Staff Rotas: The Complete Guide

The success of your business can largely depend on your staff rota. But sometimes, planning, creating and implementing your rota can be challenging. Fortunately, scheduling staff can be magically simple with the help of an effective staff rota.

What is a staff rota?

A staff rota, also known as a roster or schedule, is an effective way to schedule staff who work on rotation or shifts. They typically include a list of your employees and crucial information for the shift, including location, responsibilities, and tasks.

Why is a rota important?

Rota’s are essential for shift-based businesses to help account for sudden changes to shifts, including holidays, sickness and last-minute leave requests. As a result, they help keep staff happy and ensure you and your business can handle any sudden changes.

What are the benefits of a rota for managers?

When you properly use rota’s for your business, it can benefit your managers in the following ways:

Quick to build

Building a staff rota is quick and magically simple when you have the right tools. Plus, the agile scheduling method makes it easy for industries such as retail and hospitality to adapt to unforeseen circumstances and ensure you always have enough staff on hand to get tasks done.

Uses data to make informed decisions

You likely have staff who are qualified for different positions and tasks. With staff rotas, the idea is to schedule based on tasks that need to be covered. This approach ensures that you always have enough people to cover essential duties.

In addition, you can build staff rotas to account for busy times using sales reporting. As a result, you can avoid being short-staffed when it’s busiest and overstaffed when it’s quiet.

Plan and share in advance

You can plan several weeks using sales data and the right tools to build your rota. Then, when you plan and communicate these updates with your staff, you avoid staff becoming resentful and disengaged. Instead, you can make them feel appreciated.

Image source: Sebastian Herrmann | Unsplash 

What are the benefits of a rota for employees?

While reliable rotas for great for managers, they can also benefit your employees. Here are a few benefits of a rota for employees:

Stable

Your workforce is stable when you properly plan your rota, meaning that none of your staff is overworked or under-used. Moreover, it ensures evenly distributing shifts between staff members despite staff availability.

Easily accessible

After you’ve finished building your staff rota, it should be easily accessible for staff from home or everywhere via a mobile roster app. When staff can see the rota in advance, they can keep track of shifts, swap shifts if necessary and update availability.

Empowering your staff with easy access to their shifts can prevent shortages and unplanned changes and ensure that tasks are always covered. An employee-friendly rota, such as RosterElf, gives staff total control of their work.

Easy to use

One of the best ways to ensure your rota benefits your employees is to make it easy to understand. For example, make sure that staff know when they need to swap shifts, they can only swap with someone who meets the same criteria as their shift.

Plus, choosing a rota tool that enables you to send SMS and email notifications about rota changes makes it easy for staff to adapt quickly and remain in the loop. Employees shouldn’t have to come to work to check their schedule or show up for a shift only to discover a change.

How do you build a fair rota?

Make sure employee information is in one place

To streamline your scheduling process, ensure that all employee information, including availability, certifications, and qualifications, is in one place. With workforce management software like RosterElf, you can apply different rules to each staff profile, including specific awards, to make scheduling quick and easy. Plus, staff have access to keep their availability up to date and apply for leave in advance.

Use rota templates

You shouldn’t have to look back through previous shifts to figure out the best way to schedule employees to build the rota every time you sit down. Instead, consider rota templates that help you replicate recurring shifts with the click of a button. For example, RosterElf’s rostering feature includes roster templates that allow you to save popular shifts and use them for future scheduling.

Empower your employees to stay connected

Building an effective rota ensures you have the most up-to-date staff availability. Then once you’ve published the roster, staff need to confirm that are no conflicts with their schedule outside of work. To help prevent miscommunication, you need to empower your employees with the tools to swap shifts and update their availability. RosterElf is an employee first rostering software that gives staff the tools to help managers make better scheduling decisions. They can also swap shifts with other qualified staff without disrupting the flow.

Build using your labour budget

Another critical component of building a fair rota is paying attention to your labour budget as your schedule staff. RosterElf’s budgeting tool empowers managers to build staff rotas using the labour budget. Then, as you schedule staff, you can see whether or not you’re below or above budget. You can make changes using slide bar technology until you hit budget or fall below. Plus, you can use this as a guide to ensure you share shifts across all staff.

Wrap Up

Making smart scheduling decisions can have a significant impact on the growth of your business. When you build an effective rota, you can help ensure that you cover all significant tasks, staff are happy, and you always have a backup when things don’t go to plan.

To learn more about RosterElf’s online rota software, sign up for a free 30-day trial today.