Work Schedule



How To Create The Perfect Work Schedule For Your Team

The perfect work schedule is something many managers strive for. Unfortunately, few actually achieve it. This is despite the fact that technology makes it easier than ever to streamline the process and get it right the first time.

The Work Schedule staff has worked to understand our business and meet our needs. Some of the benefits Visual Audio Captioning has enjoyed as a result of this relationship include the following. Our captioners and schedule coordinators who are located across the U.S. Have real-time access to our fluid broadcast schedule 24/7. In the employee schedule, you will find the total number of employees accompanied by their responsibilities. After having that, you can arrange them into charts based on the time spent by the employee to work for a certain period of time. Why is each employee’s schedule has to difference? What makes each employee schedule different is the.

Whether you use online scheduling apps, have your own tools like Excel, or rely on the pen-and-paper method, there are some important points to keep in mind. These points range from building shifts around your best employees to planning for the worst to using the best tools for the job. This article will discuss 10 tips for creating the perfect work schedule for your team.

What Exactly Is A Perfect Work Schedule Anyway?

Before we can begin creating the perfect work schedule, it’s worth considering what the ideal finished product will look like. Let’s go over some of the things your business’s work schedule should do.

Features Your Work Schedule Should Include

First and foremost, your work schedule needs to ensure that each shift is staffed appropriately for each position. You may not need a bartender at all for weekday lunch shifts, but perhaps you need three people behind the bar on Friday and Saturday nights. Alway get the numbers right.

In order to do this, be aware of events—either local or national—that might cause an unusual spike in customers. Sporting events, concerts, festivals, and theater performances are all things to make note of. Also, keep an eye on the reservation list. Weeknights might normally be slow, but you don’t want to get caught off-guard the one time there are several large party reservations on a Tuesday.

The second requirement of your work schedule is that it must be completely free of errors. It probably seems like we’re stating the obvious, but making a work schedule is not a simple process. It’s much easier to make a mistake than it is to make a perfect work schedule. Here are the three most common scheduling errors:

  1. Double-scheduling an employee. Say you have an employee who works some shifts as a host and others as a busser. Make sure staff members like this aren’t scheduled twice during the same time slot.
  2. Scheduling staff for the wrong position. No matter how amazing a line cook is at their job, it doesn’t mean they know how to work the grill. Don’t schedule an employee for a position that they haven’t been trained to do.
  3. Under- or over-scheduling employees. Be sure you’re not giving a part-time employee too many shifts. These team members might have other commitments outside of work that they can’t miss. Similarly, full-time staff need to be given enough shifts to meet their financial obligations. However, avoid giving a single employee too many shifts in any given week. This helps keep labor costs down, as you won’t have to pay out more money for overtime.

If you can steer clear of these three common mistakes, you’re on the right track. But what else needs to be done to make the perfect work schedule? Simply stated, the perfect work schedule is one that keeps you and your staff happy while maximizing efficiency and profits. So how is this holy grail of work schedules created? Start with the 10 tips listed below.

Maker

1. Know Your Team

Knowing your team is perhaps the most basic part of creating a work schedule. So basic, in fact, that you may be wondering why we even bothered mentioning it. We bring it up for the simple fact that many managers do a substandard job of really knowing their employees. Some even skip this step completely. All they’re concerned with is making sure there are enough people to cover every shift. Download hbo now on mac. So why is knowing your team so important? Because it allows you to make choices to further the success of the business rather than just getting enough servers for the lunch rush.

Really knowing your team members gives you the freedom and the flexibility to mix and match skills, strengths, weaknesses, and personality types (just to name a few) to create the perfect shift for any situation. To make this process easier, we recommend making a list that includes:

  • The employee’s name
  • Relevant skills
  • Certifications
  • Full- or part-time status
  • Overtime restrictions
  • Personality type (e.g., outgoing, friendly, introverted, etc.)
  • Other notes that you may find useful (e.g., efficient, can handle a large crowd, meticulous, etc.)

