If you work in retail, restaurants, healthcare or any business where you have to schedule much (most businesses!) you know that it can be a pain in the you-know-what to get that schedule perfected every week or two. It seems like you can never fully please everyone, and that there are constant arguments about the schedules you create.
Nod along if you can relate to any of the following headaches.
- It’s Nearly Impossible to Keep Up with Employees’ Changing Needs Whether it’s a school schedule you’ve got to work around or vacation requests, it can be hard to keep them all in mind when building out your schedule on paper. Forget just one scheduling request and it throws the entire schedule off.Another issue is when everyone wants off on the same day (like Prom). You want it to be first come, first served with the days off, but it seems you’re constantly fighting whiny employees on that.
- You’re Constantly Tweaking It Despite the fact that you’ve asked your staff to let you know of schedule requests weeks in advance, it always comes down to the day the schedule is updated; they just have to have Friday off. Could you pretty please switch them with someone? It seems like you spend more time on your schedule than anything else in your business.And if you’re creating your schedules on paper, you’ve got to erase what you’ve got or rewrite the entire thing. If you spill coffee on it? Back to the drawing board.
- Your Employees Call and Call and Call to Get Their Schedules You’re constantly pulled away from helping customers to answer the phone when your staff calls in to find out when they work. It’s distracting and a time-waster. It takes away from your interaction with customers, which could turn them off.
- You Can’t Always Match Employee Skills to Customers This is especially big in healthcare. You want to match a nurse who’s certified for certain abilities, like administering certain medications, with a patient who needs those abilities, but your scheduling is such a nightmare it makes it hard to do so.
- You’re Not Putting Your Time Where It Needs to Be As a manager, you need to be involved in marketing, managing, payroll…pretty much everything. But the time you should be spending on those tasks are eaten up with scheduling.
If you can identify with any or all of these pain points, give TrackSmart Scheduling a spin and see if you can eliminate them.
