Detailed Shift Management Guide To Keep Business Flowing

Managing hourly employees is challenging, even for the most experienced supervisors. Juggling call-offs and no-shows while ensuring sufficient staff presence is a daily reality.

This guide provides new insights into better shift schedule management. You’ll find information about the challenges, benefits, and best strategies for effective shift management. 

Key takeaways

• Shift management organizes employee work schedules for optimal staffing.
• Effective shift management aligns staff availability with business demands to reduce labor costs.
• Automated tools help accurately forecast staffing needs and maintain compliance with labor laws.
• Flexible scheduling and shift management software improve employee morale and reduce turnover.
• Advanced planning tools optimize shift management processes, like geofencing time clocks and automatic scheduling.

Table of contents

• What is shift management?
• Why is shift management important?
• Common shift management challenges
• How to improve your shift management

What is shift management?

Shift management organizes and coordinates employee schedules to ensure enough coverage and smooth operations. When you manage shifts well, you create a timetable. The timetable assigns team members to shifts, tracks their attendance, and adjusts when someone can’t work.

You must consider factors like employee availability, skills, and preferences. You need to make schedules that meet your business’s needs. Good shift planning helps resolve pain points, ensures enough staff and balanced workloads, and keeps service levels consistent.

Why is shift management important?

Shift management effectively allocates resources and optimizes team composition. It ensures the right combination of staff and managers for optimal service and productivity. Here are the reasons why shift management is important:

Minimize overtime and other labor costs

Proper shift management reduces labor costs by cutting unneeded overtime and overstaffing. Matching staff levels to different demands keeps service quality high and costs low. Controlling costs shouldn’t hurt customer satisfaction or employee well-being.

Good shift management ensures the right number of employees work at the right times. It minimizes the need for overtime pay and reduces the risk of overworking your staff. And it helps prevent worker burnout and turnover. These can cause costly recruitment and training expenses.

Accurately forecast your staffing needs

Overstaffing leads to high labor costs. Understaffing risks poor customer service and missed sales. These can hurt profit and reputation. Shift management allows businesses to align staffing with customer demand to promote cost efficiency and consistent service.

Automated shift management tools provide real-time data on employee availability, schedules, and attendance. Managers and team leads use this data to find staffing needs and plan schedules well. Strategic planners rely on this information to make informed staffing and resource allocation decisions.

Increase employee morale and performance

Flexible scheduling options empower staff to balance their work and personal lives. Automated systems make shift swapping and time-off requests easier. They give employees more control over their schedules, boosting worker happiness. It also helps cut turnover, making it easier to keep workers and fostering a more stable workforce. 

Valuing employees’ scheduling preferences keeps them from seeking other jobs and reduces turnover. These considerations lead to a motivated workforce, boosting productivity and customer service. A content and engaged team commits more to their roles. Happier employees boost performance and help your organization succeed and grow.

Improved payroll accuracy and regulation

Effective shift management reduces common payroll errors. The IRS reported that about a third of employers make payroll mistakes yearly. These errors resulted in $7 million in penalties. In the U.S., payroll compliance requires following federal, state, and local rules.

Automating key data transfers saves payroll departments time. It ensures accurate and timely employee pay. Automated integration, like payroll software, provides precision in payroll. It aligns employee payments with actual hours worked. Accuracy fosters trust and reliability in a company’s payroll system. It gives employees confidence in their pay.

Better legal compliance

Shift management ensures businesses respect labor laws, regulations, and government rules. Automating shift management goes beyond making schedules efficient. It also ensures compliance with labor laws and company policies. It comes with built-in compliance parameters to prevent policy violations.

Automated shift management software also generates detailed reports. These reports offer insights into employee work hours, breaks, and overtime, giving a clear overview of workforce activities. They help with internal decision-making and compliance audits, avoid fines and lawsuits, and protect the organization by obeying the law. 

Common shift management challenges

Shift management presents a range of challenges that require careful handling. Managing employee work schedules is often tricky, with unforeseen issues frequently arising. One missed shift can disrupt an entire workday’s flow. 

Here are some of the most common shift management challenges:

Balancing your employees’ availability with coverage needs

Balancing employees’ availability with coverage needs in shift management involves many aspects. Acknowledge challenges unique to early morning and night shifts. Distributing these shifts among employees helps prevent burnout. A manager’s goal is to schedule enough employees for customer service without overstaffing. Predicting customer demand can be difficult. 

Consider a tavern manager. They expect a busy Saturday night, so they roster two bartenders, six cooks, and four servers. If unexpected bad weather keeps customers away, the tavern faces overstaffing. Unfortunately, the evening is quieter than expected. So, the tavern pays twice the needed staff.

Having enough time to create the schedule each week

Creating weekly schedules in shift management, particularly with rotating schedules, involves significant challenges. Businesses often lack a process for quick coverage when an employee calls in sick. It leads managers to seek a skilled replacement. Improper staffing affects safety and customer service.