That way, when you’re trying to put together the schedule, you can refer to your list to find the right employee to fill a hole in an otherwise great shift rather than trying to rely on your memory. Then, as you learn more about your employees, add to the list so you’ve got a complete picture of each and every team member. Even a basic list of your employee’s traits and skills can make the next step infinitely easier.

2. Build Shifts Around Your Best Employees

We all know who our best employees are. If you don’t, it’s time to make a list like we mentioned above. Consider traits like efficiency, personableness, experience, and how well they work with others. Once you have your list, build shifts around the employees best suited for that particular time.

This serves two purposes:

  1. First, it ensures that the employee(s) most suited to each shift are working then. So, for example, the most efficient employees work during the biggest rush (lunch) while the more personable employees work when customers are more likely to linger (dinner). That isn’t to say that you don’t want some semblance of efficiency and personableness on every shift, but an employee who is more likely to stand around and chat with a customer for five minutes probably isn’t the first choice for the midday rush.
  2. The second purpose served by building shifts around your best employees is that you know you have a core of experience on which other employees can rely. An experienced employee can quickly improve the quality of a shift because other, less experienced, employees watch, learn, and rise to the higher standards. This is true for brand-new employees who are still in training, as well as recent hires who have made it through training but are still learning the ropes. Mixing some of your best employees with some of your newer employees is a great way to create stability across all shifts.

3. Establish A Team-Wide Communication Method

Communication is important for any business. But in the restaurant and retail industries, it can mean the difference between having enough employees to cover a shift and being short-staffed. Establishing a team-wide communication method makes it easy for you and your employees to know exactly where to look for your work schedule. There’s no more searching through email, instant message, and texting apps to find the newest work schedule or that time-off request you need. Everyone uses the same tool so everyone’s on the same page.

If you haven’t already, set up this team-wide communication method right away. With most people using smartphones these days, your best bet is to choose a method that makes use of this omni-present technology. Texting is one such method. Instant messaging is another.

Another great option is an app like Sling. Sling is a tool made specifically for restaurants so it takes all the guesswork out of this important step. Apps like Sling couple powerful scheduling tools with equally powerful communications tools. This allows you to improve internal communication through chatting and the sharing of messages, photos, videos, and links. In addition, you can communicate with a specific individual, a group, or all employees at the same time. These and other communication features make apps like Sling your best bet for team-wide communication.

4. Get The Schedule Out Quickly

The release of a new work schedule is always a nervous time for employees. Most will run to their own personal calendars to start planning their personal lives and to see if there are any major conflicts. Your employees need that time to adjust. On top of that, you need to give plenty of time for those conflicts, and the changes they bring, to be resolved. That’s why it’s so important to get the schedule out as quickly as possible.

We recommend finalizing and distributing the schedule at least two weeks before the end of the current schedule. This gives your employees plenty of time to:

  • Schedule and reschedule personal commitments
  • Trade shifts
  • Find a substitute
  • Talk to you about the days and times they work

The quickest way to distribute your schedule is with a cloud-based app. These apps allow you to produce one document, post it online, and grant access so your employees can view the schedule twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. That’s much faster than trying to hand out a printed copy to each and every team member. And as an added time-saving bonus, when you make changes to the online document, they are instantaneously visible to everyone involved. This makes resolving conflicts and making substitutions so much easier. It also cuts down on the confusion of having multiple copies of the schedule floating around.

5. Honor Work Preferences And Time-Off Requests As Much As Possible

At the most basic, honoring work preferences and time-off requests builds goodwill, increases employee satisfaction, and helps you retain good workers. It’s a pretty important part of the scheduling process, to say the least. It can also be an incredibly time-consuming part of the scheduling process.

But you can cut down on the time it takes to process all this information by keeping your employees’ work preferences and time-off requests in one place. It doesn’t matter if it’s a manilla folder, a quick note on your phone, or a document on your computer. What does matter is that you refer to the information often when creating your schedule.

One of the most efficient ways to do this is to use a cloud-based master document similar to the document you used to create and distribute your schedule. You can give your employees permission to add to this document and then ask them to submit their work and time-off preferences in this one location. It’s very much like having a time-off request box mounted on the wall in the break room, only this “box” is accessible anytime, anywhere.

