Managing employees is amongst the toughest aspects of running a business. It occupies a lot of time, keeps you stressed, and runs errands.
If you’ve ever been in a managerial position, you’d know what a pain it is to keep asking your team to collaborate, coordinate, and communicate. You’d know what it’s like to run after each one of them to get your business running smoothly. You’d know how challenging it is to design and implement a schedule.
Well, we’re here to ease the process for you. Here is a quick and comprehensive guide to help you figure out how to create an employee schedule that works for your team.
How to Create an Employee Schedule that works for your team?
Before you proceed to the step of creating a schedule, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the idea of workplace integration and centralization.
Today, we exist in a world wherein providing individual instructions to each teammate and maintaining a manual schedule is almost impossible. Instead, we have innovative technological solutions that make data available to the entire team in a synchronous manner.
Step 1: Know Your Team
Firstly, you need to know who’s in your team and what their performance is like. You need to know about their expertise and weaknesses beforehand so that you don’t design an unreal schedule.
Ensure that you know the answers to the following:
- Are they enrolled in a college/university?
- Do they have young kids or elderly parents to take care of?
- Do they have another job to meet their ends?
- Are they good at handling pressures?
- Are they good at time management?
- Do they need a push, or are self-disciplined?
Once you have the answers to these, ask yourself one question:
- How can you schedule their responsibilities so that both of you can handle work conveniently and smoothly?
Note that if you are at dead ends and no such possibility is in sight, you should part ways. Try negotiating and discussing it with them, but if you still have to strive for a possibility, there’s no point wasting your time and theirs.
Step 2: Plan How to Deal with Excuses Beforehand
Not every team is all-productive and constructive. You may have members who work exceptionally but often bail out at the eleventh hour. Certainly, you do not want yourself facing the consequences.
Hence, it’s best to consider and draw an effective scheme to handle excuses or misconduct.
These can be:
- Joining in late
- Leaving early
- Repetitive requests of rescheduling
- Frequently failing to show up
Determine how you can handle these excuses effectively. You can either discuss it out with them on a one-to-one basis or create new policies that make them deal with the consequences too.
If you don’t do so, your schedule will turn out to be a mess no matter how organized and systematic you get with it.
Step 3: Choose a Scheduling System
As mentioned earlier, technology has brought us several innovative solutions that make our lives 10x easier.
In the present day, several online tools and apps can help you design a work schedule for your team super conveniently.
Once you have the required data from the above two steps, you can begin drafting your schedule on the following:
Excel Sheet
Excel Sheets or Google Sheets is free of cost and easy to access. There are several prepared templates available online that can help you outline your sheet schedule conveniently.
However, this is more of a manual approach. The limitation with sheets is that it doesn’t let you track the time of your employees. Plus, the feel is a bit old-school too.
Work Scheduling Apps
Work Scheduling Apps refer to software that lets you schedule tasks and assignments for your team online. TrackTime24 is an excellent example of that. It allows you to plan detailed work schedules for the whole of your team while keeping it all organized.
As we can see with TrackTime24, employees work more efficiently. They let you plan in a more modish virtual environment, provide timely reminders and notifications, and also come with added features like notes and markers. They are more human and intuitive.
Final Words
Just as we demonstrated above, your errands can be cut down to only three steps should you decide to approach the task smartly. We hope you make the best of it. Remember, that once the schedule is up and shared, you can’t leave it all on your employees. Monitor them strictly, at least for the first month!