Scheduling software — is it worth it?

Creating employee schedules plays a crucial role in the work organization. A business that operates 8 hours a day has a different schedule from the one with a 24/7 cycle. Companies can implement different solutions for calculating and paying salaries, make adjustments based on employee preferences and company demands.

Simple scheduling solutions, including Microsoft Word and Excel, hardly keep the workflow steady. As the many industries, including restaurant, health, retail, and outsourcing moved into the digital age, hundreds of scheduling software products appeared which significantly simplified the process of timetable generation.

Before we dive into the possibilities of modern scheduling software, it is vital to get acquainted with types of work timetables.

What type of timetables can be made in an employee schedule maker

Of course, most modern companies use fixed work schedule type due to its simplicity: the same number of hours and days every week - for example, when a company works Monday to Friday from 9 AM to 6 PM. It is used by pharmacies, small shops, customer services, government organizations. In some cases, employees can work overtime and get additional pay.

• Flexible

On paper, this seems an ideal way of workforce organization: employees and employers agree on the number of hours and days which have to be met on a weekly basis. They can work 20-30 hours a week whenever they please or during a specific time of the day. Things get complicated when most employees want a flexible schedule. If this wasn’t hard enough to deal with, there are a few flexible schedule subtypes:

Compressed workweek. This variation of a flexible schedule 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 chose this option, they can pick the time when their shift ends and starts, but will have to work the same number of hours every day,

Result Oriented Work Environment. It doesn’t require any working hours to count the salary, but instead, payments are based on the amount of work done: deadlines met and assignments completed.

Split shift. This type of flexible timetable allows dividing the shift between 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 nevertheless alive and kicking schedule type is the rotating timetable. If a business adopts a rotating schedule, it will be able to operate 24/7 by breaking the cycle of production into three shifts: day, swing and night. This type of employee scheduling is mostly found in construction work, hospitals, power plants, and road work.

Employee shifts change weekly or quarterly, depending on work requirements. For example, those who are employed on construction jobs may work the night shift for one week and switch to a day shift the next  Employees can find these hard to handle, as their sleeping and eating patterns have to constantly change.

Why switch to an employee schedule maker

These timetable types can seem a bit hard to handle, but luckily there is an abundance of employee schedule generators. They offer various features that make scheduling effortless for various types of businesses, no matter what they choose for all of their workers or for a group of them.

This is made possible thanks to the various settings this software has to offer:

• Schedule generation

Users are able to generate schedules, no matter what type they choose to work with. Most online scheduling software offers to create any number of shift templates and schedules.

• Shift managing

If there are changes in shifts 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 that are not assigned to any employees can be deleted or taken by other workers.

• Shift swapping

Should any 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 a number of instances when this feature will come in handy. With that said, the management does have to confirm these requests to have some control over workforce organization.

• Time-off requests

Last but not least, most modern employee scheduling solutions offer a way for employees to ask for time off. Maybe they are too tired, need a vacation or won’t be clocking-in tomorrow due to sickness. This can be done without using any third-party service. In some cases, users are able to attach documents to confirm that their absence is based on solid evidence.

There is an abundance of similar software products currently available on the market. They bost various aforementioned features and some of their own. With that said, we can’t recommend Shifton scheduling service hard enough. It provides company owners with a fast way of creating and deploying work schedules for any number of employees with various features under its belt and a flexible schedule generation system.

The Shifton service is one for the employee scheduling software products currently available on the market.