After you establish how your employees submit their work preferences and time-off requests, it’s essential that you set up some rules to govern the process. You should address things like when employees can and can’t request time off, how far in advance the request needs to be made, and anything that is specific to your business. For example, because of the way your schedule is built, employees may only be able to take time off in blocks of five days or less. That should certainly be outlined in rules.

You’ll then need to set the rules that determine how you decide between overlapping requests that can become more and more common as holidays approach. You can tailor the rubric for settling time-off conflicts to fit each particular situation, but you should always consider things like seniority, reason for the request, what’s best for the business, and when the request was submitted. Establishing rules like these serves to make the resolution process transparent and clear to your employees. You can explain to employee A the specific reasons why you let employee B have the time off (seniority and employee B got her request in first), rather than letting employee A think there was some sort of favoritism involved. This keeps everyone happy, keeps everything running smoothly, and helps avoid conflicts between all parties involved.

6. Get Employees To Do Some Of The Work Scheduling

The thing about scheduling that most managers forget is that they don’t have to do all the heavy lifting on their own. Providing your employees with the opportunity to do some of the scheduling themselves is a great way to:

  • Take some of the burden
  • Keep them engaged in their work.

Consider scheduling one or two of your best employees for each shift as a way to start. Then give everyone access to this incomplete schedule and allow them to fill in when they want to work.

If you want to try this method of scheduling, allow changes for a set period of time (maybe two days) then close the schedule to outside alteration. Finally, go through and make changes according to what each shift needs. When everything is finished to your satisfaction, make the schedule available to everyone again.

If you’ve been scheduling everything right from the get-go, you might consider trying this new method for a few months to see how it works. Scheduling apps like Sling make this easy. You create a common document online and then give everyone access to that document for a few days. When it’s time to finalize the schedule, close the document, make your changes, and then reopen it for viewing. It’s just that easy.

7. Let Employees Find Their Own Substitutes

Giving your employees the responsibility to find a substitute to cover their shift when they can’t work is another way you can reduce your own workload. Instead of having the employee call you to say they won’t be coming in today, the employee can send out a notification informing everyone that he’s sick and that he needs a substitute. The team-wide communication network mentioned earlier in the article is the cornerstone of this process.

Other employees who are willing to work can respond equally as fast. Something that might have taken an hour or more and countless phone calls on your part, can now be concluded in a matter of minutes. That said, you should always have guidelines in place to make sure things don’t get out of hand and negatively affect your business. First, make sure that everyone knows that all trades, replacements, and substitutions have to be approved by you, the manager, and that nothing is final until you give it your go ahead. Inform all team members that this provision is in place so that each shift gets the right mix of skills.

Another good guideline to have is that all replacements, trades, and substitutions should be someone who has done the job before, and can still do it with a reasonable degree of efficiency. You don’t want a busboy subbing for a cook or a cook subbing for a server.

Requiring that they find their own substitutes is a great way to instill a sense of maturity and thoughtfulness in your employees. In addition, it helps employees feel engaged in the business and think about what is involved in the scheduling process. By showing your employees what is involved in creating a work schedule and finding substitutes, you can create a sense that the schedule is not something to be changed willy-nilly. If they are scheduled and they are able, they need to work.

8. Create An Availability Chart


Sometimes an employee can’t find a substitute to cover their shift. When that happens, it’s up to you to find someone to work. It’s times like those when an availability chart makes the whole thing go so much smoother.

Emergencies will come up. It’s inevitable. But rather than leaving it all to chance, an availability chart can act as your “plan B”. The simplest version is just a list of each employee and what days and times they’re available to work. They may not be scheduled for all those days and times and, so, might be willing to pick up an extra shift here or there. The more complicated version is another full schedule listing available employees who can come in during each and every shift.

Think of your availability chart like the second string on a basketball team. If someone can’t “play”, you’ve got a number of choices who would be willing to come off the bench. Ultimately, this simplifies the substitute process by taking the thought out of it. It can also reduce the stress involved when the need for a last-minute substitute arises.

