A number of different industries rely on their employees working shifts. Rec centers, healthcare, and higher education are only the beginning. Within companies in these verticals, there is a lot of pressure on the scheduling manager to get it totally right, for each staff member and for every shift.
Without the shifts covered, no one is working. With too many people scheduled, your budget is blown. If you're struggling with the time it takes to find your team's ideal schedule again and again, you're not alone. Many professionals in your situation have found scheduling automation to be extremely beneficial in their workday.
What Is Automated Shift Scheduling?
At an organization that relies on shifts, you're constantly creating, distributing, and maintaining your schedule. Managers tell us that they spend eight to 10 hours creating work schedules each week, equaling almost 25 percent of their at-work time. In the average year, that's over 60 days spent creating schedules. Wouldn't it be valuable to have those hours back?
Automated scheduling puts artificial intelligence to work for you. You set up the initial rules, input minimal data, and AI does the rest to create your optimal schedule. You'll get the perfect schedule, in a single click.
It all begins with understanding how you schedule your team. We find ways to improve your current system, and then wrap SubItUp's workforce tools around your exact needs and wants. This often includes things like scheduling templates to do things faster and availability collection to remove subjectivity and avoidable conflict from the scheduling process. This feature finds when your employees can work based on the shifts you need covered. Then when you generate your schedule, you will have fewer maintenance needs down the road.
The Benefits Garnered From Using Employee Shift Scheduling Software to Automate Schedules
SubItUp adds speed and accuracy, eliminating stress from your employee scheduling process. Automating schedules comes with several crucial benefits, including:
More Time in Your Day
We listed this as number one because, well, it's the number-one reason this employee shift scheduling software is so beneficial to scheduling managers! SubItUp saves the average user 80-85 percent of their time creating schedules. For the people mentioned above who were spending up to 10 hours a week building schedules, that number went down to two hours or less.
Instead of a cumbersome process full of excel spreadsheets, paper, phone calls, sticky notes, and text messages, you can get your scheduling done in one easy click with automatic scheduling. Next week, you can either reproduce the same schedule or make minor adjustments. What used to take countless steps is compressed down to a matter of minutes.
Higher Staff Satisfaction
There are several ways your staff will be more satisfied when you have better tools at your disposal. For one thing, draft scheduling lets employees pick the shifts they want without managers assigning them. Even if you handle the assignments yourself, everyone is happier if your first schedule is a correct one.
Imagine Zach works part-time at his university's gym. He can only work in the morning, because he has another job bagging groceries in the evening. You forget, because it isn't readily available anywhere when you're building the schedule, so you put him on late shifts. Zach is upset his shifts are wrong, and feels like you don't care about him as a person. The rest of the team is also upset, because now you have to pull the schedule down and change everyone's schedule to give him mornings instead. Bob wanted to see a movie, but his morning shift changed to the evening with little notice and now he has to cancel on his friends.
Everyone is annoyed and no one is satisfied! This entire scenario could be avoided if you use the right employee shift scheduling software, one that is automated and intuitive.
Improved Engagement and Productivity
The shifts being assigned aren't random. Employee prioritization puts your rock stars on the schedule first. When you have your best team working the right shifts, both individual and collective productivity skyrockets. Happier employees are more engaged, and more engaged employees are more productive. The most productive employees get the best shifts on the next schedule. It's a cycle in which everyone wins!
Reduced Turnover
When your team is happier and more engaged, they don't leave. Let's think back to our example above. It's easy to see that if Zach were assigned the wrong shifts several times he would eventually quit. "They obviously can't accommodate my schedule," he thinks to himself. Perhaps the second or third time it happens, Bob decides to leave as well. "I can't plan my life without knowing when I'll be working," he says. They're both right.
Using employee shift scheduling software to reduce turnover is about more than keeping your employees around because you like them. The costs associated with someone leaving, then recruiting, training, and ramping up someone new cannot be ignored. According to Investopedia, small companies spend, on average, more than $1,500 on training each new employee.
Each time an employee quits, think of that as adding $1,500 to your budget for their replacement. On the other hand, a happy employee is an employee who continues to work for your company for years to come. You have more control over this than you may imagine, and so does your schedule.
Automated Employee Scheduling from SubItUp
Now that you can see why you need the right software to solve your scheduling problems and bring you benefits, it's time to look further into what that solution is. With over 300 different scheduling options in our product offerings, you' find what you're looking for from SubItUp. Our automated shift scheduling tools include the following features:
- Auto-schedule generation (up to one year)
- Hourly or shift-based generation
- Build shift templates
- Fair hours distribution
- Employee prioritization
- Task scheduling
- Travel buffers
- Scheduling employees across time zones (Global Workforce)
- Employee or shift wages
- Universal availability
Say goodbye to manual time tracking, pulling down your schedule to fix it, and unhappy employees. We look forward to being able to help you transition away from a software that doesn't do everything you need it to, to an employee shift scheduling software that is much more aligned with your daily and weekly needs. Let's talk about what we can do for you!
