Running a company is challenging on its own, let alone when additional issues, problems, and troubles come along the way. With this in mind, and in an effort to help you run your company with one less thing to worry about, it is time to talk about employee scheduling software and see how it can help your company. In the following sections we discuss the signs your company is in actual need of an advanced employee scheduling system. To learn more about this, we advise you to visit www.worksightflow.com.

1. Employee scheduling requires a full-time scheduler

The company has grown, and an extra shift has been added. Preparing, posting, and updating the weekly schedule in addition to vacation planning has turned into a full-time job for at least one employee.

2. **Finding available employees to fill empty shifts is challenging

As you build your weekly schedule or your yearly vacation plan, finding available and qualified employees becomes more and more difficult like a game of tetris.

3. Empty shifts are frequently filled using overtime

An employee calls in sick – you would like to fill the vacancy with a qualified straight time replacement and move the resulting overtime to a lower-paying position. However, on short notice, you can’t find a qualified straight time replacement, so you fill the vacancy by holding a senior employee over on overtime.

4. Inaccurate Schedules are frequently displayed

There are repeated corrections, amendments, and re-postings of the work schedule. The employees now view it as a rough guide. This leads to multiple requests for changes as per the employee’s preferences and it is difficult to encourage an ordered and responsible approach to staff deployment

5. Information to make scheduling decisions is in disparate locations

What a mess - your record of employee job qualifications is in numerous supervisor spreadsheets and post-it notes. Seniorities and their date ranges are in the HR system. 

Occupation rates are in the Payroll System. Employee special skills don’t seem to be recorded anywhere and vacation planning is carried out on an old in-house system.

6. Back-to-back shifts are causing employee burnout

Employees are complaining of burnout – they are not exaggerating; the Institute for Work and Health (IWH) reports that there is strong evidence that rotating and irregular shifts are associated with worker fatigue and an increased risk of occupational injury.

7. Unequal or unfair scheduling causes employee grievances  

As you know employees often prefer to work on certain days and employers like to rely on a few trusted employees for overtime. You must be careful, however, that your scheduling practices are fair and do not lead to a formal grievance.

8. Time entry and the schedules are not tied together

After preparing the schedule, timecards still must be collected, and time entered into the payroll system as separate steps. And, as you know, failure to calculate payroll correctly, creates grievances and can put you on the hook for back taxes, interest, and penalties.

9. There are information “silos” associated with sick leave, vacation, FMLA, and other time off requests

Tracking and recording each employee’s available time off for an assortment of valid time off reasons isn’t done in a single system. You can’t get a full picture of the company’s liabilities