Effective Scheduling Strategies to Increase Workforce Flexibility at Your Workplace

The skill labour shortage is one of the major workforce challenges across all industries. Adding to the woe is the emergence of “remote working,” physical distancing requirements and health concerns at the face of COVID-19. While effective hiring, training & development are the best ways to acquire and nurture talent pool, maintaining flexibility in scheduling can also result in improved employee satisfaction and productivity.

Here are three effective workforce scheduling strategies that aid in operational agility while addressing the challenges of compliance, cost and health.

1. Create Schedules Based on Employee Availability

With the TimeCentral scheduling app, creating a schedule works hand-in-hand with employee availability. The self-service platform allows your employees to set their availability and request time off. Any change instantly gets updated in the system, allowing you to create a schedule with more precision and efficiency. Scheduling employees based on their availability also helps instill a sense of satisfaction and reduces conflicts, resulting in increased productivity.

2. Offer Self-Service Scheduling    

A self-service scheduling system provides more autonomy to workers to achieve work-life balance. When employees have some level of control over their work schedule, it not only helps increase shift fill rates but also aids in better scheduling. Self-service allows the workforce to update their availability or set locations. As such, supervisors will have a pool of employees who are accessible for a particular shift. It also allows creating teams or shifts based on location.

In this way, supervisors maintain better control over who are assigned specific shifts and also prevent last-minute shift refusals. Additionally, scheduling becomes simpler and accurate with self-service.

3. Make Schedules More Accessible by Your Workforce

One of the biggest challenges of using a traditional scheduling system is the lack of internal communication. Employees often remain unclear of their shifts, resulting in conflicts, refusals and dissatisfaction. Using a workforce scheduling system that focuses on effective team communication can be an ideal choice to improve flexibility at the workplace.

TimeCentral Scheduling allows supervisors to view employee availability/time-offs and assign shifts likewise. The same can be published on the system to be made available for the team. Employees, in any location, can view published schedules via mobile app or the browser. Together, it helps build an environment of improved workplace flexibility, seamless scheduling, increased productivity and more satisfaction.