For many managers in a variety of industries, much of their time is spent creating and then adjusting the schedule. Whether you build the schedule one week at a time, one month at a time, or more, this is a time-consuming process that takes time and energy to get right.
This is particularly true if you’re manually creating your team’s schedule in an old-fashioned way, like using spreadsheets, or even if you use a software that doesn't align well with your process and operation. Well, all this time adds up and carries a significant financial cost in addition to the impact on team morale and efficiency.
Imagine you have three employees, Liza, Audra, and Grant. Liza works for you at the campus rec center, and another manager at the bookstore. Audra prefers to work weekends, because she’s very focused on her academics. Grant is supposed to be on your schedule 20 hours per week, but frequently calls out with little notice. Let’s take a deeper dive into how your current schedule process handles these three employees, and how a better staff scheduling software could make everyone’s lives easier.
The Cost of Creating Schedules the Old Way
Scheduling takes a lot of time away from managers. Managers tell us that they spend eight to 10 hours creating and managing work schedules each week, equaling almost 25 percent of their at-work time. In the average year, that's over 60 work days spent just creating schedules. Yet, this time is necessary because you need to have your shifts covered.
It's not only the schedule that steals manager's time. It's everything that's connected to the schedule too. This is particularly cumbersome if your initial schedule for the week isn’t correct. Let’s say you forgot Audra requested to be off on her normal Saturday shift because she’s headed home for the weekend. Now, you need to make a correction so you end up placing her on a new shift - one that conflicts with a shift that she is scheduled for in her other job. She let's you know she can't work, and you have to call Liza in at the last minute. Now, both Audra and Liza are upset! Fixing scheduling conflicts like this takes more time and costs you team engagement.
Fast forward and you've finally gotten this week’s shifts covered and people are happy enough. Within a day or two, it’s time to begin creating the next one. Managers lose far too much time rebuilding their schedule from scratch each week. In fact, data tells us that when you improve and simplify your scheduling processes your team you can save 85% of their time and prevent virtually every conflict that could arise! What could you do with all that time back in your work day?
The 4 Things The Right Employee Scheduling Software Will Fix
As you know so well, there's more to scheduling than a schedule. It takes a lot of time and mental energy to monitor your employees’ max hours, time off requests, and when other managers have the employees your share working. SubItUp does it for you, so you have a 100% conflict-free schedule all the time.
You don’t just want any old staff scheduling software, though. What you’re looking for is the solution that fits both your team and entire organization best. One that provides each manager insight of when shared employees are working for other teams, that assists employees in finding coverage solutions, and gives your managers their time back.
In SubItUp, shift templates do the hard work for you. Automated scheduling puts artificial intelligence to work for you. You define the days you need staff, how many, and at what time, and then survey employees to see what shifts they can work. AI does the rest to create your optimal schedule.
With our software, you'll get the perfect schedule in a single click. You’ll enjoy several amazing features that make your work-life easier. These include:
Improve Cross-Team Collaboration
Let’s think back to the situation with Liza. In other platforms, when one manager has to make a change to the schedule they must unpublish everyone's schedule, even yours. This makes the schedule inaccessible to all other managers and employees. We don’t make you work this way. Your schedule is never unpublished, even if one manager has to make a change to the schedule. In SubItUp, you can make any change you need and your schedule is always live.
Better yet, we maintain insight of when employees are working any job they have in the system even if they aren't working for you. Simply put, SubItUp will never schedule Liza if we find she has another shift across campus, off campus, and for another company entirely. Why? Because we don't want managers to have to reactively deal with an issue.
These processes in SubItUp are designed to improve collaboration, sharing of employees, and eliminate conflicts that require time and attention.
Eliminate Subjectivity Around Staff Availability
In order to create the perfect schedule, you need to know when staff can work, not when they want to work. If we only know when they prefer to work, you as a manager never have a sense of if they can actually work the full shift times you need coverage for. For example, if Grant tells you he can work 9:00 to 10:45 but your shift is 9:00 to 11:00, Grant won't be placed on that shift. He'll begin to wonder why he's getting fewer hours. Eventually, he'll seek other work opportunities and you'll need to replace him. SubItUp eliminates this domino effect by collecting availability based on the shifts and times you need filled. Then, artificial intelligence places staff on the shifts that work best for them, avoiding shifts they are likely to drop. This is learned over time based on staff add, drop, and swap tendencies. If Grant is dropping too many shifts, the system will take notice of this and will avoid scheduling him in those high-risk time slots. All of this is done in a matter of minutes and always conflict-free.
Why does this matter? Because your time is too valuable to be spent making small changes to the schedule. It should be spent strategically and it easily can be with SubItUp.
Control Max Hours and Unnecessary Overtime Costs
An employee like Liza can only work 20 hours total each week. It's a tremendous amount of work to track the total time of her shifts, and making sure they do not exceed that ceiling, manually. How much time does it take to do that for each employee on your team?
When you have a manual process it's common to lose sight of the total number of hours an employee has worked across the week. If you schedule them over their maximum weekly hours you could be incurring overtime costs you didn't plan for. Not to mention, this could be in violation of state laws and university policy, and certainly puts academic success at risk.
Furthermore, how are you tracking maximum hours when an employee works for two different departments or two different managers. Each team will monitor their own maximum amount of hours but if there is no global oversight of that employee, they could be stretched way to thin.
With SubItUp, it is possible to control the max hours your staff can work and control overtime costs at the same time even if your staff work for more than one team. In SubItUp, you're always able to set the max hours they're allowed to work across the organization.
Give Your Staff The Flexibility They Desire
Our employee scheduling software makes it possible to empower your team to self-manage their schedule! This feature is a fantastic way to improve collaboration and reduce no shows. Grant’s constant requests to take time off make it impossible for you to get the schedule right. Wouldn’t it be great if he came to you with a coverage solution rather than dropping his shift? With SubItUp, he has the tools to see which of his teammates can help him out, and can propose a swap with them directly. In SubItUp, your staff have the tools that grant them control and flexibility over their schedule. These same tools ensure they come to managers with a solution, always.
This is Social SchedulingTM - the tool that allows staff to add, drop, and swap shifts in a collaborative and flexible fashion. It's a great way to keep your team members happy, engaged, and part of a cohesive team. When they don't have this ability, Deloitte tells us employees are 174% more likely to seek a new job. Social SchedulingTM is a win-win for your managers and employees at the same time.
Make Yourself and Your Team Happier
There’s more to it than that, though. Our tools work together to make life easier for you. What if your team was happier and less stressed? What if you never had to manually reconcile a time card again? What if scheduling were completely automated? These are the big picture questions we answer alongside our user community.
Is SubItUp a fit for you? Let's jump on the phone for 10 minutes and, in that time, we'll be able to see how much efficiency SubItUp can bring you.
