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Three Benefits of Good Shift Management & Scheduling Practices

TimeWellScheduled

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” – Annie Dillard.

If you’re running a business, it is critical that your employees work as efficiently as possible. This means ensuring that your employees work the right hours and that their shifts are scheduled correctly. By implementing good shift management and scheduling practices, you can help improve employee satisfaction and the business’s bottom line. This blog discusses three benefits of good shift management and scheduling practices. Plus, we demonstrate how TimeWellScheduled’s cloud-based scheduling system optimizes the entire process. Let’s get started!

Millions of Americans punch a clock daily at the beginning and end of work. The U.S. Labor Department data reports that more than 78 million Americans – or nearly 59% of the U.S. workforce are paid hourly.

A 2021 Deputy.com survey study found that the top four benefits shift workers want most from scheduling:

  • Increased or accurate pay
  • Schedule transparency and flexibility
  • Recognition and support
  • Effective employer-employee communication

What is shift management?

Shift Management is the managerial function associated with leading, planning, organizing and controlling employee shift times and paid labor hours. This function exists so managers can monitor and control operational efficiency and labor costs by optimizing shift schedules. Organized scheduling practices eliminates shift issues such as unfilled shifts, or over / understaffing.

For instance, TimeWellscheduled’s cloud-based scheduling systems improves shift management by allowing businesses to mitigate sheduling issues and minimize scheduling errors that cost money and damage employee morale. This is an example of good shift management.

Why is shift planning important? 

“People who are doing shift work or managing shift workers or deciding to put people on shift schedules, to begin with, should realize that we’re not robots.” – Jessa Gamble.

Without proper shift planning, many businesses end up paying for common scheduling mistakes such as overstaffing, unfilled shifts or allowing employees to accrue too much overtime. Shift planning helps to eliminate these extra expenses and cost-effectively employ staff. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to scheduling groups of people, all of whom come from different walks-of-life. Therefore, communication is the key to keeping the shift planning process transparent and organized.

In order to for shift plans to succeed, it is important to keep employees happy and to maintain positive organizational morale. Hence, management should embrace a people-first mindset insofar as dealing with staff is concerned. This means managers must understand employees, their needs, life-stage and what motivates them to work productively. Moreover, TimeWellScheduled’s scheduling solution improves workplace communication between managers, employees, and employer-employee relations generally by providing organizations with two essential tools, the online portal and the TWS app, available in the google play store and the iPhone app store.

TimeWellScheduled’s communication tools provide four benefits that improve scheduling communication:

    1. Send and receive comprehensive communication (including attachments)
    2. Provides user-friendly and convenient access
    3. Enhances employee engagement & synergy
    4. Respond to messages in real-time
    5. Allows for individual or team communication

Read here to learn more about how TimeWellSchedule can improve scheduling communication : How to improve Communication in the workplace in Retail

Three Benefits of Good Shift Management

I) Increased Accuracy & Reduced Cost

Shift management is crucial to the workplace as they allow for the most accurate tracking of labor hours. TimeWellScheduled’s dashboard and attendance system enables managers to know who is present, absent or available for their shifts, which is necessary for calculating payroll accurately.

If an employee is absent for a shift, TimeWellScheduled’s systems will make management aware via the dashboard, and they can act accordingly and find replacements, etc. Good staff management is helps to avoid any discrepancies or inaccuracies.

  • 82 million. employees are affected by payroll problems, with about a quarter of all workers dealing with paycheck errors.
  • A study by the Kentucky CPA Journal estimated that over 400 billion dollars are lost to time card fraud and lost productivity each year.
  • CNBC reports that more than 50% of US workers have had a mistake on their paycheck 
  • 80% of employee timesheets require corrections after they have been submitted.

Knowing precisely how many hours each employee is working during a given week allows managers to monitor labor costs closely. In addition, employee scheduling provides business owners and managers to plan the future financial needs of the company with more precision.