9. Have A Backup For Your Backup

The poet Robert Burns once wrote about the schemes of mice and men and how they so often go awry. It’s where we get the saying, “The best laid plans of mice and men…” to refer to the fact that no matter how carefully a thing is planned, something may still go wrong. If you’ve been a manager for any length of time, you’re well acquainted with this fact of life. So even though you’ve got your availability chart that outlines employees who are available to work on short notice, you may need a backup to this backup, or a plan C to your plan B.

That’s why we recommend setting up a list of trusted and reliable part-time workers you can contact when all your other options have failed. These workers may be former employees who left on good terms or prospective employees who interviewed but didn’t get hired. You may think these people would never be willing to come in on such short notice, but you never know until you ask. Former employees may look forward to working with your team again, and prospective employees may jump at the chance to get a toe in the door.

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10. Use The Best Tool For The Job

If you’ve ever tried to drive a nail with a screwdriver, you know the importance of using the best tools for the job at hand. Creating a work schedule is no different. The right tools can make the job easier and quicker to complete.

Even tools meant for other purposes (like Word or Excel) can streamline the scheduling process when compared to the age-old pen-and-paper method. And now, with cloud computing penetrating every corner of the business world, free online versions of Word and Excel (e.g., Google Docs and Sheets) make the process even simpler.

So while you may already be using one or the other of these apps, is it really the best fit for the job? Is there a better tool available? For restaurants, there are tools available that are specifically tailored to the restaurant industry. Apps like Sling contain powerful features that help make building your schedule easier than ever before.

Because Sling is created specifically for restaurant scheduling, there is no complicated formatting necessary to get the schedule looking the way you want it. There’s no endless searching for a template that doesn’t quite work. There’s no trying to figure out a way to do something with a program that is made for some other purpose. All you have to do is focus on making the best schedule possible.

Then, during the scheduling process, Sling can notify you when you’ve double booked an employee. It can notify you when you’ve forgotten a time-off request. It can even offer suggestions to help you create the perfect schedule. When the schedule is complete, Sling can send automated notifications to remind your employees that the schedule is available, that changes have been made, or that they have a shift coming up. Indeed, Sling can provide everything the savvy manager needs to create the perfect work schedule in no time. It’s like having your very own personal assistant who does nothing but help the scheduling process go easier. And best of all, Sling is free to use.

The Best Way To Create A Work Schedule

An app like Sling truly is the best solution for creating the perfect work schedule for your team. It can help you execute all of the tips above as well as provide easy ways to assign and track tasks, create social media pages, and much, much more. Yes, managing a restaurant, or any business for that matter, will always be hard work. Fortunately, Sling can make at least one part of that job easier. Overall, it can reduce the time you spend on scheduling issues and making sure employees are where they are supposed to be at the proper time. So don’t wait. Try Sling today for free.

Work

The work schedule or shift plan is an integral part of staff management within a company. It is intended to ensure that the right number of employees with the right qualifications are in the right position at the right time. To achieve this, the work schedule defines the start and end of working hours. It therefore offers employees a practical overview of when they have to do their work.

The work schedule itself is quite a simple document. However, in order to provide orientation for the staff, it must meet certain formal (and possibly legal) requirements. Although there are numerous software solutions for scheduling, many of them involve monthly subscription costs. A common program is sufficient to create a professional, homemade work schedule: Excel.

  1. Step-by-step guide: How do you create a work schedule with Excel?

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Formal and legal requirements for a professional work schedule

As a planning tool for employers and guidance for workers, each work schedule should meet certain requirements:

  • It must contain all essential information, including employees’ first and last names, working hours, and the planning period for which the work schedule applies.
  • It should not just make sense to the manager creating it, but also to the employees. The work schedule should therefore be limited to the essentials for the sake of clarity (also make sure that the text is not too small) and be as an uncomplicated and self-explanatory as possible. If in doubt, it is a good idea to add an explanatory note.
  • A visually appealing design is also an advantage. For example, empty rows or columns can loosen up the layout. Different colors also make individual areas stand out from each other.

It is also important to ensure that your work schedules comply with predictive scheduling laws or fair scheduling laws. These types of laws are becoming more and more common at the state and local level in the USA. The purpose of these laws is to ensure that workers are being assigned a fair amount of work, and to ensure that their work-life balance is being prioritized. Some laws also cover availability of additional work hours or call-in pay.

