Welcome back to IndeavorTalks. This is episode two of our series on employee flexibility. Today, we’re going to talk about the first category of employee flexibility, transparency, and accountability. and accessibility. If you missed episode one, which introduced the concept of employee flexibility and labor scheduling, discussed why it’s important in our current workplace environment, established four categories of employee flexibility, and examined how technology can help us find the sweet spot in the spectrum of flexibility for your company, don’t forget to go back and watch that episode after this one.
Okay, let’s talk about transparency and accessibility. The first step towards employee flexibility is meeting your employees where they are with easy-to-use technology. Most of your employees are perfectly comfortable using a smartphone for many daily tasks. Workforce management is no different. As long as you also have means for interacting with the scheduling system at your facility through a kiosk, those people who insist on having phones that still flip open or plug into the wall, have the access they need. Almost all of your employees, though, prefer the convenience of interacting with their schedules on their phones.
Therefore, an easy-to-use app is key, as it lets employees see their schedules in real time and react to any changes that may come up as your labor needs change. Other important mobile functions to consider when improving flexibility include the following, the ability to request time off while at home with your family. This facilitates planning life outside of work when it’s convenient. Instead of needing to remember to stop by the HR office the next day, fill out a paper form that might get lost or somebody might play games with by postdating their own request and slipping in under your earlier request in the HR inbox.
That request could and should have been submitted electronically the night before and time stamped so it’s auditable and nobody can play those games. Volunteering for overtime or canceling assignments at the employee’s convenience. Again, this can be done while with friends and family, planning their lives outside of work. The easier it is for employees to tell you when they want to work, the more likely they’re going to be to volunteer, which will make it easier to fill your labor standards, providing the schedules with the schedulers with the flexibility they need and not having to rely on forced overtime.
Relaying preferences for what shifts employees want to work, what days they want to work, and what jobs they’d like to do can be a very powerful way for employees to get a sense of control over their work lives. Work is where they spend more of their waking hours than anywhere else. Employees want to be able to interact with these preferences and update them as their needs change. Without an electronic system to capture these preferences and their changes, it can be difficult for schedulers and supervisors to incorporate those preferences into the process, and really difficult to manage the changes to those preferences.
Four, finally, employees swap shifts or find their own coverage when needed on short notice. This can give employees a lot of control over their schedules, and if done right by an automated scheduling system with an easy-to-use mobile app, it can ensure that this happens without creating additional overtime or creating compliance issues with employee skill misalignment or fatigue rules, while eliminating the administrative burden on schedulers and supervisors to manage the process.
That takes me to the barriers that have traditionally been put up, preventing the inclusion of these common-sense ideas from being part of many facilities, and scheduling processes. One of the key barriers many facilities face when giving employees this kind of input in the scheduling process comes down to having too many irons in the fire when creating schedules and filling labor demand gaps with an automated scheduling system helping to gather this data from employees directly.
It eliminates one of the main reasons that scheduling processes historically may not consider employee preferences or swap requests. The administrative burden, imagine for a moment, that you’re a scheduler at a manufacturing facility and you have variable labor demands. Your workforce has a varied set of skills and you deal with complex scheduling rules established before you, or anyone you know, was working there for reasons couldn’t even guess at.
One of the biggest incentives you have in work is avoiding being yelled at by the employees on one end or supervisors on the other. If there’s any kind of issue with the schedule, schedulers tend to get put in the middle of a rock and a hard place, and it could be super stressful. You already have a complex web of issues to consider.
Building a schedule, adding that burden of collecting employee preferences, making last-minute changes to employee availability, or managing a swap request for tomorrow when you’re working late and doing everything you can just to get next week’s schedule posted on time. Becomes nearly impossible for any human to manage by having a slick and easy-to-use tool to gather employee information and a system to automatically consider many of your possible concerns. You as our imagined scheduler can focus on the strategic elements of creating a schedule that needs your discretion.
Or if supervisors are creating schedules instead of a dedicated scheduler, it allows them to focus on keeping production running and generating revenue while the system handles that added burden while still giving employees an unprecedented level of control over their work lives. The added visibility for employees into the schedule and the knowledge that is being done fairly gives employees the peace of mind that scheduling is now a two-way street.
And while they know they might not get everything they want, they also know that all that can be done to allow them work-life balance and the flexibility to manage their work around their lives instead of the other way around is being done.
In the next episode of IndeavorTalks series on employee flexibility, we discuss scheduling preferences that we talked about earlier in much more detail on how they can be used to create a schedule without the additional administrative burden. Thank you, and I look forward to talking to you soon.
