At any company, scheduling employees and their tasks are one of HR managers’ core responsibilities. It is a crucial management function that ensures enough workers are available to keep the business operations running. Shift scheduling is essential but time-consuming and tedious when the number of workers to manage is high.
Many companies are adopting automatic scheduling tools to simplify the process, but many employers are still reluctant to use them. Change is hard. However, it is essential for business growth and adaptation. Today, optimizing business operations for efficiency to increase productivity and beat the competition is vital.
An automated scheduling system can result in a productivity boost as it frees up a lot of time for HR managers to focus on other activities related to operations management and employee engagement. This article will explore the importance and benefits of automatic scheduling for a company.
But, before we discuss the benefits of automated scheduling for a business, it is helpful to understand manual scheduling and where it is lacking.
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What is manual scheduling?
Manual scheduling is when supervisors and managers have to manage the schedule of workers through timesheets. It is a prevalent practice at most manufacturing and construction companies. As manual scheduling gives the managers complete control over who, when, and where an employee is scheduled, it allows for micromanaging almost all aspects of an employee’s work shift.
However, this type of schedule is not sustainable as it can take hours or even days depending on the number of employees to be scheduled. Furthermore, manual scheduling creates layers of abstraction that make it challenging to identify favoritism by managers. For instance, as managers ultimately control the shift schedule, they can easily allot preferred shifts to some employees irrespective of whether the assignment fits them.
They can also discriminate between the distribution of hours of work, days off, shift rotations, and holidays. With an automatic employee schedule, the entire shift schedule data can be centralized such that no one manager is in control.
What is automated scheduling?
Automatic scheduling can have a revolutionary effect on employee scheduling and management. Most automatic schedule maker tools consider your organization’s policies, holidays, weekly off, and staff availability to come up with the best times and people to schedule shifts.
The real benefit of an automatic employee schedule lies in its ability to assist HR managers in creating transparent shifts and eliminate favoritism or discrimination. Automated scheduling allows you to put labor where labor is needed with extreme efficiency without overworking employees.
An automatic shift schedule is beneficial not only for the company but for employees as well. These systems are flexible and can help improve employee quality of life issues. These tools can allow multiple shift availabilities so employees can work without burnout. As the workload will be evenly distributed among employees, there will be better work-life balance.
For HR managers, such tools provide a high degree of automation. As a manager, you can create and fix a schedule taking a fraction of the time compared to manual scheduling. Also, the program will keep you on track even if you are on leave for a day or two.
4 benefits of automated scheduling
With automatic scheduling, you can achieve an extremely balanced work schedule for workers and create an automated system that can operate independently. An automatic schedule maker offers more than time-saving and labor management.
Here are some essential benefits of automated scheduling.
1. Saves time
When HR managers don’t have to sit through a long list of data to find the right employees for a particular shift, they can create a work schedule much more efficiently. Time-saving is one of the most significant benefits of adopting automatic scheduling in your company.
The time thus saved by using shift scheduling tools like Truein can then be focused on more critical tasks like promoting your business and making future goals.
2. Reduces overtime spending
Overtime spending can have a dramatic impact on a business’s bottom line. If not kept under check, you can lose a substantial portion of your revenue in paying overtime wages.
You can configure the system with an auto-scheduler to consider certain overtime limits. It is how you can control overtime spending and eliminate any malpractices, such as unnecessary work hours and frequent overtime shifts.
3. Track working employees easily
Often there is a discrepancy between planned or scheduled tasks and actual tasks performed by the employees when there is no way to track their performance. It happens with on-site employees more often. With automated scheduling, it is possible to create an accurate log of exactly what work is being performed and when.
An automatic shift scheduler can record the time worked by the employees at the location. This allows HR managers to match the schedule with actuals, tracking down any discrepancy or deviation in employee performance. Managers can quickly generate reports comparing the program with actual tasks and tracking discrepancies or deviations.
4. More accurate
Unsurprisingly, an auto-schedule maker is much more accurate than manual scheduling. Human error is possible when you keep timesheets to track employees and create schedules. Automatic scheduling can auto-track data such as employee availability, schedule shift timing, weekly off, etc., to more accurately schedule shifts, ensuring that the right person is available for the job at the right time.
It saves time and cost otherwise wasted if shifts are not correctly scheduled. It can lead to poor productivity and loss of revenue. Also, faulty schedules can put the same workers to work affecting their performance and health.
Why is automatic scheduling better than manual scheduling?
Automatic scheduling saves the labor wasted on manual scheduling to a great extent as managers can invest the resources saved by adopting automated scheduling on the tasks that can increase sales, improve customer interaction, and result in cost savings.
Manual scheduling is highly limited in flexibility when a large workforce is involved. With an automated schedule maker, a large workforce can be much more easily managed, ensuring better labor distribution, lower cost, happier employees, and better customer experience.
How can Truein help you with automated scheduling?
Truein is a cloud-based shift scheduling and attendance software. It is an AI-powered face recognition time and attendance system that offers capabilities to automate attendance management and leave management.
As a shift scheduler, Truein offers HR managers to create successful schedule templates that can be used repeatedly. It simplifies and streamlines the entire scheduling process from tracking employee attendance, geo-locating their position, and monitoring the leave management data.
Truein offers a complete set of features that make it a potent and versatile tool for shift scheduling, such as mobile-based attendance recording and monitoring, geo-fencing attendance, leave management, and much more.
Conclusion
Shifting from manual to automatic scheduling might seem daunting, but with the selection of the proper automatic employee schedule, it’s easier. The numerous benefits of automated scheduling for your business outweigh the reluctance to be open to change.
We hope that this guide will help you understand the genuinely transformational benefits in terms of cost savings and better scheduling and auto-scheduler can offer for your business.