While there is no federal legislation available on this topic, and state laws can vary from locality to locality, there are some steps you can try to take when creating your work schedule to ensure that you are complying with best practice. Employers should be able to give a reasonably accurate estimate of their potential schedule upon hiring them, to ensure that workers are not being promised hours that they will not receive, or being manipulated into working additional hours that they are not available for. Work schedules should also be issued well ahead of time (two weeks’ notice is ideal where possible), and employers should try to be flexible and accommodating with employee shift requests or overtime requests. Naturally, employee rest times should be prioritized so that employees are not exhausted and can have a work-life balance. Employees should be made aware of any changes to the work schedule with plenty of notice and employers should consider offering overtime or premium pay for any last minute schedule changes.

Schedule

Work Schedule Calendar

If you are unsure whether your work schedules are following best practice or complying with local laws, be sure to consult a legal professional to ensure that you are legally in the clear.

Step-by-step guide: How do you create a work schedule with Excel?

Work schedules can look different depending on their application purpose. There are weekly schedules for individual employees as well as long-term shift schedules for the entire workforce.

Our example is the work schedule for a fictitious retail store that is open from Monday to Friday from 6:00 to 22:00 and on Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00 during the 2019 Christmas shopping season. When using a reusable monthly plan in Excel, it should clearly display the working times of all employees and at the same time offer some automatic functions that make it easier for the employer to plan personnel deployment.

Basically, our sample work schedule consists of the following three areas:

  • A permanently visible header with the different shifts and corresponding clock times
  • A sidebar with automatically generated, continuous dates
  • A table where the names of employees on duty can be entered and which also calculates the number of shifts performed by each employee

The sample work schedule created here was made with Microsoft Excel 2013, but the user interface and procedure are very similar in all software versions.

Create header

In this section, we’ll show you how to format table columns and rows, and fix the header at the top of the screen. We will also give you tips on how to use Excel shortcuts:

  1. To adjust the width of the columns in your schedule, you can simply click (hold) on the column boundary and drag it to the desired width (the current width is displayed in a small window over the mouse pointer).
  2. Alternatively, you can click on a column and enter the desired value in the “Start” tab under “Format” à “Column” width.
  3. Using the “Transfer Format” button (located in the upper left corner of the Start tab) you can even speed up your work: To do this, first click on an already formatted column, then on the button in question and finally on the column to be formatted. This saves you having to adjust all table columns manually.
  4. In our example, column A (December 2019) has a width of 35; columns C,E,G, and I have a value of 20; empty columns B, D, F, H, and J, which are meant to break up the schedule are only 40 pixels wide (corresponds to a value of 5). You can set the columns K and L as you like – depending on how much space you have left.
  5. To format the cells for individual layers, just type in “Early Shift” (or midday, late, or night shift) and then use the Excel shortcut [ALT] + [ENTER) to manually break lines. Now type in the time “6:00-10:00.” By double-clicking the cell last, you can adjust the font size of the shift name and time and mark things as bold.
  6. Finally, fix the header at the top of the screen so that it is still visible when you scroll down the work schedule. To do this, navigate to the “View” tab and click on “Fix top line” under “Freeze Window.

Apart from the key combination [ALT] + [ENTER] for the manual line break, there are many other Excel shortcuts that can make working with the spreadsheet program much easier.

Here, you can see a video tutorial on how to use the “Transfer format” function of Excel correctly:

Work Scheduler

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Formatting the time column

In this section, you will learn how to set a sequential date for your work schedule (this particular one excludes Sunday, as this is often a day of closure for businesses):

