Common Shift Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The year 2024 has begun, bringing with it a wave of aspirations for growth and profitability among start-ups and businesses of various sizes. From ambitious start-ups to medium enterprises and well-established corporations, organizations are setting their sights on increased productivity and financial success in the new calendar year.
However, the path to achieving these goals is not without challenges like aligning employees to one common goal and scheduling their tasks. One major obstacle to these is mistakes in shift management system.
These mistakes could potentially hinder the realization of these lofty aspirations. Unless these pitfalls are effectively addressed, the ambitious resolutions for profitability in 2024 may remain mere intentions rather than transforming into tangible and substantial realities for businesses.
This blog uncovers:
- 5 Employee shift management mistakes
- Impact of Shift Scheduling Mistakes
- The Importance of Effective Shift Scheduling
- Solutions and Best Practices in rota planning
5 Employee Shift Management Mistakes
Here is a list of five shift scheduling mistakes that frequently occur in organizations.
1. Dependency on manual employee shift scheduling methods
How do you presently notify your employees about their schedules? Are you still relying on paper schedules or whiteboards for displaying shift changes? While these traditional methods have been in use for years and were commonplace before the digital era, it is not compulsory that your shift manager work has to stick to them anymore.
There are more convenient and transparent options available today. Traditional manual scheduling poses various challenges. For instance, when an employee scheduled for a shift calls in sick or another employee arrives late due to unforeseen circumstances, HR personnel often have to scramble to find replacements. In contrast, a cloud-based shift manager proves immensely beneficial in such situations. It offers real-time updates on schedules.
2. Employee availability management in isolation
If you’re used to managing your employees’ schedules in isolation, there are pretty high chances of neglecting other crucial aspects of their work such as payroll processing, leave applications, or time tracking. Without even your knowledge, you are opening the door to potential errors arising from double entries or missing information.
Consider a scenario where an employee scheduled for a specific day fails to report to work despite having applied for leave. Without real-time updates in shift management, this discrepancy can cascade into payroll processing errors.
Mewurk’s integrated solutions seamlessly combine timesheets, shift management, and payroll. It ensures that any update across the modules is instantly reflected and thus minimizes the shift manager work.
3. Preparing and sending schedules at the 11th hour
In many countries, companies are legally bound to prepare employee work schedules at least a couple of days in advance and send it to the respective employees. Last-minute schedules will cause employees to come to the office physically and mentally unprepared, which can even impact their productivity.
Employees deserve to plan their off days and spend them meaningfully with their families. Last-minute changes in the shifts may cause them to drop their plans. Sending schedules to the teams at the last minute can also create troubles for the HRs or multiply the shift manager responsibilities as they have to make adjustments in the shifts due to employee unavailability.
4. Accepting or rejecting shift swap requests manually
You have perfectly prepared a shift for your employees and all your team are well aware of it. But at the last minute, something unexpected happens. An employee needs his shift covered or swapped.
He got some emergencies. How do you think you could make a change instantly and get that communicated across your team? The manual way seems quite a hectic process. But with an advanced shift management tool, the employee himself can request for shift swapping or covering and the shift manager can approve or reject it.
The notifications of these activities are communicated to the respective team members or the select ones who need to be informed about these updates.
5. Staff scheduling without data-driven insights
If you tend to prepare employee schedules following a fixed staffing equation or a long-term practice, you could be wasting your human resources.
Explore innovative staff allocation strategies by analysing productivity across shifts using varied staffing equations. Be flexible to accept changes and discover the most effective staffing configurations for optimal results. Similarly, ensure equitable workload distribution in each schedule. If certain roles face underutilisation, consider adjusting staffing levels.
Tailor staffing allocations based on varying sales or customer engagement dynamics in different schedules for enhanced effectiveness. A sophisticated tool for employee shift and schedule management enhances transparency in staffing configurations. It shows how diverse staffing equations contribute to overall productivity and provides valuable insights for optimization.
The Impact of Poor Shift Scheduling
Staff scheduling mistakes can have significant consequences. Some of these include understaffing leading to employee burnout and decreased productivity, and overstaffing resulting in unnecessary labour costs and reduced efficiency.
Inadequate labour coverage can impact customer satisfaction and loyalty, while fatigue and safety risks can arise from inadequate rest periods or excessive overtime. Furthermore, mistakes in shift management can lead to compliance issues with labour laws and regulations, decreased employee morale and engagement, and increased turnover rates, recruitment, and training costs.
Why Should You Prioritize Effective Staff Scheduling?
Effective staff scheduling is crucial for businesses to optimize productivity, reduce costs, and improve employee satisfaction.
It ensures that there is adequate staffing to cover important tasks so no one has to work overtime. When the shifts are convenient for employees to work, there will be reduced absenteeism.
A well-planned employee availability management also enhances customer satisfaction, increases efficiency, and reduces errors. Furthermore, it helps to identify and allocate resources effectively, resulting in less wastage of them. By prioritizing effective scheduling, businesses can gain a competitive edge, improve morale, and drive success.
It’s essential to use appropriate rota planning tools and techniques to create a schedule that meets the needs of both the business and its employees.
Solutions and Best Practices
Implement A Cloud-Based Shift Management System: Utilize a cloud-based shift scheduling platform like Mewurk that allows automated staff scheduling and notifications, real-time updates, and easy access to schedules for everyone involved. This helps reduce errors, increases transparency, and enables employees to request changes or swaps.
Set up Clear Communication Channels: Set up open communication channels for employees to report scheduling conflicts, request time-off, or swap shifts. Regularly review and address rota planning challenges and flaws to prevent them.
Conduct Regular Schedule Audits: Regularly review and audit schedules to identify and correct errors, such as overlapping shifts, under/overstaffing, or missed breaks. This helps prevent mistakes from impacting operations.
Provide Scheduling Training and Support: Offer training and support to scheduling managers and employees on scheduling best practices, company policies, and system usage. Make sure that everyone understands the scheduling process and can identify potential mistakes quickly.
Conclusion
Mewurk helps you steer clear of shift management errors that can cause time wastage and escalated labour costs.
The state-of-the-art attendance and shift management solution it offers enables smooth integration of shift management with other modules like payroll, time and attendance tracking, core HR and flexible integration with third-party HRMS solutions or workforce management solutions. For a demonstration of Mewurk’s scheduling solutions, reach out to us.
