How workforce scheduling could benefit your business in FY2025

Having the right people working on the right things at the right times will help your enterprise boost productivity and profitability.

Having far too many of ‘those’ weeks – the ones where Monday morning kicks off with half your team ringing in sick and the other half texting to say they’re stuck in traffic? In between responding to their calls and messages, you’re stuck fielding a ton of calls from customers, all of them sweating on orders that are yet to arrive, or complaining about the ones that have?

If the answer is yes, then it’s likely you’re thinking that there has to be an easier way. The good news is, there is, and it’s called workforce scheduling.

The term refers to the process of monitoring your resourcing requirements and assigning employees to various tasks or shifts, to best meet the needs of the business. It encompasses everything from determining the set hours of work through to assigning shifts and checking roles are adequately staffed.

Clocking the benefits

So, why is workforce scheduling so important and what benefits can it deliver for organisations like yours?

Improved productivity, for starters. That’s because more effective scheduling will help you to get your resourcing right. You’ll be able to roster more people on during periods of peak activity or demand and dial down the headcount during troughs. That means less idle time for workers across the week and less scrambling around for staff who can come on shift at short notice when things go unexpectedly nuts.

Service quality and customer satisfaction are likely to improve as a result, particularly if your enterprise operates in an industry like retail or hospitality where short staffing can be all too evident to customers.

Proper scheduling is also a highly effective way to control labour costs. By analysing historical data, your human resources team will be able to predict your organisation’s staffing requirements more accurately on a weekly, daily, and even hourly basis. Amending your rosters accordingly can help you avoid overstaffing and minimise overtime. That’s a great way to keep a lid on payroll, which is, for many Australian businesses, the largest of their outgoings.

But better scheduling isn’t only good for your organisation’s staffing, service levels and bottom line. It can be good for your team too. Inconsistent and unfair rostering is an enormous bugbear for contingent workers and for employees who don’t have agreed patterns of work. Ensuring shifts are allocated equitably allows everyone to enjoy certainty of income and improved work life balance.

Meanwhile, the complexity of Australia’s industrial relations legislation makes it all too easy to contravene workplace laws governing working hours, overtime and breaks. Get it wrong on a regular basis and you may find yourself liable for civil penalties, and pay-outs to affected employees. Smarter scheduling will help you mitigate this risk and sidestep the stress and expense that come standard when a business is subject to a compliance process.  

Tools to make the task easy

Optimised workforce scheduling can be tricky to achieve in the absence of the right tools – namely operations and enablement technology that allows you to organise and empower a workforce of permanent and casual staff.

Deploying an operations enablement and workforce platform will make it possible for you to analyse your operations at a granular level.

You’ll be able to conduct in-depth data analysis, monitor your activity levels across the working week and extract insights that can help you get staffing and rostering right.

Choose a platform with self service capabilities and your employees will be able to take some of the hard work and hassle out of rostering for you, courtesy of the fact they’ll be able to swap shifts with suitably qualified co-workers and put themselves forward for unfilled slots.

It’s foundation technology that will enable your human resources and leadership teams to optimise labour usage and costs across the enterprise and, in doing so, drive profitability and growth.

Setting your business up for success in FY2025 and beyond

A motivated, well organised workforce is your biggest asset and, in its absence, productivity and profitability may prove elusive, particularly in today’s challenging economic times. That’s why optimising the way you organise and utilise your team is good for business and your employees alike. If you’ve yet to explore how workforce scheduling technology could help you enhance your operations, there’s no time like the present.