A staff schedule might seem unnecessary when running a business, especially if it is brand new. You might sometimes wonder if just winging it every day or having a brief schedule in your mind might actually provide better results. But I can assure you with complete certainty that having a proper schedule is way more beneficial. And to show you the amazing benefits it provides, I have listed all the reasons why it is important to schedule staff…
It provides structure for your company:
The difference between successful and unsuccessful companies is that successful companies have goals and a strategy in place that lays out a plan to work towards the goals. When you run a company with a solid structure in place that is built on data, you will be more likely to achieve results. When you and your employees just run through your daily work lives winging it, you will get some work done, but it will be all over the place. And you won’t achieve all the goals you are supposed to achieve.
As a result, your company won’t generate enough revenue to sustain itself and you will end up being one of the 90% of startups that don’t succeed. So, if you are serious about your company being successful in the long term, it is important to plan out everything for months and years in advance and break them down into a daily schedule.
Creating a strategy and a schedule might seem like a sophisticated task, but it can easily be executed by using good scheduling software.
It ensures that the company is adequately staffed:
When you set goals and create a schedule for your employees you will assess their skill levels and calculate the time it would take them to complete a project. This will help you figure out if you have enough employees or are you burdening an understaffed workforce with too much work. And if you’re understaffed, you can hire employees and reduce the workload. This will keep your current employees happy and prevent them from quitting because of the stress all the extra work is putting them under.
It ensures your customers are taken care of:
Creating a schedule is not just beneficial for your employees, but for your customers as well. This is because you will also be creating a schedule for your customer service employees.
When you make sure that there are always enough employees working shifts in a 24 hour period, you will be able to offer better customer service. This will keep your customers happy and improve retention and also attract more customers because as you know very few companies offer good customer service.
It makes it easy to deal with employees who want to take leave:
When you create an employee schedule in advance it gives your employees plenty of time to plan their lives around it. And if they are planning to go on vacation they will come to you early on and inform you about their plans.
This will give you sufficient time to find a replacement. If you don’t have a schedule, employees will come to you at the last minute and make things chaotic.
So, take steps to release the staff schedule at least 2 weeks in advance.
Helps you measure employee performance:
If you are just randomly managing employees without a schedule, you will never know the reason why a particular day was productive or unproductive. But if you have a schedule in place that you are tracking properly, you will always know what brought about the positive or negative impact.
So, after you create your schedule you should monitor it and your employees to see if they are performing better. And regularly experiment with different scheduling strategies to see if any specific changes bring about a positive impact.
Helps you stay in the budget:
Another big advantage of scheduling is that it helps you stay in your budget. You will only schedule the right number of employees for shift lengths within your company’s budget.
Conclusion
These are all the important benefits of scheduling staff. So, make sure you implement all of them today. Soon you will see a rise in employee productivity, happiness, and engagement.