Last-minute changes impact employee morale. An employee called to work on a planned day off might be less productive. It can affect the team’s mood and work quality. These changes also cause understaffing or overstaffing. High-demand industries have too few staff in busy times, lowering service standards. They have too many staff in slow periods, which raises labor costs.

Reducing overtime

Reducing overtime is a complex challenge in shift management. High demand for certain shifts often leads to overscheduling. 

Unforeseen events can compound this issue. For example, you schedule a large team for a busy shift. Unfortunately, many staff call in sick or face emergencies, leaving you with too few workers. It creates a financial burden for the scheduled but absent employees and forces a last-minute scramble for replacements.

Knowing and complying with labor regulations

Shift management involves the challenge of keeping up with labor regulations. Managers must understand overtime, rest, and shift laws, which vary by place. As labor laws change, shift management strategies require regular adjustments to maintain compliance.

Navigating union agreements and regulatory requirements adds complexity to the process. This is why you need automated systems to follow labor rules and stay vigilant.

How to improve your shift management

Shift management requires a delicate balance of scheduling, verifying availability, and effective communication. It also involves ensuring the safety of lone workers and implementing preventive measures. 

Here are different ways to improve your shift workforce management system and make sure it runs smoothly:

Determine your peak business hours for coverage needs

You start by analyzing sales history to find the busiest times. Understanding these patterns helps align staff coverage with customer demand. History and customer feedback help predict busy times, including holidays and special events. Scheduling extra staff during these times ensures attentive service. 

On the other hand, knowing slower periods prevents overstaffing. Balancing staff is key to effective shift management, making it easier for staffing to adapt to demand. A calendar with these insights makes operations smoother.

Get real-time insights on labor costs

Labor costs are a major line item for businesses. They include wages, sick days, overtime, bonuses, payroll taxes, and healthcare benefits. You can categorize costs as either fixed or variable. Fixed costs include salaries for employees with consistent work hours. Variable costs cover tasks like cleaning or contract work. 

Proper shift management allows businesses to monitor and adjust these expenses. Managers can calculate labor costs as a percentage of sales. They can also do this as a percentage of total overhead. It helps them make informed financial decisions.

Want to make getting labor cost insights easier than ever, helping you reduce overtime and saving money? Sign up for your free 14-day trial of When I Work today!

Ask your employees for their input

Talking with your team offers a new perspective and shows how well your current shift strategies work. Sit down with your employees and discuss their shift time and day off preferences. 

Often, staff have to change their lives and it affects their preferred schedules. Whether it’s for a class, childcare, or another job, understanding these aspects helps prevent scheduling conflicts and improves job satisfaction. 

Use automated scheduling to save time and plan ahead

Automatic scheduling transforms shift management by integrating employee scheduling software, streamlining the entire process. The software automates the creation and maintenance of shift schedules, saving managers time and reducing errors associated with manual entry.

It prevents overlaps and conflicts by matching employee qualifications and availability correctly. Managers no longer need to manually track requests for time off or last-minute changes, as the system handles these efficiently.

Get a geofence time clock to accurately track employee time

A geofence time clock enhances shift management by monitoring employees’ working hours. When I Work offers geofencing technology that lets managers set virtual perimeters to ensure employees are at their work locations before they can clock in. The platform also supports flexible self scheduling to let staff members choose their shifts within set boundaries. 

The time clock flags entries outside these perimeters to prevent time theft and promote accountability among staff. It also makes things simpler for employees. It lets them clock in and out via an app. The process streamlines payroll and ends the need for manual timekeeping.

Encourage communication with your staff

Effective shift management relies on clear communication. When I Work makes this possible with its team messaging feature. It lets staff on different shifts interact within the same platform. 

The platform helps managers and employees share vital information and coordinate tasks by bridging gaps caused by differing schedules. Open communication tools keep everyone on the same page. They foster a responsive, united team. When you use these tools to keep staff in the loop, you create a workplace where people work together well.

Use shift management software to make the process easier

Managers and supervisors can simplify scheduling using shift management software like When I Work. This software simplifies shift assignments by integrating employee roles, levels, and availability. It also offers mobile clocking in and out and real-time shift change notifications.

Shift management software also enables data collection for labor costs and forecasting. When I Work provides insights into labor expenses to optimize staffing, cut costs, and boost efficiency. Leveraging this data empowers managers to make scheduling more accurate and data-driven.

When I Work is here to help you optimize your shift management

Stress from managing shifts decreases when you adopt simple workforce management practices. You can use tools like When I Work and make it easier to track employee attendance, manage absences, and get clear visibility on shift availability. 

When I Work improves communication, automates scheduling, and ensures accurate time tracking. These all streamline operations and improve efficiency.

Ready to simplify your scheduling process? Try a free demo of When I Work today to learn about pricing and how easy managing your workforce can be.