5 Staff Scheduling Ideas That Are Inexpensive and Efficient

Employee scheduling is a major cause of headaches for many business owners. It can even be more challenging for small businesses, where admin processes haven’t been fully established yet.

If you’re:

• a business owner looking for scheduling ideas
• a business owner who hates scheduling, but wants to love it

Then this post is for you.

5 Staff Scheduling Ideas for Business Owners

Paper schedules

Many companies still use paper schedules because they’re simple to use. There’s no need to learn to use any type of software. Everyone can understand what to do and make changes when using paper schedules.

Despite their simplicity, paper schedules are inconvenient in so many ways. Paper costs are actually bigger than you think. You have to spend more hours crafting employee schedules.

When you’re doing things manually, it’s easy to make mistakes. And it’s even more annoying to notify everyone if you make changes to the schedules.

It’s also more difficult to keep paper records of employee hours. Some states require employers to keep employee schedules for years.

Paper records are easy to lose, and managers have to find a way to store them and find them quickly when needed. In other words, business owners have to be extremely careful when using paper schedules to comply with the laws and legislation.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets is one of the most common scheduling ideas among businesses.

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets provide a bunch of useful features that allow business owners to manage shifts, availability and employee hours, via different devices. Plus, there are various scheduling templates available to help those who don’t know much about these programs.

It’s easy to share accessibility to all employees so that you don’t have to print and distribute the schedules to every one of them.

Whenever you need to find a specific name or information, you can quickly search for it using the Finder tool.

However, using spreadsheets alone is not enough. You may need to use a messaging app to notify your staff about schedule changes.

Plus, setting up an advanced spreadsheet for employee schedules and hours is not simple. Managers need certain knowledge about these programs to customize and make the best use of them.

Intranet

Intranet is an organization’s private network, designed to provide employees with a place to communicate and share information.

It’s a great platform to keep everyone on the same page. Employers can send schedules, announcements, and manage employees’ time off here.

The main disadvantage of Intranet is that it costs money and time to set up, maintain, and administer. This can be a huge downside for small businesses that want to optimize their budget.

Unless you have the money and a strong desire to establish Intranet, we wouldn’t recommend this method for small businesses.

Social Media

While Intranet is complex and costly to set up, creating a social media group is a simple and free way to manage employees.

Some business owners create Facebook groups to post schedules, news, and announcements. Employees can tell their availability or exchange information in certain posts in the group.

Almost everyone has a social media account and constantly updates, so this is a quick way to keep in touch with your employees.

The thing about using social media is that information floats away. Sometimes, your staff may miss important announcements, and it can take some time to find out the necessary information.

Employee Scheduling Software

Employee scheduling software is an all-in-one toolkit for business owners to manage their employees. Staff scheduling software solve all the disadvantages of the scheduling methods mentioned above.

From creating and updating schedules, assigning shifts, managing time-off requests to messaging team members and exporting timesheets for payroll, these software have them all in one place. Might we recommend Camelo?

They’re free if you only need simple scheduling features, and you can always upgrade to a more advanced version without breaking the bank.

Try them all out and see what works for your business

Each of these scheduling ideas has its pros and cons. Some owners might combine papers and chat apps, while others just create a Facebook group.

Try each of them out and see what works best for your business. Or simply choose a good scheduling app like Camelo and save yourself and your employees lots of time.