Meelik Samel
November 24, 2023

Effective employee scheduling is more than just a logistical challenge. It's a strategic business imperative. How you schedule your staff will impact your business's productivity, employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, your bottom line. This article helps you understand how to schedule employees effectively, how it benefits your business and what mistakes you should avoid.

What is effective employee scheduling, and why is it important for your business?

Effective employee scheduling should not only be based on getting weekly schedules out quickly. It should be a strategic process built from the ground up to be tailored to your business needs while considering your employee skills, qualifications and preferences.

The best starting point is to understand the ins and outs of your current team. This provides an overview of your staff’s scheduling preferences, skills, and qualifications to ensure each team member is scheduled for a shift most fitting to them. It can also provide insight into training opportunities, such as matching senior members with new employees.

But knowledge enough can only create the foundation for your processes. To really benefit from it, you should establish effective two-way communication between your management team and staff members to ensure that employee preferences are taken into account and guarantee that each team member receives their individual schedule on time.

While this can seem like a lot of work, it may not have to be this way if you’re using the right tools. While it’s inevitable that most businesses need to ensure short-term profitability, balancing your company's needs with your employees' well-being is an investment for long-term success.

Benefits of having an effective strategy for scheduling employees

Having an effective strategy as a basis for each staff schedule will help you utilise your workforce more effectively, provide a better service for your customers and create efficiency in your operational processes. This will determine your business’ competitiveness and growth potential. Here are some of the benefits of efficient staff scheduling:

Optimise productivity

Now, this may seem obvious, and that’s exactly why it’s worth mentioning in the beginning. Effective scheduling ensures that you have the right number of employees with the right skills during peak hours. This helps you maximise productivity and meet customer demand without overstaffing or understaffing.

Control labour costs

By aligning labour costs with actual demand, you can reduce unnecessary expenses. Well-planned schedules help you avoid overstaffing during slow periods, minimise overtime costs and downtime and implement optimal shift lengths. If your salaries are specific to employees, you can also consider if simpler shifts can be allocated to junior members.

Retain and recruit more employees

Fair and predictable schedules can reduce employee turnover, which can be costly for businesses in terms of recruitment, training, and lost productivity. Prioritising work-life balance in scheduling can improve employee well-being, reduce burnout, and promote a healthier, more engaged workforce, so employees with schedules that accommodate their needs and preferences are generally more satisfied and motivated. This can lead to higher job retention and better morale and provide a long-term benefit for your employer brand when recruiting new employees.

Ensure labour compliance without worrying about it

Labour compliance can be a headache for managers and schedulers, especially when working with irregular hours or a temporary workforce. Having effective scheduling helps ensure compliance with labour laws and regulations related to work hours, rest breaks, and overtime without the need to monitor it constantly. This will, of course, prevent any legal issues and associated costs.

Adapt to uncertainties

Scheduling staff strategically will allow flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing business conditions to ensure position coverage in unexpected staff absences or sudden increases in customer demand. Conversely, you can make long-term adjustments – if the annual low season takes place at a different time, you can move collective vacations to the respective period.

Get returns on investment from employee development

As mentioned in our 3rd point, when you account for employee preferences and create a good work-life balance, you’re on the road to better employee retention. In addition to this, effective scheduling can also be used to cross-train employees, helping them develop new skills and offering career advancement opportunities within your organisation. These two aspects help you get the most back on your investment to new employees and create a quickly developing workforce.

Provide better customer service

This point brings together everything we discussed previously. Your clients will be happier if your staffing schedule provides optimal position coverage with the most fitting employees. Ensuring that you have the right staff available during busy periods is also crucial for providing quality customer service and maintaining customer satisfaction. And in addition, engaged and motivated employees will add even more value to your service.

Use management’s time more effectively

Having set up a good strategy, creating your staff schedules will take significantly less time. This efficient scheduling process reduces administrative overhead and time spent on manual scheduling processes, allowing managers to focus on other aspects of their roles. This gives you an opportunity to provide lateral movement options within your organisation to focus on growth.

Or suppose you just started to scale and need to hire more employees. In that case, you don’t need to worry about directing as many resources to management as they can schedule more employees, as an efficient scheduling strategy lets your management schedule more staff simultaneously.

How to schedule employees effectively? 8 best practices for successful staffing schedules

1. Understand your business requirements

This might be an obvious one, but it’s always beneficial to look at it from a detailed perspective. First, are you scheduling employees for your operations or providing staffing services for your clients? The latter may add a certain degree of unpredictability that you should consider when recruiting. But that depends on the industry you’re catering to.

