Hello Scheduling Blog

When designing your employee schedule it’s important to maximize shift coverage most efficiently, providing the right staffing level for the day’s needs while also ensuring that employees’ have the right skills for their shifts.  It can be daunting to set up your schedule for the first time but with the proper start and a flexible employee scheduling system you’ll be up and running in no time.

In order to create an efficient schedule, begin by asking yourself the following questions:

1. How many employees do I need you need for each shift?
2. How many employees do I have available on a given day or a given week?
3. How many hours can each employee work each week?
4. What skills do my employees need for each shift?

How Many Employees?

One important goal of creating an efficient schedule is to match the number of employees with the amount of work as it varies throughout the day.  This can be particularly challenging for business with variable schedules and workflow. If the workday is slow, you’re wasting money by being overstaffed. However, if you are understaffed during a busy spell, you may lose sales, hurt your customer service, or overwork your employees.

So how do we calculate our staffing level? Let’s assume you schedule your staff at 40 hours per week per employee.  In this example, we’ll assume 3 employees need to be in the store at all times — 10 hours a day — for a total of 70 hours a week.  Let’s also assume we have 6 employees in our staff.

To calculate if you’re staffed fully, take the minimum number of people needed (3) times the total hours open per week (70) and divide by the number of employees you have (6).

In our case we get (3*70) / 6 = 35 hours a week each.  In this case we’re averaging a 35 hour work week for our staff.  However, you’ll need to account for time off, sick days and part-time staff.

With Hello Scheduling:

• We track how many hours per week that a full-time employee vs a part-time employee should work
• We track how many hours per week that the employee has actually worked
• We track time-off, so that you don’t accidentally schedule an employee that can’t work

But the best part is, we provide all of this information when you are scheduling , so you end up with the right staffing level, with the fewest clicks — and headaches — possible.

Shift Needs and Employee Skills

Another element that goes into a highly efficient schedule is matching skills to shift needs.  Let’s say, as in the case of many retail stores, you have an opening shift that requires a combination of staff trained in the stockroom, floor design and one manager that has a store key and can work the alarm system.  This means you may have three different shifts with the same start and end times but with very different requirements.  Tracking this kind of complexity can rapidly get out of hand.

Using a good employ  scheduling software solution will greatly reduce the things you need to track in your head or with notes.  For example, Hello Scheduling allows the addition of shift requirement tags and employee skill tags.  With Hello Scheduling it’s easy to see if the employee is a good skill match — we automatically match shift needs with employee skills.

These are some of the basic building blocks of an efficient and productive schedule design.  In the coming weeks we’ll be blogging more about setting up the optimum schedule.

Stay tuned and Happy Scheduling!