Assigning shifts to your staff effectively can be quite a task without a proper shift management solution in place. Assigning blocks of time to all your staff in different departments needs to be perfect, right in that sweet spot where your staff is neither overworked nor underutilized.
HR departments and shift managers need to come up with a working shift management system to keep everything flowing.
Why Shift Management Is Important
Improved Productivity
Having an effective shift management system means all your personnel are effectively utilized. Effectively utilizing your personnel with optimal shifts means your business will be active round the clock with no unnecessary downtimes.
Everything in your office, or organization for that matter, will be utilized to the maximum. Having employees work in their preferred schedules increases team morale and they certainly will perform better and achieve better results.
Increased Flexibility
It goes without saying that employees look for opportunities with some level of flexibility to their work shifts. A more flexible schedule could prove more efficient than the traditional 9-5 for most employees.
For instance, night owls are a lot more productive in the latter hours of the day vis a vis during the day. Why not put employees like those on night shift duty?
Another example would be a working mum who gets to pick her kid up from day care around midday. Perhaps she could prefer working early hours so she gets to spend the rest of the day with her little one.
An effective shift management solution helps employees work according to their schedules, which improves employee morale and satisfaction.
Effective Workload Management
The whole point of shift management is to come up with schedules that maximize employee strength, especially during peak hours. On the other end of the spectrum, it means only having necessary employees present when there is less traffic.
Work your shift management around how your business peaks and when you need more or less employees around. This helps you avoid both understaffing and overstaffing with respect to work traffic. This simply improves efficiency of workflows and cuts unnecessary costs.
Tips for Effective Shift Management
Offer Incentives
No one particularly loves adjusting their entire life around their work schedules. As such, it wouldn’t hurt to offer incentives at work based on performance as extra encouragement for them to work more efficiently and avoid any lapses in concentration and focus, which can have you needing your workplace safety management software.
Be Selective in Your Recruitment Process
When going about hiring staff, consider how many shifts they can work, the time shifts they prefer, and how it fits into your overall plan.
This is especially important if some of your time block allocations are for odd hours. Choose the right people for the right schedule hours.
Use a Shift Management Solution
This is applicable especially to large organizations with lots of shifts. Having to monitor dozens of shifts and lots of employees manually can be taxing and overwhelming.
Software for this will help you in all those trivial tasks and it can even provide reports for a more complex business analysis.
What to Look Out for in These Solutions
Shift Management
Of course, the very first feature to look out for in these solutions is comprehensive shift management. Employees should be able to access the software to pick up shifts as well as post their own shift openings.
For management, shift managers should be able to view open shifts and contact employees to fill said openings.
Integration
An ideal system of this nature should allow for integration with other essential business systems that you have, like workplace safety management software. The full scope of scheduling may for instance need some level of collaboration with a HR management system not to mention other tools like payroll systems. As such, integration abilities are key for any shift management system.