Gain efficiency and savings with best-in-class shift planning
When running a company where you need to ensure a certain service level, one of the things you cannot escape is work shift planning. It can be an undertaking that your managers fret every week, and your employees await with trepidation. But it doesn’t have to be.
I have first-hand experience in how to build a shift planning solution that enables your internal processes to run smoothly, saves time for managers and keeps your employees happy. For the last 20 years, my company has provided a technical shift management platform that has helped thousands and thousands of people have a smooth experience with work shifts.
A system is just a part of the process
First off, I’d like to highlight that shift planning is just one part of the workforce management process. A single solution at one stage of the process does not get you the best efficiency gains, but at the same time, all parts of the process are important for the overall success of a workforce management process.
The key is to properly plan the process, understand the dependencies between systems, understand what the process should do and how users will interact with different parts of it, and map how and where data should be collected.
Now, I’ll tell you what I have learned about shift planning
I like to think about shift planning from three intertwining perspectives: People, customers and numbers, now and in the future. Let’s take a look at these aspects.
1. People (your employees)
In my experience, three things are most important to people:
Reasonable work shifts (equally distributed between people)
Reliable payroll (employees get their pay on time)
Easy-to-use tools (hour markings, overtime accrual, shift ledgers etc.)
When it comes to people, there is always legislation and collective agreements (if you’re in Finland) that set the base for compliance. The shift planning system must include these aspects, but there are other important things to consider.
For the system to start creating value, it should support your managers in their task to plan the shifts. If the system is difficult to use or is lacking essential functions, people will find other ways to tackle the sometimes quite tiresome task. So, thinking about your users, how and when and why they use the system is essential.
The system should also allow for many different shift planning scenarios, for example, days off, sick leaves, parental leaves, full-time and part-time personnel, personal wishes and more. I believe that it’s key to make it possible to take your personnel’s wishes into account in shift planning, and if there are situations where it’s a bit unclear how the system should manage something outside of regular functionalities to resolve the issue in favour of your employees.
People who work with shift planning know that every week you get curveballs, and the plan needs to change. For example, if someone gets ill, the system should allow a manager to assign the hours fairly to all employees and help the manager to communicate about the changes. Or, per usual, you do not want people to work overtime, but during Christmas sales, you want more people to work a shift and then, in January, revert to normal. The system should support changes in volume.
2. Customers
Let’s look at the key aspects of the system from the customers’ perspective. Again, here are my three key considerations when it comes to customers:
Service reliability (you can keep your business open when promised)
Service experience (you have enough people in a shift and the right mix of people)
Price (be avoiding overtime pay, you can get better margins)
What’s most important, from the customer perspective, is that you can consistently offer the service level you have promised to your customers. For example, you want to optimise the number of cash registers so that the queue does not get too long, but at the same time, you don’t want your cashiers to sit empty-handed.
And when your employees are happy, then it’s more likely that your customers are happy as well. This helps your personnel to focus on things that are at the time important, such as having someone available to receive cargo or have more hands on deck during rush hours. In the end, it all adds up as business benefits.
3. Numbers (your business)
Obviously, you want the shift planning system to support your business and processes. Here we need to focus on the metrics, profitability and monitoring. My three takeaways:
Profitability (you want personnel costs to be in balance with revenue)
Efficiency (you want to have just enough people)
Monitoring (you want to be able to offer the right information to payroll, follow how different cost centres are accruing hours, and follow sick leaves, for example)
A shift planning solution is, by default, in a supporting role. If the system is hard to use, you cannot get the data you need, or the system is creating friction among your employees, it is not doing what it’s supposed to do.
As we have recently seen in Finland, a supporting system (in this case, payroll) can absolutely wreak havoc in your business and cause tremendous amounts of bad PR and, most importantly, can negatively affect the lives of hundreds or thousands of people.
And that brings me to my last point about numbers: predictability. A shift planning system should always aim to increase predictability in your business. It’s not just about who works next Wednesday but more about keeping the cost structure manageable and making sure you are making a profit and can keep all those employees you are planning the shifts for.
High level model for a 3x2 framework based shift management process
How to build a shift planning system that scales with your business
I built the first version of my shift planning solutions 20 years ago. A neighbourhood supermarket owner knew that I code and once asked me to program one - so I did. Since then, I have rewritten the system five times with new technology, but it’s always been easy to add and expand. Let’s take a look at what makes a shift planning system scale.
The first thing I’d think about is the lifecycle of the solution. You want it to scale as your business grows, you want to be able to integrate it into other solutions, and you want stability while you do so.
Taking some time to choose and validate the right technology and dependencies early on is key. Without a doubt, as time goes by, requirements will change, as will technologies and needs for integration. Therefore a clear internal architecture is needed to be able to adapt to changing demands such as changes in legislation (for example, collective agreement or data protection), reporting needs, data transfer protocols or payroll systems.
At the same time, I would like to highlight the risk of over-engineering at the beginning. You might accidentally end up with a system that covers all imaginable needs making it heavy, not scalable and unable to react to future needs. So, building a system with an architecture that is fluid and open to changes is my recommendation.
Shift planning and workforce management should always be about people first, business second and technology only as an enabler.