If you’re in the market for software to handle staff scheduling, you know what a daunting task it can be to find an application that will actually work for your business. If you’re not in market – or if you are still doing research — quickly do a search for “staff scheduling” or something similar and you’ll see that the results pages are littered with companies who are offering software to meet this need.
The reality is, however, that most of this employee scheduling software absolutely sucks. Pardon my French.
After working in the employee scheduling business for over 2 years, I think I’ve boiled it down to three main reasons why most employee scheduling tools — especially web-based tools– fail:
- Most web-based offerings make it too hard for your business to get started
- Most web-based offerings aren’t flexible enough to handle the two or three scheduling quirks unique to your business
- Most scheduling tools are very poorly designed.
Getting started with most employee scheduling software requires too much effort
So you’ve made the decision that you’re done creating schedules with paper-and-pencil or Excel. After years creating your store’s schedule by hand, you’ve decided it’s simply too much work to keep track of employee vacations, swaps, timesheets, and payroll – let alone actually trying to find shift times that work for every employee. So you go to Google and research companies who offer employee scheduling software.
There are a million links, all of them look the same, but you find 3 or 4 tools to try. As you sign up and go through each application’s sign up process, there are usually 4 or so steps and each step is more detailed and cumbersome than the last. Here are just a few examples from my experience:
- Maybe the application is asking to put in very rigid store open and closing times, when your store has varying times.
- Maybe the application is asking you to input all of your employees and it requires that they have email addresses. You either (1) don’t know their addresses, (2) have no desire to invite your employees to view the schedule online, or (3) your employees aren’t technically savvy enough to create their own accounts
- Maybe the application is providing you with 30 payroll and time and attendance options, and you’re not even sure if the software is right for you yet.
The whole setup process is time-consuming and frustrating, especially when all you want to do is kick the tires and get an understanding of whether the software can do what you need. Do you really want to waste 30 minutes on setup before you can even begin scheduling your employees?
I wouldn’t be doing myself any good if I didn’t at least mention how quick Hello Scheduling’s signup process is. Two steps. Tell us your company name and put in your employees’ names (no email addresses required). That’s it — I’m serious. The whole process takes 2 minutes. No really, I’m serious.
Your business has a unique scheduling need and Company X’s tool can’t handle your request
Throughout the beta period of Hello Scheduling (we launched in mid-January 2011) we’ve received a lot of unique requests from our customers. Throughout the time, we’ve been implementing features weekly to meet these needs. Here are just a few examples:
- One customer, a home healthcare business, needed to create shifts that extended past midnight because when they meet with patients, their employee regularly stay overnight.
- Another customer, a convenience store, needed us to add “premium shifts” – shifts that pay the employee above normal rates because of odd/late shift hours.
- One of our customers, who runs a coffee shop, needed the ability to customize printouts so that his employees wouldn’t see private scheduling information.
And you know what? We’ve implemented every single one of these features within 2 weeks of being asked. Many tools on the market today either don’t have the unique features that your business needs, and if they don’t, they’re not willing to implement the features for you.
So if you are evaluating staff scheduling tools, and you can’t find one that will be able to handle your unique need, you fall back to what works: paper-and-pencil. This is a major reason why most employee scheduling apps fail.
Most scheduling tools are very poorly designed
If you’ve had a chance to try many of our competitors on the web, you’ll see that many are very poorly designed; not only from a graphical design perspective but also from an interaction design perspective.
Poorly designed software causes headaches and frustration – at that’s exactly what employee scheduling software should be trying to alleviate.
At Hello Scheduling, we’ve spent countless hours perfecting our designs while also studying the usability of our software with customers. We use usability studies to discover what areas of the software aren’t intuitive and we correct those areas quickly. The highest priority for us is making a solution that is not only fun to use but very intuitive.
How can I find employee scheduling software that “just works”
My answer is very simple:
- In order for your employee scheduling project to not fail – in order you to move beyond Excel of paper-and-pencil scheduling – you need to use software that offers the flexibility to handle your unique scheduling needs while also being fun and intuitive. Or a shorter version: choose TrackSmart Scheduling.
