Are you considering ‘making the shift’ to online rostering as a 2022 new years resolution?
Here are five of our top ten considerations when building schedules. Of course, using an online rostering solution helps apply these tips easily. But, whichever roster solution you use now, these tips may help you?
#1 Start with the end in mind
You know your business better than anyone. Therefore, the roster should start with the end in mind. Firstly, setting your venue operating days and hours defines what days and times you need to roster staff. Secondly, define the critical roles (work areas) required to run your business.
This structure allows you to add shifts, accounting for the peak days and trading periods to reflect a roster of the ideal team. This structure means that your online rostering solution has a potential template that can be a favourite within minutes. This template can then remain a base schedule for any future roster week.
This base schedule becomes an active roster by allocating each shift to available staff. The final step is publishing it to employees who will receive notifications of all their upcoming shifts. Ready for them to check-in on the day and achieve your end goal – to have another day with high revenue with excellent service by having the right team working.
#2 Pair the old with the new
Online rostering allows you to customise your business roles, areas of work and employee attributes. If you’re lucky enough to have new starters (which has been a challenge across most sectors, post-COVID), your roster should pair experienced staff with new employees. Enabling your highly skilled members to deal with inevitable chaos as it arises. When chaos subsides, they can also train the less experienced—supporting a roster mixed with experienced and junior staff to reduce wage costs without compromising customer service delivery.
#3 The correct number and the right skills to get the job done.
If only rostering was as simple as allocating the ten staff working tomorrow. However, the reality of any business is you have to have the staff working with the right skills to get all the jobs done. Online rostering allows you to allocate shifts structured around the essential roles/skills. That could be staff who can manage the front of house, lead in the kitchen, deliver excellent customer service, or operate the forklift for that must have delivery.
#4 Roster knowing staff’s availability
Online rostering can save you hours in creating the schedule. Also, reduce the churn and lost time associated with filling every shift. Online rostering solutions can give you visibility of when your staff want to work and when life has them meeting other demands. So the allocation of shifts to those available reduces administration, follow-up phone calls and confirms you value staff who ensure their availability early (and call out those who don’t!).
The holiday season makes rostering with a view of availability and unavailability more critical. The summer season typically drives an increased reliance on casual staff. Using casual staff doesn’t need to result in more admin work. Instead, allow your casuals to confirm their availability as part of their onboarding. It will save you time and the pain of shifts swapping requests, changing working days or worse costly no-shows.
Online rostering also allows you to confirm to periods where customer demand requires ‘all hands-on deck’— set the expectation with your staff on days they are required to be available, as an expectation of the season ahead and taking this job.
#5 Create rosters for different scenarios
The ability to save templates within the online rostering solution allows you to create any number of varying schedules. Using roster templates was also referred to in tip #1. The template can define the right roles needed for your operation. Importing a template builds the roster for any future week in seconds. Templates can also exist for versions aligned with revenue and service estimates— for example, a schedule that aligns with 100 covers, 150 covers, 200 covers, etc.
Online rostering allows you to plan for different scenarios for your business. These scenario plans remain invisible to your staff until you decide to publish them. Online rostering is for you if you’re a planner who likes to consider different scenarios.
Watch out for part two of Going Digital in 2022. (Richie Benaud would love the title)
In our follow up article, we’ll share the other five considerations to round out the top ten considerations of online rostering.
#6 Share early to reduce shift swapping
#7 Contingency planning
#8 When it doesn’t go as planned
#9 Review past rosters
#10 Get regular feedback from your team
Why wait until 2022, ‘make the shift’ now
The team at urhere believe software can genuinely change lives. Technology can offer time-saving solutions and real-time insights to help businesses make more intelligent decisions to impact the performance of any operation. For example, our modern online rostering solution has been designed for any manager to create a schedule in minutes. Providing the respective staff numbers, hours and wages instantly as real-time insights on the plan. The life-changing benefit of online rostering has been stories from customers freeing themselves of paper and spreadsheet processes and what managers are now using their time to focus on growing their business.
If you would like a demo of urhere, reach out to the team via help@urhere.com.au or www.urhere.com.au