“TimeWellScheduled’s scheduling software alleviates the burden of management by increasing efficiency and saving your company time and money.”

Payroll needs to be completed at the end of each pay period. Therefore, businesses must issue pay slips to employees and fulfill reporting obligations. Managers can track employee work hours confidently with TimeWellScheduled’s employee scheduling system. This information permits payroll staff to quickly complete the payroll at the end of each pay period.

II) Optimized Employee Usage

In order to ensure that customers have the best possible experience with your business, there must always be enough staff on duty. Whether running an online business or having a brick-and-mortar retail outlet, the operation must always be adequately staffed to deal with customers’ concerns. Thus, staff scheduling helps to organize staffing needs ahead of time so that the business is optimally ready to serve clients.

TimeWellScheduled’s software solutions quickly create schedules efficiently and with visual clarity. TimeWellScheduled lets managers create schedules with time bands, templates, and copy-past schedules for multiple uses. In addition, we help managers and workers to:

  • Simplify the scheduling process
  • Make building schedules easier, faster and more accurate.
  • Free up valuable time that can be used on more important things.
  • Promote employee input and accountability into the scheduling process

Shift managers can share these schedules with employees and let them offer shifts or trade them with fellow employees.

III) Improved Legal compliance

Legal compliance means that an organization respects labor laws, business regulations, and government rules. The rule of law is vital to properly functioning commerce, market economies, and societies. The business legal framework regulates markets, protects shoppers’ rights, competition and safety, and ensures public goods and services delivery.

“The IRS hands out millions of payroll penalties in any given year. The bulk of those penalties are assessed as “failure to pay” with over $1 billion in fees.”

Businesses that self-comply with business law often prevent legal violations, which protects the organization from fines and lawsuits. A self-imposed business compliance process tends to be ongoing based on organizational culture. Lastly, most mature organizations establish programs and practices to consistently and accurately govern compliance policies over time.

The benefits of a workplace compliance program generally:

  • Prevents illegal or unethical actions committed by uniformed employees.
  • Encourages reporting of illegal and unethical activities of administrators, managers, and colleagues.
  • Reduces the likelihood of waste, fraud, abuse, discrimination, and corruption.

Payroll Accuracy & Regulation

“The IRS has estimated that around one-third of employers make a payroll mistake in any given year, collecting nearly $7 billion in penalties for 2021″

Payroll is arguably the most government-regulated business function in an organization. In the U.S, payroll must meet federal, state, and local requirements, as stated by the American Payroll Association. Businesses must comply with the following:

  • Tax withholding and reporting.
  • Timely pay of employees to meet wage and hour law requirements.
  • Withholding child support and garnishments from wages.
  • Ensuring new employees are eligible to work in the U.S.
  • Awareness of federal and state-specific labor laws

Failing to maintain the standards set by the law and the rules governing the business will lead to liability issues. In addition, legal cases could damage the business’s reputation and negatively impact productivity.

Shift Management in Summary

Shift management is an essential managerial duty that includes allocating and optimizing financial and labor resources. The objective is to schedule the right mix of staff and managers that work a given shift resulting in the optimal customer experience and business outcomes.

Implementing good shift management and scheduling practices by integrating TimeWellScheduled’s cloud based scheduling solution will 100% improve your business’s bottom line in three critical ways. First, they can help reduce employee absenteeism, employee accountability and punctuality. Second, they can help employees be more productive at work. Finally, they can help you control costs by optimizing labor levels, reducing unnecessary overtime pay and the elimination of time theft. If you’re looking for a way to improve your business’s performance, implementing good shift management and scheduling practices may be the solution you’ve been searching for. Contact us at TimeWellScheduled for more information about our scheduling system by clicking here today!

About #TimeWellScheduled

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#TimeWellScheduled is a secure, online time and attendance software that is 100% tailored to meet your scheduling needs! In addition, #TimeWellScheduled facilitates employee attendance tracking & payroll tasks and enhances staff management capabilities. Plus, our Service is free for up to 10 employees!

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