Event-based schedules

If you’re scheduling staff for events, such as festivals, concerts and sporting events, it may be more efficient to work with an events calendar instead of a weekly schedule. If the staff schedule requires a large number of employees for similar positions, you may be better off going with open shifts and letting staff schedule themselves instead of filling each shift manually.

Seasonal fluctuations

In some areas, you have to consider seasonality. The most intense periods for construction work are usually spring and summer. For warehousing, preparations for the holiday seasons start to peak in October and can last all the way to the following year. Seasonal fluctuations are also at the core of the hospitality, tourism and agriculture industries and can be present in some areas of retail.

Daily peak hours

For many industries, schedules can be more predictable and regular, with fewer seasonal fluctuations where the complexity stays within a 24-hour period. This is true for the restaurant industry: the peak hours for most coffee shops are from 8 am to 11 am, with certain places having another peak time in the afternoon. Fine dining restaurants, on the other hand, see most of their work after 6 pm.

Complex shift patterns

But daily schedules can be even more complex, having to follow other rulesets than a workweek. One of the most popular examples of this is the 4-on-4-off schedule that is used for 24-hour coverage. This requires each employee to work for four consecutive consecutive days of 12-hour shifts, after which they have four consecutive free days. After each cycle, day and night shifts are rotated between employees. These complex shift patterns are at the core of the healthcare industry, emergency services, fire departments and police.

2. Know your employees

Whatever your future recruitment plans are, first, you have to make the most of the team you already have. Having the right people in the right positions and understanding your employee preferences will make your staff schedule significantly more efficient while improving your employee satisfaction and engagement.

Consider employee preferences

Understanding your staff scheduling preferences will help you ensure employee satisfaction, but it can also identify opportunities for more efficient scheduling. Identify the preferences and always try to provide the preferred hours and shifts with predictability. Provide full-time employment to those who seek it and weekend shifts for part-time workers or students looking to earn extra income.

While excessive reliance on overtime is definitely not recommended, it may be inevitable in some cases. Seek out if there are people who would like to work overtime. Overtime pay can still be more cost-efficient than hiring and training new employees. But It’s essential that employees are voluntarily opting for overtime without pressures from management.

If you are providing staffing services to multiple clients or locations, try to find the best matches between employees and customers. If you see a good fit and both parties are looking for stability, you can keep it going and worry less about the scheduling process. But when perceiving dissatisfaction from either side, try to switch up employees’ job sites to find a better match.

Understand your staff’s skills and qualifications

Identify your staff members' strengths and weaknesses and differentiate between senior members and newer employees. Matching experienced employees with junior staff can provide quicker on-the-spot training and understanding of the job. It’s always beneficial to know if any of your employees possess specific skills, such as language proficiency or certifications for providing first aid.

Manage employee data methodically

All of the above-mentioned information about employees can create a good amount of data points, especially when managing a large workforce or a growing business. To get the most out of your knowledge about your employees, it’s best to set up an employee database where you can store all your employee contact information, skills, qualifications, certifications and scheduling preferences.

3. Implement a user-friendly scheduling app

After having a thorough understanding of your company’s needs and workforce characteristics, you should look for rota software to actually put this to good use. Provide your managers with an app to create schedules quickly and find the most suitable employees for each shift. At the same time, an app for employees to set their availabilities and get real-time information about scheduling updates will make your communication process significantly more efficient.

4. Plan for peak times

As we discussed earlier, many industries have to operate with seasonal fluctuations. To have adequate plans in place to meet the higher demand periods, it’s essential to ensure that everyone in your business is also well aware of these periods. Encourage and nudge employees to not take vacations during high seasons. Establish and grow a network of temporary workforce and subcontractors to provide sufficient coverage. Depending on your industry, there may also be opportunities for volunteer work and internships.

5. Manage absences transparently

A smooth absence management process is always easier said than done. That being said, there are some simple steps to make this process efficient. It’s best to set up easily differentiated absence types, such as paid time off, sick leaves, personal days and parental leaves. You can, of course, add to these to provide extra flexibility and value as an employer. Also, be sure to communicate your local public holidays within your organisation. For managers, provide a system that helps them find quick replacements and identify absence trends to plan ahead.

6. Schedule Ahead

Having laid the groundwork for efficient staff scheduling and using staff scheduling software to automate the process, you can schedule ahead of time with less work. This provides your employees with a better sense of security and allows them ample time to plan their personal lives and make necessary adjustments. From the business side, this will help you identify how balanced your workforce is in terms of your organisation’s future.

