Shift planning can be a big source of frustration for supervisors working in front-end majority companies. For businesses that operate around the clock, ensuring that they have round-the-clock coverage might be difficult to achieve.

The good news is that a proper shift planning evaluation can assist your firm in overcoming typical resource management difficulties and staying out of the quagmire of high labor expenditures.

What is Shift Planning?

Shift planning and management is the process of developing a focused schedule that clearly defines who is responsible for each shift at work.

In addition to shift overlap, shift change timings and alignment with the clock, vacation, training, shift requirements, and holidays are all taken into consideration when creating a shift schedule.

7 Tips for Effective Shift Planning

Despite the fact that shift planning is not the most interesting task in the world, it is an extremely necessary one. The good news is that there are a number of shift planning tips and best practices that can assist managers in streamlining the procedure. Let’s take a look at some of them.

#1: Have a template to work from

The first rule of shift planning is to develop a template and keep to it every week, regardless of whether you are using a spreadsheet, a shift schedule program, or a word document. The use of a shift planning template will considerably minimize the amount of time shift managers must spend each week generating the schedule for their team members.

#2: Know everyone’s availability in advance

You will need to know the availability of everyone on your team before you can start putting together the proper scheduling. This information can be gathered during the onboarding process for new employees. Having a better understanding of when your staff is available to work will allow you to reach decisions more quickly and make fewer changes to the shift schedule once it has been posted.

#3: Plan shifts a minimum of two weeks in advance

A number of studies have found that providing your staff with their future shift schedules at least two weeks in advance can significantly minimize the number of days off that they take.

Working with well-planned shift schedules in the workplace can also help employees achieve a better work/life balance because they can better organize other responsibilities around their job schedules rather than rushing to get cover at the last moment.

#4: Do not rely on on-call scheduling

The term "on call scheduling" refers to the requirement for scheduled workers to call in before their shift begins to ensure that they are still required. This approach is widespread in businesses such as food service and commerce, where the number of staff required on a given shift is determined by the number of clients present in the establishment to be served by the employees.

#5: Make shift communication simple 

It is critical to develop a clear, simplified approach for communicating shift schedules to your staff in order to reduce confusion and irritation throughout the shift planning process. Shift scheduling software is used by a large number of companies.

#6: Share gaps as soon as they become available

Identifying a gap in performance caused by annual leave only addresses a portion of the problem. In order to plan the ideal shift, you must first fill the void with the appropriate type of staff.

Here's where everything we have talked about so far comes together to form a seamless working process: you know how many employees are required on the rotation and what skills they must possess; you have created shift patterns based on this knowledge and inputted them weeks or months in advance; you can see where 'usual' staff availability falls short of requirements due to people being on vacation, and you can identify available shift opportunities quickly and accurately.

Some workforce management solutions provide built-in messaging tools that allow you to send an email to a group of employees informing them of open shift opportunities. This makes recruiting additional employees even easier. This allows them to respond quickly and efficiently, and when gaps are filled, the information about who has been added to the rotation is transferred instantly to your main schedule.

#7: Consider your employees

Consult with your staff. Their advice is invaluable because they have access to information that even the most comprehensive statistics cannot reveal on their own, such as the challenges of a 9/80 work schedule.

They are well aware of which moves they dislike and why. The fact that they can detect an issue in a shift, regardless of how it is defined during the day (or night) or how well you have staffed it, is a valuable asset. You may believe you have the proper numbers based on statistics, but it is possible that you are under or overstaffing the department and have not realized it yet.

Keep in mind that the purpose of shift planning is not only to properly satisfy client demand, but also to prevent employee turnover and boost overall productivity. Discover what makes people happy, and you will have a better notion of how to structure your shifts.

What are the benefits of shift planning?

It enables you to control workforce labor costs

When shifts are not properly planned, they might result in two costly mistakes: staff shortages and overstaffing.

Customers will be dissatisfied if you do not have enough employees on a given shift, which can result in increased overtime costs. Both of these have an impact on your bottom line. When you manage your labor expenditures you begin to understand the benefits of having a well-planned timetable on your side.

On the other hand, filling a shift with too many employees means that you are paying for the labor that you do not require.

While it is easy to observe how under or overstaffing results in apparent problems, it is also possible that it contributes to employee turnover or overall dissatisfaction as well. Internal problems arise when staff are overworked or when there are too many people on a shift, causing some to be relieved of their responsibilities.

Increased efficiency

Increased staff efficiency is one of the most significant advantages of shift planning.

Having a sufficient number of employees with the appropriate abilities to meet consumer demand indicates that you have a productive workforce. However, there is more to it than just that.

More productivity is achieved by employees who wish to work the shifts that have been given to them.  They have the impression that they are in command of their lives and that you have taken into consideration their preferences for which shifts to work. When it comes to their work, they have a strong sense of ownership and responsibility, and they believe that their opinions matter.

The polar opposite of this is just assigning employees to shifts without any consideration for their preferences, abilities, work-life balance, or any other issues.

Better flexibility

With the correct shift planning tools, you can give your company more flexibility and make it more profitable. And that level of adaptability is essential in these increasingly volatile and unpredictable times.

As you will see, depending on how you choose to design your shifts, you may be able to make swift adjustments to your schedule in response to varying customer demands.

It is possible to transform your attitude toward shift planning from a complex, worrisome component of your organization to a solid, dependable foundation for success with a well-organized approach and the appropriate supporting software.

2020-2021 State of Shift Work Report

I found this very interesting infographic about the current state of shift work put together by Deputy. The #1 perk of shift work was reported to be the flexibility!