Simple scheduling solutions, like Microsoft Word and Excel, seldom keep the workflow smooth. As many industries, such as restaurants, health, retail, and outsourcing, moved into the digital age, hundreds of scheduling software products emerged, significantly simplifying the timetable creation process.
Before we explore the opportunities of modern scheduling software, it is crucial to familiarize ourselves with different types of work timetables.
What type of timetables can be created in an employee schedule maker
Most modern companies, of course, use a fixed work schedule due to its simplicity: the same hours and days every week - for example, when a company operates Monday to Friday from 9 AM to 6 PM. It's used by pharmacies, small shops, customer services, and government organisations. In some cases, employees can work overtime and receive additional pay.
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Flexible
On paper, this seems an ideal way of organising the workforce: employees and employers agree on the hours and days to be worked weekly. They can work 20–30 hours a week whenever they choose or during a set time of the day. Things get tricky when most employees want a flexible schedule. If this wasn't challenging enough, there are a few flexible schedule types:
Compressed workweek. This flexible schedule variant takes a 40-hour week and squeezes it into a few days. For example, an employee can have three 12-hour or four 10-hour workdays but get an additional day off or two.
Flex. If employees choose this option, they can decide when their shift begins and ends but must work the same number of hours every day.
Result-Oriented Work Environment. It doesn't require counting working hours for salary but bases payments on the amount of work completed: meeting deadlines and completing assignments.
Split shift. This flexible timetable allows dividing the shift across different hours of the day. A worker can do 3 hours in the morning, 4 hours in the evening.
- Rotating
The less commonly used, but still prevalent schedule type is the rotating timetable. If a business adopts a rotating schedule, it can operate 24/7 by dividing production into three shifts: day, swing, and night. This type of employee scheduling is mainly found in construction work, hospitals, power plants, and road work.
Employee shifts change weekly or quarterly, depending on work requirements. For example, those employed in construction might work the night shift for one week and switch to the day shift the next. Employees can find these challenging as their sleeping and eating patterns have to continually change.
Why switch to an employee schedule maker
These timetable types can seem somewhat challenging, but fortunately, there's an abundance of employee schedule generators. They offer various features that make scheduling easy for different types of businesses, no matter what they choose for all their workers or just a group of them.
This is made possible thanks to the various settings this software offers:
- Schedule generation Users can generate schedules, no matter what type they choose to work with. Most online scheduling software offers the creation of any number of shift templates and schedules.
- Shift managing If there are changes in a shift's duration, they can be edited on the go. For example, if an employee wants to work more hours, but fewer days, some of their shifts can be deleted, while others are extended or shortened for a chosen period. Shifts not assigned to any employees can be deleted or taken by other workers.
- Shift swapping Should unexpected circumstances occur, employees can easily swap shifts with one another to avoid unnecessary time-wasting on exchanging shifts using third-party software and keeping the workflow in check. There can be several instances when this feature will be very helpful. That said, management does have to confirm these requests to maintain some control over workforce organisation.
- Time-off requests Last but not least, most modern employee scheduling solutions offer a way for employees to request time off. Maybe they are exhausted, need a holiday, or won't be clocking in tomorrow due to illness. This can be done without using any third-party service. In some cases, users can attach documents to confirm their absence is based on solid evidence.
There's an abundance of similar software products currently available on the market. They have most of the aforementioned features and some unique ones. That said, we highly recommend Shifton scheduling service. It provides company owners with a fast way of creating and deploying work schedules for any number of employees with various features and a flexible schedule generation system.
The Shifton service is one of the employee scheduling software products currently available on the market.
