As a manager, you wear a lot of hats. A jack of many trades, one trade you have to perfect is shift management. Anticipating trends, matching the volume to staff, and maintaining order between your staff and management team is paramount. Yet resources on shift scheduling are few and far between, making your job all the more difficult. Beyond the lack of resources, time, and surplus of tasks, you realize that creating an employee schedule is an essential part of running your business. But for a lot of managers, the task is cumbersome, disorganized, frustrating, and a total time suck. But, it doesn’t have to be as painful.
Luckily you have come to the right place. This article will offer resources on shift management and employee scheduling:
On Shift Scheduling Resources
1 - Scheduling Secrets Revealed - 5 Secrets to Success: As a manager, you dictate your most valuable assets and how a change in personnel can impact your bottom line. But, the secrets are revealed! To help you make the best scheduling decisions possible, we created a blog post with five basic tips for scheduling employees.
2 - 8-Hour Shift Schedules: Pros, Cons, and Opportunities for Your Business: A rotating 8-hour schedule has multiple benefits for restaurant and hospitality businesses. It provides 24/7 coverage for your business by maximizing the number of consecutive days employees have off, while still maintaining a 40-hour workweek by including 8-hour days, 8-hour swings, and 8-hour night shifts.
3 - Managers Can Schedule from Anywhere With Technology: Still not convinced of the benefit of using a cloud-based, online scheduler? Know this -- being locked to this singular method of creating a schedule means restaurant managers are glued to their desks. Any time a manager receives a question about scheduling changes away from their schedule, they have to remember the change in order to make the update later on. What a pain! Beyond that, it offers extra employee visibility and transparency, allows for easy access, and reduces headaches!
4 - Staff Scheduling for the Holidays: The holidays are the best time for marketing opportunities for your enterprise -- and ones that can help capture big sales. There are three tips for maximizing holiday season sales. First, hold a training session that focuses on the customer experience. Then, confidently go forth in scheduling your employees to avoid burnout. Lastly, be more flexible with your staff scheduling and consider employees may want time off during the season.
5 - Creating A Schedule Template: When you are creating a schedule, you can choose to use a template to help you know what shifts you need to fill for that time period. There are two ways to create a template, you can create one from scratch, or you can turn an existing schedule into a template. This will help with scheduling in a timely manner each week, if shifts may be the same.
6 - All too often employee scheduling is a constant struggle between putting out fires and staying organized. Employee Scheduling Software for Industry Vets helps you learn some of the secrets to scheduling and how to get more time back in your day. With the right scheduling system, you can reduce labor costs and create a better customer experience.
7 - The old way of scheduling with an excel spreadsheet and hand-written papers is slow, tedious, and just downright inefficient. With the new technology available today you can turn scheduling communication breakdowns into breakthroughs. With this newly created technology, you can allow the software to do the work for you while focusing on other more results-driven opportunities.
Management Resources
8 - The 80 / 20 rule is present everywhere inside your organization including your scheduling process. 80% of the time you spend on scheduling yields 20% of your results. The key to this principle is finding your 80 / 20 and focusing your attention on the right activities that drive more results.
9- Communication with staff can be even trickier than normal everyday conversations. Check out the most effective communication strategies for managers and learn how maintaining two-way communication loops with your team will ensure that everyone is on the same page. Learn how to use verbal and non-verbal cues to get the most out of your team.
10 - Easy Ways to Reduce Employee Turnover: According to Nation’s Restaurant News, cleanliness, labor costs, maintenance issues, and unexpected sales dips all have one common denominator – employee turnover. Your employees are your #1 asset. Combat the negative trend of losing employees and figure out how to find employees that are the right fit for your organization, avoid burnout and how to empower employees so you can do less with more.
11 - Manager Notes 101: How To Effectively Log Notes for a More Productive Organization: Anyone who has a shift-to-shift change-over should definitely be using a shift change-over logbook to log the day's activities. Logging notes aids in communication between managers, owners, employees, and anyone else who is engaged in the business. Notes allow managers to document and communicate critical information and important operational intricacies pertaining to day-to-day business as well as long-term issues. Having a system for logging manager notes allows you to keep your team on track and held accountable as well as streamlining the process of communication thus making decisions easier and information clearer.
12 - Create More Engagement in your Organization: Engaged employees are highly invested in your business. They bring consistent performance, support new initiatives, and champion other employees to perform at higher levels. The secret is communication and offering continuous feedback while allowing them to make meaningful continuations to your organization. Allow them to take ownership and help drive their results with rewards and praises. Creating a more engaged employee will help grow your organization faster than you ever expected.
Are you already a user of Shiftnote’s employee scheduling software? If so, check out our Help resources on shift scheduling. Scroll to the middle of the page where you will see “Scheduling Tool”.
TIPS FROM THE INTERWEB
“The Schedule Book”: This book offers 75 schedules for every work environment. Whether you are an employee or a manager, this book will help you guide your company and even your industry to make critical changes to provide stability or growth in key market areas. Each schedule has tips that will give the reader ideas for implementation and success.
“Schedule Your Success”: Our lives are run on schedules. But, where is your current schedule taking you? Gain some tips on scheduling from this. This book teaches you to learn how to master a schedule to make everything else in your life easier and more productive.
The above resources will give you more guidance on shift management and employee scheduling. Remember, we can help! Try Shiftnote’s employee scheduler for 45 days for free to see for yourself! It’s cloud-based, convenient, flexible, and suits any sized organization.
ShiftNote is an Online Manager’s Logbook and Employee Scheduling Software available to make all those hairy management tasks easy to control in one simple interface. Start your research and see how technology can help your management by exploring ShiftNote!
