The importance of effective rostering
A properly designed staff roster can ensure your business is getting the best of your employees. However, creating the roster is not a very enjoyable task and is often a balancing act between business requirements, legislative requirements, staff leave requests and customer demands. Without the right information, creating a roster can take hours of valuable time better spent elsewhere. you want to create a roster that includes your best sales people whilst monitoring your wages budget.
Below are some tips and tricks which may help you build a roster that is optimised for productivity, cost, and customer service.
1. Rostering software
Purchasing a tool to help automate creating a roster is one of the most time saving resources that you can implement in your business. This is especially true if the software is built into an all-inclusive management system that includes an employee self-service app with shift swapping, leave management, and time and attendance.
When choosing a rostering software, the most important consideration is that the tool incorporates legislative requirements. By ensuring compliance, the software will roster employees by allowing for break times, times between shifts, minimum and maximum shift lengths, and labour costs.
2. Effective budgeting
The starting point of building a roster should be to calculate the staffing budget as this ensures that your business’s financial health is put first. Know what your daily and weekly staffing budget is as well employees’ wages so that you can build a roster that will fit inside your budget.
3. Previous data for roster decisions
A cost-effective method of rostering uses POS and timesheet data to take the guess work out of creating a roster. Scheduled versus actual time worked can tell you a great deal about whether staff are regularly being sent home early as they aren’t needed or are working too much overtime.
By looking at your POS sales data and clock-in and out data you can have an accurate idea of how many staff should be on, at what time, and on what day.
4. Develop templates
There’s no need to start from scratch for each roster cycle as this is time consuming and easily avoided by creating roster templates. Start by creating a template that already has your permanent staff shifts in place and from here you can fill in the gaps or add roles and shifts during peak times.
It can be helpful to create several different templates for periods of high and low demand (Christmas holiday rosters versus standard mid-week rosters) so that the creation process can be further streamlined.
The bottom line
Rostering staff doesn’t have to be a complicated and time-consuming task if all the right measures are in place. If you want to discuss some rostering software options available to you, feel free to contact us to arrange a meeting or book in online here.
