If you’re a restaurant, retail, or other manager that deals with scheduling issues, it can seem insurmountable. But, it’s not. While no method will ever be perfect, there are some tips and tricks that make it easier.
To learn about it, click here: Managing Employee Scheduling: Tips and Tricks to Know
Step number one: ask the employees their scheduling preferences, before making the first schedule. Some prefer early schedules, some later ones, some want certain days off. A lot of scheduling worries and dissatisfactions can be eliminated right off the bat. Step two: create a neutral — “fair” — system for resolving situations where you can’t always schedule according to employee preferences. It could be a system based on seniority, or on alternating plum assignments, or even something as random as drawing straws or flipping a coin. Get employee buy-in for whatever situation you use. Step three: don’t abandon common sense. Regardless of the schedule, “stuff happens” that will require deviations — sometimes on very short notice — that don’t conform with your well-thought-out and constructed schedules and systems. In an emergency, you gotta do what you gotta do. My family has years of restaurant experience. Sometimes the Manager might have to — temporarily — run the dishwasher or mop the floor. Sometimes, someone has to be dispatched to go pick up an employee with transportation issues. Sometimes, the first person you’re able to reach in a crisis gets those extra hours, even if they would not be the first choice under your scheduling system. If employees know that you’ll “work with them,” have their backs and are trying to be fair, you will be rewarded with satisfied and incredibly-loyal workers in an industry that all too often mistakenly considers employees to be interchangeable and disposable.
I think what I should have done is asked you to write the article!
I completely agree with both the article and the comment above. While the managers should make every effort to schedule the employees according to their preferences, sometime it is easier said than done. Every manager wants their best employees specially during busy hours but what if your best employee doesn’t want that shift? At KunbaHR.com – an online HR Management software we have developed a labor scheduling module that allows the managers to schedule their resources easily, but to ensure the manager is taking employee availability into consideration, we provide them with employee availability notification during the schedule creating process and allow the employees to manage their availability so the managers are always aware of their employees’ availability.
This link as well as a couple of others, does not work anymore and I’d like to read the article.