  1. In cell A2 (column A, row 2), type the first date of the month that does not fall on a Sunday (e.g. December 2nd 2019).
  2. Right-click on the cell and click on “Format cells” in the drop-down menu that opens.
  3. Select the “Numbers” tab in the following context menu and click on “Wednesday, March 14th 2012” under the “Date” category to display the date together with the day of the week (of course you can also choose a different display method).
  4. Click on the A3 cell below and copy the following formula into it to exclude all Sundays from the consecutive dates: =WHEN(WEEKDAY(A2;2)=6;A2+2;A2+1).
  5. Format this cell just like “Wednesday, March 14th 2012.” Instead of a cryptic sequence of numbers, the second date of the month should now be displayed, unless it falls on a Sunday (which is omitted).
  6. Select cell A3. Click on the small square in the lower-right corner of the cell and drag it down until you reach the last date of the month. Then release the mouse pointer. Excel now automatically adds all dates without Sundays.
  7. If you want to leave out the whole weekend, it’s even easier: enter the first date of the month and drag the small square down until the whole month is listed. Now, click on “Auto Fill Options” in the lower right corner of the highlighted area and select “Fill Weekdays.” Excel will now remove all Saturdays and Sundays from the list.

An important component of Excel are the “Formulas,” which all begin with an actual equal sign (=) and accelerate the work with the table software clearly. The IF function is one of the most common of these formulas and is used to enable a logical comparison between a value and an expected value. Basically, it tells the program: “IF a certain value is true, do the following, if not, do something else.”

The following video explains the basic procedure for automatically filling in dates in Excel:

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Tables

The last section explains how to have Excel calculate the shifts of your employees and make any final changes. We will also give you a few tips on macros:

  1. Choose an area of your work schedule and list the names of all your employees. Write each employee’s name in a separate cell. In our example, Matthew S. is assigned to cell L9.
  2. Enter the following formula in the adjacent cell M9: NUMVERIF(C2:I29;“Matthew S.”)
  3. In our example, area C2:I29 represents the totality of cells in which employees can be entered and counted in their respective shifts.
  4. Excel now automatically counts all Matthew S. entries in the work schedule and displays the total in cell M9. If you enter additional shifts for Matthew S., the numerical value is updated automatically.
  5. Formatting the layout of your work schedule should be done at the very end. You can use the “Fill color” button on the “Start” tab to color rows, columns, or individual cells differently in order to highlight them. Remember, however, to explain the coloring using a legend for your employees.
  6. Do not forget to activate the border lines with the button of the same name. This is the only way to clearly separate the individual cells of your tabular work schedule.
  7. Finally, you can protect your work schedule from being edited by others by activating “write protection” in the “Check” tab.

With the COUNTIF function, you can let Excel take over even more complex calculations. For example, the working hours can be derived from the number of shifts that will be undertaken. If you want to use particularly extensive command chains, you should consider creating a macro. This can reduce your workload and reduce the error rate for manual input.

The following video explains how to use the “=COUNTIF” function in practice:

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Using the Excel work schedule

You can now use your finished work schedule for all coming months. All you have to do is create a new Excel worksheet for each month (click on the small “+” sign at the bottom left of the window) and copy your work schedule template into it (key combination [CTRL] + [C] and [CTRL] + [V]). You can then right-click and “Rename” the worksheet with the current month and add a “Register Color” to better distinguish the worksheets from each other.

However, you will notice that the column width of the template is not copied during the copy process. Microsoft suggests a certain procedure for this, but it does not work in practice. Proceed as follows instead:

  1. Select the work schedule template manually by dragging an area with the mouse that covers all relevant cells.
  2. Copy the table into your new worksheet.
  3. Click on the SmartTag “(Ctrl)” in the lower-right corner of the inserted table. A context menu opens.
  4. Under “Insert,” click the “Keep width of the original table (B)” button. The correct column width will now be restored.

Do you want to enter several employees in one shift? Proceed as follows: Right-click on the cell below the relevant shift, click on “Insert cell” and then on “Entire row.” With the option “Delete cells,” you can also delete them at any time.

Work Schedule

When reusing your work schedule Excel template, remember that you must re-enter the consecutive date each time. Just follow the step-by-step instructions again.

Once you have divided all your employees into their respective shifts, all you have to do is save your work schedule – preferably as a PDF file. You can then print it out and use it as a notice board or send it directly to your employees by e-mail or intranet.

It doesn’t always have to be Microsoft Excel: find out in the IONOS Digital Guide what free alternatives to Excel are available.

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