The Timesheet Blog

All companies strive to manage their human resources effectively, especially in today’s economy when employee populations already feel a bit lean. It is often necessary to stretch resources – to utilize their skills wherever they can make an impact – even if it means sharing employees across departments.

For managers, sharing skilled workers can present challenges. They must cooperate to schedule employees efficiently, and in a way that applies valuable skills to the company’s greatest advantage. In cases where multiple managers are vying for the same resource, scheduling can become complicated; a single resource could easily end up double or triple booked.

Visible, Real Time Collaboration

Web Schedule addresses these challenges. Similar to Google Docs (TM), it allows multiple managers to collaborate on the same schedule – each from his/her own computer – and see others’ changes in real time. With visibility into each employee’s scheduled activities, managers can avoid scheduling conflicts.

Watch this video to see how easy it is to collaborate on employee schedules with Web Schedule.

Ready to tackle your employee scheduling nightmare?  Try a free trial.  No download required – sign up and get started today!

Have a story about your scheduling challenges? Please share your story in the comment section or ask us how we can be of assistance. Get our RSS feed , connect with us on LinkedIn, follow us @Replicon on Twitter.

Employee Scheduling Problem: Part 1 of a 2-part series

Accurate and efficient employee scheduling is an absolute necessity for companies in today’s highly competitive environment. As a leader in business, you know we don’t live in a world where:

• Your budget to cover labors costs is unlimited
• There are plenty of hours in the day to complete any task
• Workers are always available and never require supervision

Instead, we live in the real world where any scheduling error can negatively impact your organization’s bottom line.

Your goal in managing workflow is to ensure sufficient staffing levels so you can meet the needs of your customers. Accidental understaffing doesn’t just affect the service you give your clients. It also increases stress for your workers as they scramble to get things done. Morale, quality of work, productivity, and employee retention all suffer if you don’t schedule adequately.

Of course, this is a careful balancing act. Labor costs are one of the most significant recurring expenses your company has. Because of this, overstaffing can be just as detrimental as having too few workers on the job. Paying for superfluous labor (or unnecessary overtime) cuts into your organization’s profitability. It also leaves employees adrift without enough to do.

Top 5 Challenges Caused by Traditional Employee Scheduling

Manual Staff Scheduling has Low ROI

Creating an employee schedule by hand is a daunting task for managers and supervisors. Matching worker availability to staffing requirements and controlling labor costs at the same time is complicated. When managers produce a schedule manually, they often end up causing inflated payroll in some areas while leaving other departments chronically understaffed.

Worse yet, achieving this sub-optimal result usually takes over 8 hours per week just to create a schedule for 70-100 workers. A manager who takes employee scheduling seriously may spend much more time on this task – up to 14 hours per week. Still, the outcome can be disappointing simply because this method is inefficient.

Employees Aren’t Kept Up to Speed

In today’s dynamic production environments, last minute changes are common. This means you have probably noticed the following problem with manually created employee schedules: workers are frequently unaware of last minute changes. That’s because they have no visibility in their schedules. This causes unintended time & attendance violations that managers and HR staff members have to investigate and address.

When an employee doesn’t show up to cover his/her shift, other workers must stay longer. This increases your overtime costs. Or, you have to cope with the inevitable problems caused by running a shift with a skeleton crew.

In addition to being confused by the lack of a transparent staff scheduling process, employees may also become resentful. It isn’t unusual for workers to feel that covert decisions regarding time off requests and shift scheduling are being made out of favoritism.

Payroll Errors Eat Up Valuable Resources

When it comes to getting timesheets turned in to Payroll, the problems with manual employee scheduling become even more evident. Each timesheet has to be tediously compared with logged hours. Managers must review each sheet after the fact, correct it, and send the edits to Payroll. This is not a productive use of time for your department heads. Of course, if a busy manager makes an error in editing, payroll employees have to edit (by hand) again.

Unbudgeted Expenses Cause Conflict

A decentralized, manual scheduling process makes it tough to keep staffing expenses and unapproved overtime under control. This is a common cause of unbudgeted departmental expenditures. Without real-time access to staffing data, current schedules, and budgeting parameters, managers have difficulty finding the most suitable, cost efficient employee to fill a gap. They have no choice but to make an uninformed decision and cope afterward with the consequences of incurring unbudgeted expenses.

Labor Law Compliance Risks

Inconsistency and poor record keeping are the most common offenses that trigger fines for labor law and worker pay violations. Without visibility in employee scheduling (and complete, accurate records), HR may be unaware of a problem until it is too late. This not only puts your company at risk for being penalized by government agencies, it also opens you up to litigation from employees.

Are you ready to wake up from the nightmare of creating inefficient, time consuming employee schedules by hand? Stay tuned for our next post on a practical solution that will ease the hassles of creating, communicating and adhering to schedules.

What type of scheduling problems do you run into most often? Let us know in the comments. Keep in touch with us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to speed with the latest product innovations.

One of the things we’ve been hearing from customers is that you need a way to track when your people are supposed to be working – and not just the hours they’ve actually put in their timesheets.

We understand, and to make sure you get what you need, we’re expanding our product line once again!  Web Schedule is the latest addition to our software suite, and is currently available for beta testing.

If you want to set up employee schedules, this is the tool for you.  It’s really easy to use, with a calendar interface that lets you type in each employee’s scheduled work for a given day, and then use drag-and-drop to move schedules around or copy from one day to another.  For employees who work the same shift day in and day out, there are scheduling templates to save you time.

If you add Web Schedule to your existing Web TimeSheet solution, you’ll also be able to compare the schedules you’ve created with the actual hours each employee works – making it really easy to track discrepancies.

What’s really nice about Web Schedule is that it’s not just for supervisors or managers.  Your employees can use it to check their schedules in a calendar view that also shows them their booked time off, holidays, and actual hours they logged in their timesheets.

Web Schedule is still a work in progress, of course, but we’re getting great feedback from our beta testers.  In fact, we’ve already put together a big list of features to add in the future!  If you want to join the beta program, we’d love to hear from you – just leave us a comment, or contact us via phone or email so we can get you set up with a free trial.

We’re really excited about this new direction we’re taking, and can’t wait for the official Web Schedule launch in the next few months!

To get a sense of what Web Schedule can do, take a look at the video of our beta release.

Replicon Web Schedule Demo