7. Encourage self-scheduling

There are a multitude of industries, such as security, event management, retail and hospitality, that provide excellent opportunities for employee self-scheduling. This can make the staff scheduling process even more efficient while providing employees with more flexibility and freedom to work the shifts they choose. One of the most common processes for this is to publish open shifts and let staff members apply and monitor position coverage.

8. Monitor and Adjust

Now, this can sound a bit dull and obvious at the same time, but it’s a question of complacency. Having set up a well-working and automated scheduling strategy will definitely be a good foundation for your business and provide significant benefits, but this should be seen as only the beginning of your optimisation and scaling. Make sure to continuously monitor the effectiveness of your schedules gather feedback from employees, and be prepared to adjust schedules as needed to accommodate changes in demand, employee availability, or unforeseen events.

6 common mistakes to avoid when creating a schedule for employees

Just as important as pinpointing tried and true practices is understanding mistakes that should not be replicated. And the only better way than learning from your own is avoiding the ones that have already been made.

1. Overscheduling or underscheduling

Overscheduling your employees for a long period of time is a sure-fire way to elevate health risks and, thus, unforeseen absences, which can, in turn, make you even more prone to overscheduling. Underscheduling employees will not ensure them with a steady income. Or if you have workers with fixed salaries, it’s simply bad business.

How to avoid overscheduling and underscheduling:

Know your employees' capabilities and workforce capacity
Analyze previous periods and forecast future
Use a temporary workforce to mitigate fluctuations in demand
Encourage employees to take time off during lower-demand periods

2. Relying too much on overtime

Overtime can be inevitable in some situations, but it should not be at the core of your scheduling strategy. If you require employees to work overtime frequently without adequate notice, they will be burnt out, and morale will be decreased.

How to avoid problems with overtime:

Recruit additional employees
Use subcontractors for higher demands
Identify employees who want to work overtime

The maximum workweek, including overtime, in the UK is 48 hours. If you expect some overtime, it must be agreed upon in the employment contract. Employees can voluntarily opt out of the 48-hour workweek limit, and employers cannot pressure this or show any preferences depending on individual opt-out decisions.

3. Ignoring Employee Preferences

While not always possible, employee preferences should always be considered when creating schedules. Again, the risk of high turnover can result in more recruitment and training of new employees that will drive up your company’s costs.

When managing multiple locations, try to provide employees with their preferred job sites, which will help with client satisfaction. Without knowing your employee preferences, you may also miss some opportunities for maximising productivity, as some staff members may be more willing to help out with overtime.

How to account for employee preferences:

Set up communication channels
Listen to employee feedback
Adjust shift scheduling when needed
Provide self-scheduling options

4. Inconsistent scheduling

Inconsistent scheduling usually arises from using the wrong tools and inefficient processes. Unpredictable working hours and last-minute changes can create unnecessary stress for your employees, especially when their daily routines and salaries are affected by this.

How to avoid inconsistent scheduling:

Implement scheduling software
Create long-term schedules
Forecast demand fluctuations
Analyze historical absence trends

5. Inflexible staff schedules

While scheduling ahead is always preferable, it must not come at the expense of flexibility. Schedules that are too rigid can cause another kind of discontent within your workforce, as your employees may start to feel unnecessarily boxed in when planning their personal lives. And as recent years have taught us, some seasonal illnesses and even pandemics can be inevitable, and people will just be sick from time to time. In these cases, unnecessarily rigid schedules will just cause more headaches for your management.

How to avoid inflexible schedules:

Create a transparent absence management system
Provide reasonable flexibility with time off
Cross-train staff members to cover shifts
Implement a scheduling system that enables finding replacements quickly

6. Using a manual scheduling process

While there are a multitude of options on the market, it’s still not rare to see staff schedules done in spreadsheets. At first glance, it is of course the free option, but if you consider your management's workload, it is actually the more costly option. It’s also prone to human errors, which can create massive discontent when this affects salaries. This legacy process will also require the implementation of separate communication channels.

How to automate the employee scheduling process:

Identify staff scheduling software providers that suit your needs
Book free demos to further filter out the best-suiting platforms for your business
Test out free trials to experiment with day-to-day work and examine user-friendliness

What are the best employee scheduling software solutions in the UK?

The UK encompasses a diverse range of industries with different requirements, which makes it no surprise that there are many different scheduling software providers on the market. This can make it quite overwhelming when choosing the best employee scheduling software.

Some of the well-recognised ones are Deputy and Connecteam. Both are known for their user interfaces but lack the features for larger companies with more complex needs. At the same time, their cost may turn away some of the smaller businesses.

Some platforms are specifically designed for a certain industry. 7shifts is a popular choice in the restaurant industry for optimising labour costs. But for this reason, it’s also probably not the best choice for other sectors. It’s also worth considering that some advanced features are only available for higher-tier plans.

