Workforce Management – The ideal way
An organisation is a group of people working on the same goal by performing necessary tasks. The organisation efficiently utilises the resources by dividing the duties of various employees to fulfill the client’s requirements. Scheduling and planning employees’ shifts in an organisation is a crucial, complex, and time-consuming task. Therefore, having rostering software to create rosters with complete information like the person’s details, shift timings, hours, and responsibilities, is essential. Organisations can trust shift rosters and staff scheduling tools for productive work culture and higher efficiency. Whether an organisation is overstaffed or understaffed, overhead costs can arise. People can also be fatigued and less productive if they work long hours.
What is shift work?
An organisation should be active 24/7 as many components manage it. So there should be enough employees for those working hours. It’s not a compulsion that a single person needs to work for a whole day, which is next to impossible as that results in restlessness and affects physical and mental health. So to avoid those, the shift work has come to light. Here the employees will be assigned a time slot for their work. There will be 9-hour shifts given to all the employees working and managed to serve the whole day by providing different timings to different batches of employees. Through this, the employees will work without any burden.
There are many approaches for arranging shift work in a place that needs 24-hour service, like hospitals, the military, customer support services, transportation, newspapers, and media. In a week, an employee can work for four consecutive days and take off for the next three days working 12 hrs a day.
Conventional method vs. modern method
Shift work is mostly either the conventional method or the new-age method.
The conventional method is the old one used before the rostering software came into practice. In this method, a person is employed to note all the tasks given to an employee with their details and keep track of how much work is done and the hours worked. A paper-based shift roster is challenging to share with all the workers. All these details are manually noted by a person allocated for this work. The high risk in this job is the accuracy as everyone knows “To err is human.” So while manually entering the details, if even a single point is missed or entered incorrectly, that may be affected fatally.
On the contrary, the modern method follows the roster software to schedule the employees’ shifts and assign them the work. It is possible to automate the creation of shift schedules by implementing a variety of changes using this shift scheduling software. It makes it visible to all the other employees so that there will be a clear picture of the work done by each employee. In the new-age method, digitalisation plays a vital role. Due to digitalisation, these rosters can be updated and shared over a mobile or computer in the organisation. It helps maximise productivity and optimise the shift and employee roster scheduler. This method also reduces paper usage and encourages an eco-friendly system.
The major disadvantage of using the conventional method for the division of work shifts is that it is not economically feasible for every new change creation, printing, and distribution, as the process must start from scratch for every single error committed. At the same time, a shift roster saves time and money in the long run, while paper-based staff scheduling may seem beneficial to a few, only in the beginning.
The software helps the organisation to be more productive and optimistic in the market. It also maintains the bond between the employee and the organisation as the organisation provides a burden-free environment to work and complete the assigned tasks.