How to Manage Your Employees’ Schedules

Good management and planning of employee deployment is an important factor in maintaining sustainable performance. And while working to ensure the well-being of their employees at work, managers must also respond to perennial operational constraints. The challenge is to satisfy your employees as well as possible while ensuring the ongoing activity of your business. To achieve this companies sometimes reexamine the way they manage their employee schedules. Should an internal process be implemented? What is the purpose of an employee schedule? What is the most optimal way to manage employee time? This article offers you solutions you can implement immediately, regardless of the nature of your business.

Why Do We Need to Organize a Team Schedule?

The productivity of a team depends in part on a weekly (or monthly) schedule adapted to its members. At the most basic level, companies have an obligation to respect the legal framework imposed by employment contracts and labor law (holidays, days off, sick leave, etc.). From a business perspective, managers must ensure that ongoing operations and planned growth activities take place. And, as described above, many companies are motivated to satisfy their employees’ needs for a good work-life balance. To meet this multi-faceted challenge, taking into account company and employee constraints is the first, essential step:

• What are the busiest periods?
• Which are the most important or most strategic projects? What skills do they require?
• What is the employee leave requests annual breakdown for each team?
• What is the situation of absent employees? Are they on sick, maternity, or paternity leave? When are they expected to return to work?

These are all questions that must be anticipated before developing a scheduling plan. Achieving a harmonious working climate by basing the work schedule on these needs will help to increase cohesion and foster agreement between the different levels of management, boosting collective performance.

>Easily manage planning and scheduling all your employees’ time by using RowShare’s collaborative tool! RowShare allows your HR and business teams to share and access scheduling information in real time.

How to Manage Your Employees’ Schedule Effectively?

Using a shared tracking table has the advantage of providing restricted access to people who do not necessarily belong to the same department or team. The tool can act as an HR dashboard, providing selective access to managers. In some versions of this table, the employees can be given access so they can log their hours themselves. Everyone therefore benefits from the same level of information and is automatically updated as soon as anyone makes a change to it. In addition, shared access facilitates employee autonomy and results in more accurate data that everyone can use for different purposes. HR can track days off and sick time, while managers can adjust schedules to accommodate current projects. With highly fluid communication, the risk of errors or misunderstandings is reduced.

Finally, projects can sometimes require very specific skills. For example, some IT or digital projects (ERP migration or deployment of a mobile application) require particular expertise at strategic times. This is why it is so important for team managers to see an overview of their team’s schedule. The contribution of the team members themselves to projects can be facilitated if they have access to their colleagues’ schedules to schedule necessary meetings.

Essential Data to Include in a Collaborative Tool

Use this table to manage schedules of your employees effectively!

As an example, here are the elements that might appear in a shared table for a typical week:

– Name of the employee – Name of the manager – Department (Logistics, IT, Finance, etc.) – Expected hours of absence – Type of absence (day off, paid leave, sick leave, etc.); – Comments

The table should be filled in a few weeks in advance, so everyone is aware of the planned absence.

Managing employee schedules effectively with a collaborative tool is possible for any HR team. It is a simple tool to implement, use, and collaborate on. In time, its use will gain employee loyalty and performance for your company.