Social Distancing Strategies via Scheduling to Increase Workforce Flexibility

The right shift schedule can streamline the entire workflow of a business and boost success rates within the restrictions and regime to follow. Many companies have taken up the “work from home” approach in the current pandemic scenario, resulting in their employees’ flexible working conditions. This, in turn, has increased productivity and shows the importance of scheduling techniques behind the growth of a business. Here, we have curated four effective scheduling strategies that are bound to increase your workforce flexibility and productivity keeping in mind the ever-changing regulations.

#1 Self-Serve Scheduling

Based on company resources, we often adopt a top-down approach while drawing up employee schedules. Supervisors in charge of designing these schedules often struggle to fill in the vacancies or gather enough backup if someone cancels their shift at the eleventh hour. This stress can be effectively minimised by adapting scheduling options in a controlled manner. This method makes a list of vacant schedules available, and employees can choose a suitable shift. 

#2 Shift-Splitting

Certain scenarios can arise when no employee is willing or available to work a full shift. Does that mean that the shift will go vacant? Certainly not! An effective way of troubleshooting is shift-splitting. You can divide one long shift into two or three shorter ones, thus employing multiple workers to get the work done and complying with the employee demands. 

#3 Rotate Job Positions

Having separate, rigid categories of employees with limited skill sets to maintain the functioning of different business blocks might not be very productive. In many cases, a professional standstill can arise from the lack of skilled workers in a certain domain. Statistics show a considerable rise over the decade in employment rate, as employees tend to stick longer to the jobs that offer opportunities to obtain new skills.

#4 Get Old and New Employees to Work Together

While drawing up employee schedules for the week, always have a mixed batch of new and experienced employees working in unison. The greener batch of workers can benefit from the experience and knowledge of older ones while old employees get to learn new skill sets from the freshers. 

Final Thoughts

Getting your entire workforce to labour effectively under a flexible schedule can be tricky, but TimeCentral is here to help you manage business timetables also with capacity management and vaccination management which also aids in attaining social distancing.

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