduling software, this time can be cut drastically, and actually save you up to 95% of your time on managing and tracking schedules.
The software will speed up the process, but also improve the quality of the schedule. The free time of managers can now better be spent improving operations, recruiting new employees, and interacting with employees. Win, win right?
Unbillable overtime
Are you resorting to overtime to fill schedule gaps? Software like Celayix can prevent that. With a rules-based engine, managers can create rules that prevent overtime from being scheduled.
Overtime is very costly to employers, particularly when it cannot be billed to clients/customers. Based on the 16 hours that are averagely assigned to employees every month, you could save up to $6,000 per month by cutting it out.
Staff turnover
As mentioned above, scheduling employees poorly can result in increased employee turnover. Aside from impacting morale and disrupting operations, turnover is extremely expensive. Workforce scheduling software allows you to introduce scheduling initiatives such as self-scheduling for open shifts that can provide improved work-life balance to employees, and reduce turnover. Based on the average cost of turnover per employee at 16% of earnings under $30,000 per year, and a 22.8% improvement in turnover from implementing self-scheduling systems, you can expect to save $8,885 per month.
Absenteeism
Perhaps one of the most expensive scheduling-related expenses, absenteeism can cost you up to $2,660 per employee, per year. Workforce scheduling software provides you with the tools you need to reduce absenteeism, such as shift confirmations, flexible scheduling features, and a find replacement feature to reduce no-shows. Using these features to reduce and eliminate absenteeism means you could save up to $22,167 per month!
Payroll Fraud / Time Theft
Time theft generally occurs when systems/processes are easily manipulated by employees. Workforce scheduling software improves processes around time collection and attendance monitoring. Celayix uses geofencing for shift check ins through employees’ mobile devices.
According to the American Payroll Association, time theft can cost you up to 7% of your total payroll. For a company with 100 employees, workforce scheduling software can save you $17,049 per month.
Payroll Errors
Human error is inevitable and unfortunately, it adds up. Workforce scheduling software automates the entire process, including schedule creation, time collection, attendance matching, and data transfers. According to the American Payroll Association’s low-bound estimate of 1% of payroll and IRS estimates of $845 in annual penalties per organization, payroll errors can cost up to $2,506 per month. The automation and accuracy of workforce scheduling software can eliminate this cost completely!
Taking all of the above points into consideration, you can see the unnecessary expenses related to scheduling inefficiencies. Automated workforce scheduling software can eliminate these costs. If we assume that a company with 100 shift workers has a monthly payroll of $182,000, then we can estimate that automated workforce scheduling software would save them $14,560 per month. This money could be re-invested into the business, whether its R&D, new technology, extra personnel, or other important resources. If you’d like to see how much money your company could save from switching to Celayix automated workforce managemenrt, check out our simple savings calculator on our Pricing page!
*based on a company with 100 employees, working 35hrs per week at $12 per hour.
