The Importance of Effective Rostering
An adequately designed staff roster can ensure your business gets 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 correct information, creating a roster can take hours of valuable time better spent elsewhere.
Below are some tips and tricks to help you build a roster 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 you can implement in your business. This is especially true if the software is built into an all-inclusive management system, including an employee self-service app with shift swapping, leave management, and time and attendance.
The most crucial consideration when choosing a rostering software is that the tool incorporates legislative requirements. To ensure 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 calculating the staffing budget, as this ensures that your business’s financial health is put first. Know your daily and weekly staffing budget and employees’ wages so that you can build a roster that will fit inside your budget.
3. Previous Data for Roster Decisions
A cost-effective rostering method uses POS and timesheet data to take the guesswork 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 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’s a great idea to work out a template with the various grades required to complete each task effectively and fill in the gaps with other employees to create the cheapest roster and work from there.
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 complicated and time-consuming if all the proper measures are in place. If you want to discuss some available rostering software options, please get in touch with us to arrange a meeting or book online here.