For smaller businesses with less complex scheduling needs, ZoomShift and Findmyshift are accessible and user-friendly software solutions when moving away from manual scheduling with pen-and-paper or spreadsheets. But for businesses that are projecting growth opportunities and can foresee more complex requirements arising, these options can quickly become limited with few customisation options.

For customisation and adaptability across industries, Shiftboard and PARiM are two of the recognised solutions. Both stand out with scheduling and compliance tools, helping businesses to streamline complex workforce requirements. Shiftboard is widely used in manufacturing industries, while PARiM is the preferred choice for healthcare organisations, security companies and the events industry.

Empower your business by streamlining staff scheduling with PARiM

If you are eager to start implementing the steps for an efficient staff scheduling strategy we discussed above, PARiM provides you with a toolset that can be tailored to your industry with modules and customised to your size depending on how complex your business needs are.

Manage all employee data and ensure compliance with regulations

PARiM staff database lets you store all of your employees' contact information, skills, qualifications and scheduling preferences to make scheduling decisions easier. You can upload documents and easily track qualifications. If a certification or a visa is starting near its expiration date, you will be notified beforehand to know which employees require your attention.

Fill shifts quickly and efficiently

Set up schedules based on your employees' qualifications and preferences and avoid conflicts. Or publish open shifts, and the software will automatically filter out matching employees that will receive real-time notifications. You can create an endless variation of complex shift patterns to cater to the needs of your industry without having to worry about manual errors. And you don’t have to worry about compliance with labour regulations – set up working time limits, custom pay rates and overtime rules.

Automate payroll and invoicing processes

PARiM lets you set up custom hourly or fixed pay rules for each position. These rulesets can be tailored according to your local labor regulations and employment contracts and quickly used in relevant shifts. PARiM staff app lets your employees set up their availabilities and request time off but it also works as a time clock. Timesheets and invoices will be automatically calculated and can be exported in bulk to ensure swift business processes without inaccuracies.

Remove administrative bottlenecks and grow your business

Avoiding compliance issues, creating long-term schedules, allocating shifts quickly and automating your payroll and invoicing work will reduce the need for manual work and free up management time. This can provide great opportunities for both lateral or vertical movement to focus on areas that help you scale your operations.

PARiM offers an unlimited staff database with an unlimited number of users, which further removes restrictions from the management team’s access and lets you add new employees to the database without cost. This helps you mitigate the risks during low season and ensure enough coverage for periods with higher demands.

Key takeaways on building an effective staff schedule

Effective staff scheduling strategy should not be viewed as a peripheral but a core aspect of your business processes. Implementing it is an investment that will start providing significant benefits:

Better employee retention
Less investments in recruitment and training
Labor costs optimisation
Better employer branding for recruitment opportunities
Less overhead costs
More growth opportunities

There are no shortcuts to creating an efficient system that fits your business needs. The best way to approach it is by laying a good foundation and building the process from the ground up:

Know your business and know your employees
Adapt schedules to your employees, not the other way around
Implement a fitting software solution for quicker scheduling
Analyze, monitor and fine-tune your processes

All this certainly requires some amount of invested time and resources. But if done properly, returns can be quick and help you identify the long-term growth potential for your business. While it may look daunting at first glance, researching guides like this and implementing the most fitting scheduling software platform can help you make the process smoother.

FAQ on employee schedules

What are the risks of ineffective employee scheduling?

Ineffective scheduling can hurt your employee retention and productivity while also wasting management time. This can be a bottleneck for your business, lead to inefficiency and hamper growth. In the long term, you may face high employee turnover which will result in higher costs in training. Even then, inexperienced employees may not be able to provide the same level of customer service and this can have long-term implications on your business.

What is scheduling abuse?

Typical examples of scheduling abuse are last-minute schedule changes, on-call scheduling, fluctuating hours and split shifts. This can be immensely draining and stressful for staff. Last-minute changes and on-call scheduling may require employees to move around their personal schedules while fluctuating hours provide income instability, and split shifts can be excessively draining due to their disruptive routines.

How can employers simplify the process of schedule changes?

Changes to staff schedules can be inevitable in some cases. If needed, it’s important to do them as soon as possible and provide all affected employees with quick and transparent communication. Employee scheduling software can make this process easier for the management side, as drag-and-drop functions, copying, pasting and using templates will make it quicker. At the same time, the right scheduling platform can offer real-time notifications to employees and clients to update all parties as soon as changes are made.

8 Tips on How to Schedule Employees Effectively & Best Practices