Why your employees hate your rotas

Creating staff rotas to meet the needs of the business as well as keeping your staff happy can be a very time consuming and monotonous process for managers; but do you know what your staff think of how you build, share and make changes to their schedules? For many employees how their rotas are shared and scheduled can cause a number of frustrations. So, here are a few seemingly simple things that you might be missing and how you should address them:

Sharing the rota too late in the day

We all have lives outside of work. Be it family commitments, socialising or personal needs it can be hard to find that work-life balance, especially for shift-workers. A large part of this is down to shift schedules being shared too late in the day, making it more difficult for your employees to commit to other plans or causing them stress when it comes to things such as child care or booking doctors appointments. Make sure you’re taking into account the individual circumstances of every employee and share shifts well in advance.

Poorly scheduled shifts

It’s not just number of people you need to account for when building a staff rota. You need to make sure you have the right combination of people with different skillsets and experience working each shift. Getting this right will enable you to both deliver the best possible experience for your customers and make life easier for your employees. Take some time to find the right balance and establish what works best for your business.

Too many hurdles when booking time off or swapping shifts

Inability to quickly and easily request time off or swap shifts can cause a lot of frustration for employees and result in wasted time for you. If you provide your staff with a tool where they can request holiday and swap shifts in a few simple steps it’ll benefit both you and them. 

Under or over-staffing

If you are building uninformed rotas and not accounting for changes in footfall and/or demand then you are likely to end up with too many or too few staff. Not only is this a frustration for them it will result in wasted costs for you; be that through over staffing or lost customers due to poor service. With too few staff you’ll lose money through wasted opportunity, not to mention burning out those poor souls on shift. Having too many staff scheduled will also lose you money, but this time thanks to an unnecessarily high wage cost.

To avoid this happening you need to be aware of daily demand. Monitor trends and keep an eye on any upcoming events and seasonality that may affect how many customers you have. A bar or pub for example will most likely need more staff working when there is a major sporting event; whereas retailers will need more staff in the run up to Christmas but maybe not during the summer holidays. There are multiple factors to consider here but implementing software to help you predict demand throughout the year will not just help you schedule your staff more accurately but save you a huge amount of time and resource.

The solution 

Make sure you get to know the individual circumstances of each of your employees when you hire them. Can they only work weekends? Are they busy every Wednesday afternoon? Do they have families or a second job they need to work certain hours for? Ensure you know all of this from the get go. That way you can be sure you are scheduling correctly and not causing frustration amongst your employees. 

Once you have accounted for all of these factors you can focus on scheduling your staff perfectly to meet demand.

With a solution like Rotaready you can achieve all of this with very little effort and be confident that your employees will love your rotas! For more information on how our solution can help you schedule staff to perfectly meet demand, all whilst accounting for employee preferences and giving staff greater control over their time; then email us at team@rotaready.com or drop us a message via live chat.