7 Common Employee Scheduling Mistakes and Solutions

Scheduling employees may seem like an easy task from the outside. One has to make decisions about who to put to work, when to do it, and where each worker should be.

However, as companies get bigger, it becomes much harder to schedule workers correctly.

Different levels of availability, specific roles required in particular shifts, time-off requests, and various other issues might arise anytime. And when it comes to manual scheduling, any of these can cause problems for workers and managers.

Luckily, almost all scheduling problems can be solved if one uses a better strategy.

Here are seven common employee scheduling mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Ignoring Employee Availability Checks

The most common scheduling error is scheduling a shift without proper consideration of the availability of the employee.

If an employee informs his or her manager about unavailability on a certain day, the manager may forget about the conversation while developing the schedule.

This will bring in unnecessary changes into the schedule and cause trouble for both the manager and the employee.

How to avoid it

Take employee availability into account while developing your schedule.

Prior to the development of the schedule, consider the following:

• Employee availability

• Time off

• Current schedule

• Working hours requirement

• Preferences of employees (where applicable)

Maintaining all this information at hand will help create an effective schedule.

2. Ignoring Scheduling Conflicts

Scheduling conflicts are possible if an employee is assigned overlapping shifts or if the employee is scheduled during days he or she cannot work.

This problem becomes very easy to miss when managers are handling huge spreadsheets.

How to avoid it

Look through the schedule for conflicts prior to publishing it.

A digital scheduling system will help you do this since it will help to spot a conflict even prior to it affecting the employee.

3. Neglecting Workload and Staffing Requirements

A schedule is not only about filling shifts that are available.

Moreover, managers should take into account how many staff members will be required in certain periods.

For instance, the busy period might require more staff than the quite one. Scheduling insufficient number of people might lead to overload of employees and low-quality service provided by them and also poor experience of customers who visit a place.

Scheduling too much people during quiet periods will bring about increased unnecessary labor cost.

How to avoid it

Analyzing your business demand while working out shifts is important.

Consider such aspects as

• The busiest and the quietest periods

• Workload

• Necessary positions

• Employees' skills

• Previous staff requirements

Your aim here is to schedule enough people but without unnecessary overlaps.

4. Using Last Minute Changes All the Time

It happens sometimes that last minute changes are required in schedule.

Maybe an employee gets sick, there is a need to cover some shift or the demand changes unexpectedly.

The problem starts when such changes become routine.

Frequent schedule changes make it hard for employees to organize themselves and create extra burden for managers.

How to avoid it

It is always better to make your schedules early on and to make sure that employees inform you about any changes as soon as they happen.

In case of schedule changes, make sure that your updated schedule is available for all people through a centralized method.

5. Lack of Communication of Schedule Changes

Making schedule changes is just one part of the process.

The other thing is informing employees about schedule changes.

Since there are multiple communication channels which can be used to communicate schedule changes including WhatsApp, emails, phone calls, and spreadsheets, an important update can be missed.

How to avoid it

Make sure to keep your schedule in one place.

An employee should be able to see his/her shift from the schedule.

6. Failing to Take Into Account Employee’s Skills

Every worker is not suitable for every job position.

The schedule could be fully assigned but lack the proper skill set for a certain shift among the employees.

Thus, there could be some requirements for particular skills or positions that should be fulfilled by some employees.

The way to avoid it

Think about the roles of workers and their skills when scheduling shifts.

Thus, the manager will not end up in such situation when the shift is full of employees but lacks one role.

7. Dealing with Everything Through Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can be good for many kinds of business management, but using them as the primary tool for scheduling a large number of employees is rather complicated.

Moreover, it leads to the necessity to manually edit cells, send new spreadsheets to employees, and check different sheets in order to know the schedule.

How to avoid it

One might consider implementing centralized WFM software that would deal with all aspects of scheduling, workforce data, attendance, and other workforces management processes in one place.

This way will facilitate access to information and will make it unnecessary to maintain schedules copies.

What is Good Employee Scheduling Like?

A good employee scheduling will be beneficial for both employer and employee.

It will help managers to adapt to any changes in workforce and will help employees to plan ahead.

The listed below scheduling procedures should be simple to do:

• Creation of shifts

• Assignment of staff members

• Verification of their availability

• Processing of leave requests

• Detection of potential conflicts

• Notifying about schedule changes

• Reviewing future shifts

• Comparison of scheduled shifts with real attendance

The fewer steps are involved into the mentioned above processes, the less time managers will spend on scheduling process management.

How Digital Scheduling Can Help

Moving scheduling into a digital system can make many of these tasks easier.

Instead of keeping schedules in spreadsheets and communicating changes through separate messages, managers can use a centralized platform to manage workforce schedules.

Employees can also have better visibility into their upcoming shifts.

When scheduling is connected with attendance and workforce information, managers can gain additional insight into how planned schedules compare with actual working hours.

This can help them make better decisions when creating future schedules.

Simplify Employee Scheduling With Crewtic

Managing employee schedules shouldn't require managers to constantly update spreadsheets or chase employees for confirmation.

Crewtic brings scheduling, attendance, payroll, documents, and workforce reporting together in one platform.

With centralized workforce management, managers can keep schedules organized, improve visibility, and respond more easily when workforce needs change.

Employees can also have clearer access to their schedules, reducing unnecessary back-and-forth communication.

Scheduling Made Better by Doing It Efficiently

The aim of scheduling is not just to cover all shifts.

Rather, the aim of this practice is to ensure that the right people are available when they need to be while ensuring predictability and efficiency on the part of the workers.

A proper digital approach towards scheduling can allow businesses to achieve all these objectives efficiently.