Learn More About Employee Scheduling Software
What is Employee Scheduling Software?
Employee scheduling software helps business owners, managers, and HR personnel manage employee schedules. This software helps automate and streamline the process of creating and tracking employee schedules. It also provides communication features that enable real-time communication across a variety of devices including iPhones, Android devices, tablets, and computers. In order to keep employees up to date on the live schedule, managers and employees will receive text messages, push notifications, and emails outlining the weekly schedule for all employees.Â
What are the Common Features of Employee Scheduling Software?
Employee scheduling systems provide businesses with easy-to-use administration solutions to streamline shift workers’ and hourly employees’ schedule management.
Employee work schedule overview: Similar to a dashboard, the overview provides a transparent view of all weekly, biweekly, monthly, and nonrepetitive shifts. Managers can filter to view shifts based on specific criteria such as employee availability, shifts, locations, and time. This feature provides management with complete transparency into all shifts that are scheduled, filled, open, or incomplete. This way the scheduling process can be streamlined for shift scheduling by the scheduler of the company.Â
Schedule templates: Schedule templates provide a quick and easy-to-use solution to scheduling employees for repeating shifts. These can often be created once and saved for reuse, thereby reducing the time necessary for creating repeating schedules.
Communication: Employee scheduling tools connect management and employees via communication features such as emails, instant messaging, or mobile applications. Any employee or manager can connect using their mobile device and communicate with their team members to pick up shifts, schedule shifts, do shift swaps, and more.Â
Shift swapping: Shift swapping features empower employees to grab any available shifts or trade with their coworkers when they are sick or otherwise unable to make a shift.Â
Automate shift assignments: Employee scheduling software often provides managers with the option to automate shift assignments to match available employees with open shifts. This auto-scheduling feature can be changed anytime to manage work schedules so as to streamline the timesheets process for employees.
Managing leaves: Employee scheduling systems provide managers with the tools to manage staff vacation and leave requests and to cover last-minute absences.
Employee profiles: Employee profiles store pertinent information regarding each employee, such as contact information, availability, licenses and certifications, employment history, and education.
Compliance: Employee scheduling tools help businesses maintain compliance regarding overtime rules when creating schedules.
Reporting and analytics: Employee scheduling solutions provide insight into schedule and time clock data and labor costs. They help businesses quantify KPIs to better measure performance.
Labor forecasting: The software uses historical employee scheduling data to predict scheduling needs. This feature anticipates demand and labor costs to accurately project employee scheduling needs.
Integrations: Employee scheduling software often integrates with payroll software, core HR software, and time tracking software to centralize and optimize time and pay operations.
What are the Benefits of Employee Scheduling Software?
Employee scheduling systems can help cut costs and free personnel from potentially complicated employee management tasks. Using this software, companies can automate administrative tasks that would otherwise take up a lot of human capital. By freeing up managers from having to manually make employee schedules, scheduling software allows them to focus on other important tasks involved with running a business. It also gives employees the ability to check, manage, or switch shifts from anywhere, making manually created paper schedules obsolete. Â
Streamlines management of employee scheduling: The software helps businesses, management, and HR personnel streamline employee scheduling processes which includes creating schedules, time tracking, and communicating with employees. It makes use of a time clock to help employees to easily clock in and out. Employee scheduling tools can also clearly show open shifts as dictated by the company's scheduling needs, which can be accessed with its mobile app.Â
Eliminates staffing conflicts: Employee scheduling solutions eliminate conflicts in schedules that might be created by human error. Common issues that occur include double booking employees for the same shift and scheduling employees that are unavailable to work. This software can eliminate such miscommunication.
Who Uses Employee Scheduling Software?
Manager: A manager of a business that regularly uses hourly or shift workers would be able to organize, implement, and assign shifts using employee scheduling software. They would be the main administrator laying out the schedules week by week as needed for the specific business and assigning employees to shifts if there is no shift leader.
Shift leader: Shift leaders are often in charge of assigning specific employees to work at certain shifts and hours. They would work in conjunction with the manager to assign and organize the schedules.
Hourly or shift employee: An hourly employee or shift worker would be in charge of reporting their availability to the manager or shift leader so that they can assign the schedules. The employee then would follow the schedule as assigned and work the hours they were scheduled for. If for some reason an employee was not able to make a shift, they can then coordinate with their peers through the employee scheduling software to get someone to cover their shift, and can easily change the shift via the software.
What are the Alternatives to Employee Scheduling Software?
Alternatives to an employee scheduling tool can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Spreadsheets software: This can be used to organize, catalog, and maintain data in charts and graphs, and can be applied specifically to creating schedules for employees. While this might be a slightly outdated way to create schedules compared to employee scheduling software, for businesses that are on a budget, this can be a good alternative.Â
Restaurant scheduling software: This industry-specific software is designed to help restaurants and other food service industry businesses organize their workforce schedule. This can be used as an alternative to more general-purpose employee scheduling systems.
Medical staff scheduling software: This industry-specific software automates and optimizes the process of creating and maintaining health care employee schedules. This is similar to employee scheduling software but categorized separately for the purpose of medical staffing. So this can be used as an alternative to employee scheduling software for healthcare-specific industries.
Software Related to Employee Scheduling
Time tracking software: Employee scheduling solutions can work in conjunction with time tracking software to track, report, and calculate time spent on tasks, projects, and other work-related activities. These solutions export data into invoicing tools and often integrate with accounting or payroll software.
