In an organization that has many people responsible for some of the same tasks, chaos can reign supreme if the workers are not organized well and given proper schedules for taking care of their tasks.
And scheduling a large workforce is no piece of cake.
That is why you need an easy employee schedule template to make your life easier.
But what exactly is an employee work schedule?
An Employee Work Schedule – What It Is And Its Benefits
Employee scheduling is the process of determining when your employees will work and which employee will be responsible for certain tasks and the times they will do so.
This may look and sound simple, but when you put into consideration that you may have staff who cannot work certain days, others who may need time off for health or family reasons, or certain employees who request to work certain times, it definitely isn’t.
That is why employee scheduling can be a nightmare for most HR personnel.
So, from the above, an employee schedule is a roster that depicts the times each worker is expected to be on duty and for how many hours. This schedule can be a weekly, bi-weekly or even a monthly schedule.
Therefore, employee scheduling is a crucial part of business management, more so for any shift-based organization.
This accurate scheduling of employees will help your business operations run smoothly for many reasons that include and are not limited to
One great thing about creating an employee schedule is that it becomes an easy communication tool for employees – especially if it is easy to view and understand. This makes it very easy for everyone to know where they should be and exactly when they should be in their positions.
A point to note before you go ahead and start creating your employee schedule is that it is best to have a policy in place that requires employees to give a certain amount of advance notice for time off. This is especially necessary for time off that can be scheduled or is already in the works like vacations or surgery.
Now that you’ve seen the advantages of employee scheduling, you probably have mixed feelings about it now – excitement over how easy it will make your life and fear of how complicated it is to create one.
Let me give you a reason to keep your excitement burning while allaying your fears – both concerning employee scheduling.
It’s an employee scheduling template.
4 Easy To Use Tools To Create An Employee Schedule Template
In order to avoid the repetitive work of creating an employee schedule over and over again, you can save yourself a lot of time by creating an employee schedule template.
This is an easy to make and edit schedule that you can edit any time depending on the availability or unavailability of employees.
PEN AND PAPER
MICROSOFT EXCEL
GOOGLE SHEETS
GOOGLE CALENDAR
2 Factors To Consider When Making Your Employee Schedule
Before you jump to your favorite employee schedule template making tool, here are a few factors to take into consideration.
SCHEDULES CAN CHANGE
This may seem obvious, but if you do not consider this fact of work life, you may end up frustrated with your employee schedule template.
Whenever you create a work schedule, be sure to leave room for changes.
This is actually where cloud-based software and templates are a great help as you can use them to communicate with your employees in real time and work together in keeping the schedule as efficient as possible.
Make your employee schedule template flexible enough to accommodate changes so that when you leave out a section or policy changes affect scheduling, it will be easy to adapt.
PERMISSIONS
Especially when working with a large number of employees, not everyone should be granted the same level of permissions when it comes to making edits to the employee schedule.
For example, permanent staff should have little or no permission when it comes to altering the schedule as they are always expected to be available. The times when they are not able to come to work and need a change in shift, they can always go through HR.
In the case of those who work flexi hours though, it may be wise to grant them permission to edit the schedule according to the hours they will work.
Employee Schedule Template – The Key To Saving Your Sanity
If you work with more than 1 employee, you definitely need to create an employee work schedule. And once the numbers start increasing, making new schedules on a weekly basis becomes a torturous endeavor – especially where shifts are involved.
The best way to save your sanity is to create an employee schedule template you can easily adjust and share with your staff.
So before you lose your sanity (and the company tons of money due to poor scheduling) create an employee schedule that will make life easier for you.
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