Managing your staff’s schedule is an important task that requires planning, communication, and flexibility. Here are some tips to help you create and maintain an effective schedule for your employees:
- Deal with availability first. Before you assign shifts, you need to know when your employees are available and when they have requested time off.
- Use a template. Creating a schedule from scratch every week can be time-consuming and prone to errors. You can save time and effort by using a template that reflects your typical staffing needs and patterns.
- Enforce time off request policies. To avoid confusion and frustration, you should have clear and consistent policies for how your employees can request time off, how much notice they need to give, and how you will approve or deny their requests.
- Create a schedule based on the employee’s skills. Not all employees are equally qualified or experienced to perform certain tasks or roles. You should consider the skills and abilities of your employees when assigning them to shifts, and make sure you have a balanced and diverse team for each shift.
- Make the shift swaps easy for employees by cross training. Make sure to set aside the time to make sure all of your employees are trained at completing all of the vital tasks of your workplace. This will pay dividends in the long run.
- Retain a staffing service. Maintain a working relationship with a staffing service so that you don’t have to sacrifice productivity for hard to solve scheduling issues.
Whether it’s to fill in for an employee on extended leave, a large project, or a full time placement; call us at Tiger Labor & Staffing to work out a custom solution for you!