Workforce management software: When employers are looking to optimize their workforce efforts, they can use workforce management software in lieu of or in addition to employee scheduling solutions.
Core HR software: Core HR, otherwise known as human resource information systems (HRIS), can integrate with employee scheduling systems to transfer employee profile information. This might include availability, contact information, licenses and certifications, employment history, and education to name a few.
Payroll software: Employee scheduling software provides payroll integrations to streamline the process of calculating employee pay information. Payroll software ensures that employees are paid timely and accurately based on the employee schedules created and time worked.Â
Challenges with Employee Scheduling Software
Excessive overtime: If protections are not put on employee overtime use, companies might encounter a surge of overtime work amongst some employees. If companies are concerned about this, they should make sure that the employee scheduling solution provides safeguards against excessive overtime use.
Shift swapping: Some employees will enjoy the freedom of managing their own schedules and having the ability to swap shifts when applicable. Other employees might forget about shifts swapped or might swap shifts that they are technically not qualified to work, resulting in reduced productivity.
Last-minute scheduling: Although the forecasting features in employee scheduling software should ease the process of schedule creation, managers should not wait until the last minute to plan shift schedules. Employers, managers, and employees alike will all benefit from a clear schedule that is made on time, and any last-minute changes will be much more manageable than creating a schedule on the fly.
Shift confusion: Although employee scheduling tools streamline the entire process, managers should maintain an eye on all schedules, making sure there are no last-minute issues or conflicts due to schedule swapping or other changes. Just because the software provides a channel of constant communication doesn’t mean that managers should assume employees will not make an error when swapping shifts or covering for another coworker.
Which Companies Should Buy Employee Scheduling Software?
Though employee scheduling solutions can be used by any size business, they are typically employed by organizations that rely on hourly and part-time employees in industries such as hospitality, manufacturing, medical, call center, and retail.Â
How to Buy Employee Scheduling Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Employee Scheduling Software
There are many potential requirements to consider when deciding to buy and implement employee scheduling software throughout a company or within a specific department. Depending on the industry and the particular business, buyers should consider the size of the team, purchasing budget, and the specific functionality of the software when developing a list of requirements.
The first thing for a company to figure out is how many employees would need to be using the software, both to ensure their chosen product can support all of their employees and to get a sense of how much it will cost, since the cost of many products varies depending on how many users the buyer needs to support. Another consideration is what features of scheduling software would be most important to the business. Besides basic scheduling functionality, buyers should consider whether other features such as shift swapping, messaging, analytics reports, and mobile compatibility are important.Â
Finally, buyers should have a budget in mind when looking to invest in an employee scheduling system. If the business is considering investing in other HR software to manage their workforce, considering a cheaper employee scheduling solution might be necessary.Â
Compare Employee Scheduling Software Products
Create a long list
An initial list of potential employee scheduling solutions should include any products that meet the company’s basic feature requirements. At this point, buyers should just be aiming to get a sense of the options that at least meet essential needs, such as being able to schedule and track employees shifts with ease and facilitating efficient communication between the manager and the employee.Â
Create a short list
After a long list has been created, it’s time to look at each product in more detail to determine if it sounds like it will meet the needs of the company’s employees and managers. This should include evaluating additional features of each product beyond the ones identified as essential to determine if that additional functionality would further automate the process of creating and sharing employee schedules.
Conduct demos
When the time comes to contact sellers for a demo, buyers should have a sense of the features each product offers and be ready to evaluate how well those features work. A key aspect to consider during the demo for employee scheduling is accessibility since employees and managers will need to change and update schedules as necessary, no matter the time, place, or device used. Another aspect to consider is usability since the platform will be used by most personnel at the company.Â
Selection of Employee Scheduling Software
Choose a selection team
When choosing an employee scheduling software, it is important to involve any relevant stakeholders who might be using the product to ensure that the software will meet everyone’s needs. This likely includes employers or managers who would be responsible for creating the schedules for their employees, or shift managers specifically as they manage teams. It is possible that shift leaders be a part of the selection process, but since managers would more likely be the implementers of the software, the selection team’s members would be up to their discretion.
Negotiation
After narrowing in on a preferred product, it’s time to negotiate a pricing package. Buyers must consider the pricing model of the software, such as whether the seller charges a flat monthly fee or, more commonly, charges a fee based on how many users would be utilizing the product. Buyers can also negotiate to add more users to the package so as to meet their specific company needs. Also, the buyer can consider negotiating a discount in exchange for multi-year contracts.
Final decision
The final decision will most likely be made by the management team, or in particular the shift managers, as the primary users of the employee scheduling software. However, employees should be considered as well, since ultimately it needs to be decided if this software would streamline and automate the process of employee scheduling. Â
What Does Employee Scheduling Software Cost?
The cost for employee scheduling systems can vary based on how it is purchased. The most common pricing model sellers use is per user or employee per month. Some products do have free versions of the software in the form of a trial with restrictions on users or only allowing basic employee scheduling features. Generally, the buyer should be prepared to pay around $2-$4 per user or employee for employee scheduling software based on average estimated costs. Normally, these costs are paid on a monthly basis, although some software may have annual plans.Â
Return on Investment (ROI)
When considering ROI for employee scheduling software, companies should consider how much time they are saving and how much money they are making by automating the process of scheduling employees for shifts. Time is saved for the manager or shift leader, since instead of having to dedicate hours to manually creating schedules every week for their hourly employees, it is automated and can be finished within minutes. The time that managers save can be used more productively on other tasks related to running the business.
