9 Ways To Make Your Work Schedule Smarter

9 Ways To Make Your Work Schedule Smarter

Scheduling is something that you may not always give a lot of thought to.  Your store, restaurant, or hotel is open every day, and employees show up to work.  So the schedule must be working, right?  Perhaps – if you’ve just set the bar at “making sure someone shows up to work.”  But managers are increasingly looking for their schedules to become smarter – to become a tool that drives the business forward in meaningful ways.  They find that smart scheduling increases sales, improves employee engagement, enhances customer service, reduces employee turnover, and grows transaction size. 

Here are nine questions to determine if you have a smart schedule that can produce these results:

Does It Map Labor to Customer Demand?

Rather than repeating the same template of “two to open, three people during lunch hour, two for closing” week after week, smart schedules look at when you will have more traffic and shift your resources accordingly.  Surprisingly, it’s not the case that there is always “a lunch rush” or “Tuesday is always slow.”  Various factors – including marketing promotions, holiday calendars, even the weather – can influence customer traffic, and scheduling software has gotten extremely sophisticated at determining how a confluence of events (like “the first snowfall on Thursday before a holiday weekend”) will change traffic.  Making sure you have the right number of employees in the right place at the right time to meet this demand has been shown to increase customer service and increase sales.

Does it Over-Use “On Call” Shifts?

When people use the same template schedule every week, they tend to insert “on call” shifts to help adjust to some of the changes in business drivers described above.  “We’re not sure if that convention in town is going to really change our traffic, so call in the morning around 9 to see if we want you to come in to work the noon to 6 shift.”  Employees complain that this uncertainty makes it difficult to plan parts of their non-work lives, doesn’t give them a predictable income, and makes it hard to go back to school, or hold down a second job.  These concerns drove San Francisco to pass a landmark Retail Workers Bill of Rights, versions of which are under debate in many state legislatures.  Not only can smart scheduling tools predict demand with great accuracy (and avoid the need for On Call), they often include smartphone apps that allow managers to send text alerts about last-minute additional need – so the issue becomes one of “happy employees picking up a surprise additional shift that they’d like to work,” rather than “disgruntled employees not sure whether they’re going to get to work that day.”

Does It Invite Employee Collaboration?

Employees are eager to tell you their recurring availability (“I can never work Tuesday nights”) as well as one-off opportunities (“this Wednesday, I have a parent-teacher conference to attend at 11:30”).  Many managers don’t have a great process for dealing with these inputs, though.  They try to remember, or scribble something on a post-it note, but it’s hard to be sure whether employee preferences will actually be honored in the ultimately-produced schedule.  Smart schedules invite employee participation on these issues, and respect their preferences.  As a result, the employee feels valued, is more highly engaged, and doesn’t show up to work with a frown that tells customers they’d rather be somewhere else.

Does It Help Employees Deal With Last-Minute Emergencies?

Sometimes, daily life intervenes, making it difficult for an employee to work their scheduled shift.  A child gets sick, a car breaks down, or something else emerges.  When schedules are just posted on a break room wall, it’s impossible for those workers to find someone else who is available, contact them, and arrange for a fill-in shift.  Smart schedules are smartphone enabled, and create pushbutton identification of the list of qualified and available alternate workers (who the manager can be confident won’t also run into overtime or violate labor laws).  The systems allow for easy messaging between employees to change shifts – and ensure that the level of customer service stays high.

Does it Follow Labor Laws – and Avoid Legal-but-annoying Things Like “Clopening”?

There are a  variety of laws at the federal, state, and local level that dictate the maximum number of days in a row an employee can work, how frequently they should receive breaks, and other details that can be difficult for a single manager to keep clear in their head (or know about as laws change).  Similarly, there are things that are simply bad practice (such as “clopening” shifts that require someone to close out the store at midnight, only to be scheduled to re-open again at 4am the next day).  Smart schedules maintain a list of these rules and optimize shifts to comply with them.  The result is reduced risk of labor law violations, and happier, more engaged employees.

Does It Provide Fair Access to “The Best Shifts”?

Every schedule has some “prime shifts” that everyone wants to work, and some “less than exciting” shifts that nobody wants.  Smart scheduling solutions allow employees to provide feedback on the shift, and keep history on how frequently someone has gotten “the good shift” or had to work “the bad one.”  They have fairness rules in place which make sure everyone get a chance to work the great shifts at some point, and nobody gets stuck working Thanksgiving year after year after year.  When “dissatisfaction with my schedule” is the number 1 reason employees leave their jobs, this helps reduce turnover.

Does it Consider Employee Skill?

You’ve got some great employees – who provide amazing customer service – and you’ve got some average performers.  And you know which ones are which.  Does your schedule leverage that knowledge to increase revenue and customer satisfaction scores?  Smart schedules can receive information about who has the best skill (whether based on formal data like historical sales and conversion, or informal “1 to 10” ratings made by a manager), and put the right employees in the right place at the right time to produce results.

Does It Maximize Labor Spend - Minimize Overtime, Highlight Eligible Part Timers and Use Contracted Hours?

It’s amazing how many schedules get published that over-use employees and guarantee overtime and how often part-timers are scheduled more hours than they are supposed to (in accordance with the Affordable Care Act). Or how many salaried workers are scheduled for less than 40 hours per week.  There are serious financial implications when a worker hits various numbers of hours that cross part-time/full-time thresholds, or run into overtime requirements.  They do so because the manager putting them together doesn’t have the time or patience to run all of these totals each week and compare them to contract agreements and the like.  Smart schedules can run through millions of potential schedule permutations in a matter of seconds – and ensure that your labor spend is optimized against all of these hard and soft rules.

Does It Have A “Quality Measure” to Help Determine If It is Good?

Most Managers are tasked with scheduling to a pre-defined number of hours and/or Payroll, while taking into consideration last year’s sales and current traffic trends. With various reports from disparate systems, this is achievable, with some effort, but it certainly takes time (and even then, it’s very difficult to know for sure). Corporate spend weeks (probably months) ensuring their budgets are accurate and their guidelines are practiced, but how do they know that the Store Managers are compliant?  A smart schedule provides easy-to-understand metrics on schedule quality health to let store managers and corporate management know when a schedule is good.

 Workplace brings decades of expertise to bear in helping organizations create smart schedules that drive revenue.  To learn more about how your schedules can be improved, Request a Conversation.

Summary

Asking these questions can make a significant change in your business.  If you’ve not been thinking of your schedule as a strategic tool to advance your business, now is a great time to start.  More than just “making sure a key holder is in the store each day,” a smart schedule can drive revenue, increase employee engagement, reduce turnover, and ensure you have delighted customers who come back again and again.

 If you enjoyed this post, please click the thumbs up icon at the top of this page and let me know!  And I’d love your thoughts – what is most important to you when scheduling your work?

About:  JD Miller is a senior technology executive with a career spanning small startups and large public companies.  He uses this expertise to help organizations increase and sustain sales performance.  He is also active in Chicago’s philanthropic community, with a special interest in issues related to hunger and homelessness.

You can follow Dr. Miller on Twitter @JDM_Chicago 

Photo Credit: koalazymonkey CC2.0

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