In an increasingly competitive market, any good business is concerned with its bottom line. With efficiency top of mind, employee scheduling software may be the next right investment for your company in 2021. This organizational tool can help you maintain compliance, ensure the right people are present for each task or job and reduce costly overtime hours or rework to correct errors.
Check out these seven ways employee scheduling software can save you time and money this year.
1. Ensure the Right People Are on the Job
It’s hard enough to ensure the right number of people are on the job — something managers in retail, call center or foodservice environments know well. But what if you need to cover specific specialty tasks or field service jobs?
Whether you’re trying to staff up appropriately for call volumes, keep remote work shifts straight or ensure a master plumber is available the day you schedule a complex installation job, employee scheduling software can help. Automations backed by data accumulated over time can make it easier and easier to ensure the right people are on the job at the right times. That can drive greater revenues and reduce costs related to bottlenecks, rework, wait times and customer experience issues.
2. Reduce Overtime Hours
Manually creating schedules is difficult and leaves you open to a variety of expenses, including overtime. When you’re trying to cover all shifts and client needs, it can be easy to overlook the fact that you’ve scheduled people unevenly. You might have one employee with 30 hours while someone else has 48 hours in the week, for example.
Employee scheduling software makes it obvious when someone has reached an hour cap for the week, so you know their hours could be shifted to someone else. In some cases, you can even create rulesets in automatic scheduling systems to limit the amount of overtime that’s allowed to match your payroll budget for each week, month or season.
3. Understand Your Hiring Needs
Do you have enough people to get the job done? Manual scheduling can make it hard to tell. Oversights can lead to employees run ragged working 10+ overtime hours a week while they try to get impossible amounts of work done.
Employee scheduling software can help you better understand your needs as a business. It also lets you consider future-facing questions, too. If you add 10 customers or clients to your list, how many more workers will you need? If call volumes spike 30% during the holidays, how many reps do you need to maintain average speed of answer?
When you’re armed with the type of data that scheduling software compiles, you can make hiring decisions ahead of time. That way, when volumes increase, you’re ready with onboarded and trained staff to cover the need. Having the right number of qualified people on board helps you drive up revenue and minimize costly customer service issues.
4. Reduce Attrition
Thinking ahead and scheduling to best utilize staff without burning them out makes one major positive impact in particular: higher morale among your employees.
Positive employee morale contributes to time and money savings in a number of ways. Here are just a few:
- Happier employees tend to be more productive.
- Employees with good morale are less stressed, which can lead to reduced error rates and customer service issues.
- Your employees are more likely to stick around, which means you don’t have to hire new people to replace them.
It can cost 1.5 times more to replace an employee than it does to keep a good one, so employee morale is as much of an efficiency consideration as it is a human relations one.
5. Mitigate Opportunities for Error
Careful scheduling reduces the risk of errors in your organization. First, it helps ensure the right people (and right number of people) are on the job. But it also lets you bake important communication and transition tasks into your processes.
If you’re scheduling manually, it can be hard to get shift changes just right, for example. If everyone is coming off one shift while another team is all coming into theirs, communication is going to suffer. It can be hard in that quick and hectic transition for concerns and notes to pass effectively from one team to another. The result can be mistakes or customers who are left hanging because the communication ball was dropped somewhere.
Employee scheduling software can help you easily stagger shift changes or other transitions for a more seamless handoff. That saves time and money because you don’t need to spend either to correct the errors. Plus, when staff doesn’t have to spend time fixing previous errors, they’re able to move on to new revenue-generating tasks. That definitely has a positive impact on your bottom line.
Another huge potential for savings when you reduce error rates is related to customer service. When customers get the right service or product the first time, they’re more likely to be a repeat customer and/or tell others about you. And that’s great for revenue.
6. Help Ensure Compliance
If you’re in a regulated industry of any type, one error you don’t want to make is falling afoul of compliance regulations. Numerous industries, including healthcare and transportation, regulate how long people can work without rest. And your company might have its own rules — or be subject to union rules — related to scheduling.
One mistake on the schedule and you could be facing stiff compliance fines or other issues. Employee scheduling software helps you reduce the chances that this type of mistake could occur. You could create rulesets with those regulations, too, making it almost impossible to accidently schedule someone in violation of them.
7. Boost Customer Experience
You’ve probably noticed that the concept of customer experience came up a lot in this post. That’s because it matters a lot. Companies that pay more attention to the customer experience they provide have higher revenues than competitors that don’t. Nearly 66% of businesses compete on customer experience now because other factors, such as price and product quality, have become stable across the market.
The facts here are that if you’re not attending to customer service, you’re losing out on revenue and new sales. But you can’t care for customers in the best way if your employees are overworked or you don’t have enough staff on hand on any given day. Employee scheduling software steps in to help solve some of those problems.
Is scheduling software a magic wand that fixes all your staffing and customer service problems? Of course not. But it’s a critical tool that helps position you to solve those problems with better human resource management.
For more information about how our employee scheduling software or other projects, such as field service and project management software, can help your business save time and money while potentially boosting revenues and other bottom-line metrics, contact Visual Planning today and ask for a demo.
Manale is a passionate about digital marketing. She joined STILOG I.S.T in 2018.
She brings SEO & SEA expertise, email marketing and creative content marketing to create a great brand experience for Visual Planning customers.
