Shift Swaps Made Simple
Is seeing a messy roster riddled with cross-outs and liquid paper corrections taped to the wall an all-too-familiar sight at your business? You spend valuable time each week carefully crafting the perfect roster to suit all your staff and workload needs, only to have schedule conflicts arise almost immediately. You scratch out, correct and erase employees' names and shifts accordingly, only to be left with a barely legible shell of what started as a pristine example of organisation. We can help!
As the days go on, staff need to swap their shift or take a day off, and you need to find someone to cover for them. This is tricky enough, but now you must also ensure other impacted staff are alerted to the change. The roster, barely surviving the first round of changes, is now only understood by you as no one can decipher the jumble of symbols and scribbles. So you print out a new one, and by this stage, you have wasted precious work time wrestling with the never-ending chaos that is your shift roster.
Try keeping it all digital and send rosters and revisions via email or Facebook. This solves the issue of illegible scraps of paper. However, the amount of time spent organising and updating the schedule and notifying staff is still a, albeit neater, time-consuming and ire-inducing activity.
Luckily, we live in an age where the development of new technology is travelling at a blazing pace, improving the productivity and lives of everyone – even those of us stuck with the unholy job of rostering staff. Such a mundane and thankless task is rostering; how can technology improve the lives and productivity of roster and schedule makers worldwide, you wonder? And the answer is simple, the cloud.
By now, you’ll be familiar with applications such as Dropbox, iCloud and Google Docs, which allow anyone with access and an internet connection to add, update, change and delete files from any device, anywhere in the world. This technology of accessing information stored on the internet is called cloud computing (or ‘the cloud’) and is the basis for the wonder, a cloud-based rostering system.
Cloud-based rostering software, such as RosterElf, is a one-stop-shop for creating, updating, managing and organising rosters. I know, so far, this doesn’t sound too different from your old system, but using cloud-based scheduling software has features that you would have never dreamed possible!
So what are these fantastic things cloud rostering can do to make your life easier?
1. It gives staff their own log on. Forget chasing them up about their availability and other details; a cloud system gets them to do it themselves. It even reminds them to keep it updated.
2. You can create a roster in a matter of clicks. Specify the date, positions required, and location (if you have multiple).
3. It notifies and reminds staff for you. No more emails, texts or Facebook messages about the roster and its sweeping changes; the cloud roster has it covered.
4. It takes care of the shift changes itself. Does someone want to swap a shift? They log in and submit a request, which does the rest; no scribbling and liquid papering are required. It even alerts everyone impacted.
5. It reports back to you. Just because you have all this newfound free time doesn’t mean you don’t want to know what’s happening.
6. It stores qualification and visa documents. No need to stress; it warns you when they’re about to expire.
7. It lets you make, view and change rosters on your smartphone, tablet or PC. Welcome to the 21st century, rosters.
8. Some are run by elves. Enough said.
It’s something you desperately need.
Visit rosterelf.com today.
