Time Efficiency Can Make A Difference

We live in a society where everything and everyone is moving at such a high speed. With this high pace, we as humans have developed a way to not only work at great speeds, but to also work as efficient as possible. Most managers of major companies and organizations spend a noticeably large portion of their time assessing their employee’s availability and inputting that information on physical schedules to post or email to those employees. Other managers will opt to use the “photocopier” method which entails the manager simply photocopying last week’s or last month’s schedule which seems like a simple and time efficient approach to produce schedules for their employees but this creates a barrier for most businesses long term that fails to adapt to changes in customer demands, or changes to employees availability or preference. If the customer’s demands are continuously changing and evolving, it will eventually lead to the first option of managers utilizing a substantial amount of company time constructing schedules to adapt to their business needs on a weekly basis depending on fluctuation.
One sole opportunity that comes along with labour scheduling, is the ability to cross- utilize employees in different functions, at different times. Although this is something that comes with a barrier such as when the individual constructing the schedule may be familiar with only the area under their direct control. However, this would enable a manager to see the bigger picture and deploy people at different jobs at different times, which could lead to less under-staffing and less over-staffing. And that leads to a more effective labour deployment as the end result. This is a method that at one point could only be done with a manual scheduler such as a manager, but systems such as a management platform break barriers to this norm.
With management platforms, it allows for the manager to incorporate its own hierarchical system. In most scheduling programs it becomes an important feature to incorporate these types of features to boost morale and give the employees a goal to work towards beyond their morale. Such systems operate as though employees develop a hierarchy of what is important to the business. Having a great scheduling program that incorporates not only employee preference but a hierarchical system will lead to an overall smoothly ran operation throughout the business model.
Management platforms are programs that go beyond scheduling people based on their availability. With the algorithms in todays world, it eliminates the extensive time utilized by valuable employees, such as a manager, by tracking “busy” seasons and updating real time data into your business’s portfolio. This makes it easier to produce schedules accordingly. Managers are much more than human schedule machines. Managers are hired in positions in order to be a strong team leader and train employees to do their absolute best possible job they could while still leading by example. When managers are occupied doing schedules, it takes away from the impact to other employees that is very much needed in a majority of large businesses and will lead to a greater customer satisfactory result.
Furthermore, a great scheduling program will incorporate effective logic. With managers alone, it would be even more time consuming to evaluate specific numbers that would be incorporated into producing a well thought out schedule. Aside from this, A great scheduling program should be able to develop a schedule while considering employee availability, instead of shift-based scheduling that would schedule the employees in order to fill the actual shifts without availability taken into consideration. What makes a great scheduling system is including employee preferences and identifying their work preference in advance, including ranking these preferences or even identifying trade-offs among their preferences. Incorporating a scheduling program that would consider each employees preference or even experience would lead to the best possible schedule in terms of matching these employees to the ideal number of employees needed while at the same time satisfying employee preferences that would lead to a greater morale in any workplace.

For businesses in the hospitality category, these businesses in particular should acknowledge constraints such as government regulations. Having a knowledge of the business’s constraints will allow managers to evaluate the degree of congruence between a scheduling program’s specific constraints and those identified by the hospitality firm. How certain scheduling programs deal with conflicting constraints can make the difference between just the average program and a phenomenal one.

Overall, there are many benefits to incorporating a scheduling program into an organization. Although there are some benefits with laboured scheduling, with these benefits come many different barriers that would greatly negatively impact the efficiency of the business being ran. The clear and somewhat only advantage that laboured scheduling has over implementing a scheduling program into a business is the fact that it is extremely cost effective. That being said, although the initial cost of incorporating a well thought-out scheduling program seems like it is a great option to reduce cost in a business, there are multiple financial opportunities that would be lost due to laboured scheduling. These losses would mainly include the amount of time wasted having a key employee such as a manager spend endless hours a year producing schedules on a weekly, or monthly basis. This takes away from the impact that the manager could have on the working employees to oversee operations and create an overall better experience for the customers. Not only this, but the manager could get a live look on customer demands beyond the numbers and data.
Implementing a proper scheduling program will lead to an increase in business efficacy that incorporates all employees, including managers, to work towards the overall goal of the business, offers scheduling on the go that implements real time data to adjust schedules towards seasonal and customer needs, and ultimately a scheduling program that offers much more than just scheduling such as implementing employee preferences, goals, strengths and weaknesses and even a hierarchical system. We are currently living in times in society where technology is evolving more and more each day. More advancements to technology have been made now more than ever to produce great scheduling programs in order for companies and businesses alike to compete and progress towards creating greater products for their consumers.