How Smart Scheduling Transforms Your Shift-Based Business

Scheduling is a key component of shift-based management. It’s also highly time-consuming. With the pace of business and the number of employees most companies have to manage today, traditional scheduling methods aren’t enough. 

Learn how upgrading to smart, digital scheduling can completely transform your shift-based business. 

Direct costs of manual scheduling

Manual scheduling relies on humans, who are prone to mistakes and inefficiencies. Both of these things cost companies time and money. 

Let’s break down the direct costs of manual scheduling.

Time wasted

Manual scheduling can take a great deal of time, from scheduling itself to fixing the problems that arise from human error. This is especially true for businesses with many employees working different shifts — it’s a lot for a single person to track.  

Fines for noncompliance

Any business with multiple locations in different states has to consider break compliance, among other legal requirements. Manual scheduling requires knowing and consistently following each state’s laws, which can be challenging. 

We created a handy guide to help address this problem. But even if you’re well-versed in state laws and have good processes in place, there’s always an element of human error in manual scheduling. Mistakes can lead to fees or even legal issues if regulations are ignored too often. 

Going over budget

Manual scheduling always involves guesswork and, more often than not, going over budget. Overtime or overstaffing during slow times can result in a business losing money due to breaking its labor budget. 

Depending on the business, you may also rely on temporary workers to help fill shifts, like in healthcare or home care. Allocating these resources wisely requires an accurate and efficient scheduling system.

Understaffing

The guesswork in manual scheduling can also cause understaffing. Because many multilocation businesses have to juggle different shifts and fluctuating staffing needs, gaps can easily appear. It could be an unexpectedly busy store during a usually slow time or simply understaffing due to absences. 

Understaffing causes a decrease in productivity and a lower customer service level for the day — not to mention the burnout experienced by the employees trying to fill in the gaps.

Indirect costs of manual scheduling

The indirect costs of manual scheduling are more subtle but still impact businesses. 

Stagnant process

The lack of automation and analytics in manual scheduling makes it hard to track and build off past data. When you can’t improve the scheduling process based on past data, you go in scheduling circles. 

Limited scalability

When one or two people are responsible for scheduling many, manual scheduling limits scalability. Its inefficiency can become a significant hindrance for a rapidly growing business. 

Scheduling biases

While often unintentional, human bias is always part of manual scheduling, which can cause unfair schedules. This could be in the form of certain people getting the “good” shifts or always getting time off approved, even though others asked first. 

Sometimes, managers might forget employee preferences due to unreliable tracking, leading to unfavorable schedules. Whatever the reason, unfair scheduling can create jealousy and resentment among employees. 

Employee dissatisfaction 

Between having to work overtime, coming in on expected days off, and the general unknown about their schedules, employees are going to be unhappy. This means lower morale and reduced productivity.

Eventually, unhappy employees will get fed up and leave, and businesses will have to spend time and money recruiting and training new employees. 

How smart scheduling beats manual scheduling 

How does smart scheduling compare to manual scheduling? Here’s a quick overview.

Let’s dive deeper into some of the advantages of smart scheduling.

Reduces human error and bias

Since intelligent scheduling uses automation and data, it automatically eliminates human error and bias from the scheduling process. Deputy’s smart scheduling software will create a shift schedule based on various metrics to ensure the right people are working at the right times. 

These metrics include time off requests, so breaks are distributed fairly for all employees. At the same time, the software ensures that everyone gets a fair amount of shifts or overtime, so no one gets left out. 

Simplifies compliance

Eliminating human error makes businesses more compliant with state laws as well. Deputy’s scheduling software also makes it easy to automatically incorporate state laws and regulations into your scheduling system, so you don’t have to worry about it. 

When generating a schedule, our software will alert you of any potential compliance issues based on each state’s unique requirements. 

Uses data to improve scheduling

Smart scheduling improves current scheduling and helps optimize future scheduling. Using past data, intelligent scheduling software learns from previous inputs to continually improve your scheduling process.

For example, Deputy’s smart scheduling software offers labor need tracking and forecasting — which can assist with preventing over- and understaffing. 

Helps going over budget

Smart scheduling allows businesses to input their labor budget for the program to track while creating schedules. When generating a schedule, the software will automatically adjust to remain within your budget without your direct intervention.

For schedules in progress, the system can notify you when you’re getting too close to your budget so you can adjust either the schedule or your budget. 

This is especially handy for multi-location businesses. 

Is accessible to employees

Schedules should always be easily accessible to employees. With Deputy’s smart scheduling software, employees can see their schedule anytime. Plus, it’s easier for employees to request time off or swap shifts since they can do it through the program instead of needing a paper trail. 

Using a smart scheduling program also provides employees with additional transparency. They can see how schedules are created, when and why shifts change, and why their time-off requests are accepted or rejected. 

Transparency reduces misunderstandings and helps build trust. 

Intelligent scheduling improvements you can see

Still unsure if Deputy’s smart scheduling software is right for your business? Just see how it helped these businesses.

Juice Press

Juice Press struggled to balance scheduling with scalability — they needed to schedule over 350 workers at 85 different locations. It was simply too much for the company to handle, so they turned to Deputy.

Using Deputy for scheduling, Juice Press saved 25 hours weekly on admin tasks and scheduling while saving $200,000 per year on labor! 

The Spanish Table

With a new owner, The Spanish Table needed a scheduling upgrade. Everything was manual, meaning there were many spreadsheets to sort through.

Deputy helped make the scheduling process simple for both management and employees. Instead of using a wall-mounted time clock, employees could clock in and out on their phones. Instead of tracking data on spreadsheets, Deputy’s software tracked data in real-time. 

As a result of the change, The Spanish Table saved 312 hours on scheduling, and employee morale improved. 

Mud Bay

Compliance problems, stores not opening, employee burnout — you name it, Mud Bay was dealing with it. Expanding their business and nearly tripling the staff put too much strain on their original Excel-based schedule system. 

All 60 store managers would each spend two to three hours creating schedules — amounting to 120–180 hours weekly! 

That doesn’t even include tracking employee time, which is where compliance issues come in. Using separate systems for scheduling and time tracking created problems with getting schedules to employees ahead of time, tracking breaks, and more, causing constant conflicts. 

In a single month in 2020, 72 stores opened late, closed early, or didn’t open at all because of staffing issues. 

With Deputy, Mud Bay reduced its scheduling time by 25–50%, slashed its store closure issues by 85%, and made it easier to stay compliant with scheduling laws.

Schedule smartly with Deputy

If you’re tired of inefficient scheduling, make the switch to Deputy’s smart scheduling tool. Experience faster scheduling, simplified compliance, and smoother daily operations for you and your employees.

We create all our tools specifically for shift-based businesses because we know how hard it is to spin multiple plates within a single shift. 

Get a free demo today!