Excel has long been a firm favorite and yet a slightly painful way of scheduling staff.
It often starts when a business is small and you only have a few staff to schedule, and then it's pretty easy -
but as you grow in size, so does the spreadsheet. Keeping track of hundreds of staff then becomes pretty laborious.
Even with the best efforts your team puts forth (and Macros you put into the worksheet), things or even people get
missed and your coverage never seems to be quite perfect.
A Change from Excel
There is another way, as online employee scheduling software can take all the hard work away.
Unlike Excel, this software is designed with a single job in mind, helping you allocate your human resources effectively. That means a simple way to define shifts and match them with the right people.
You can build a staff list with connections to job roles and skills, so you can ensure that you always have the optimal mix of people on hand at any one time. You can then automatically schedule the team, or alter that schedule manually, and then communicate shift patterns by SMS and e-mail.
With online employee scheduling you can always update shit requirements on an ad hoc basis, and you don't even need to be in the office to do so. It's easy to get a high-level overview of each shift or even on a long-running calendar basis and then print out the schedule for easy use for attendance checks too.
Reporting from online employee scheduling software is simple too. For example, you can calculate individual working hours at the push of a button. The report can then be used to inform payroll or other departments as necessary.
Better still this kind of software enables upward communication from the floor too. That means agents can set their own availability via set rules, so that when someone's on holiday they're automatically pulled from the available pool of resources.
Can Excel do all this? Sadly, it can't. So maybe it's time you considered moving away from the spreadsheets and into a more straightforward way of managing your shifts?
