Employee rosters: 5 crucial components to consider when developing your rosters

In businesses across industries that rely on shift work, specifically cleaning services, there is one critical element that enhances operation efficiency, and that is employee rostering. When developed correctly, these rosters can improve customer experience, reduce absenteeism, maximise efficiency, and save on costs thereby improving your overall profitability.

Below we unpack employee rosters and the critical components you need to consider when implementing your scheduling solution.

What is an employee roster? 

Simply put, an employee roster is a schedule that highlights the running operations of your business, contracts, projects etc. This roster will let your employees know vital information related to the location of the job, their hours, responsibilities, time period and more. This ensures that you have the correct number of employees at the right location, performing the right job within the correct time frame. This roster management process is also often referred to as workforce scheduling or schedule management. 

Why is this process so essential to businesses, especially to those in the cleaning services industry? 

Employee rosters, as mentioned above, are critical to operational efficiency and, if not managed correctly, can significantly impact your business in a big way. What would happen if your employee rostering was not efficient? This would see your staff fail to turn up to their shifts, arrive at the wrong locations, come to work at the wrong hours and more. As you can imagine, this would affect productivity and negatively impact customer experience and the service you are providing to your customer base. This ultimately affects overall business profitability, success, and growth. When this system is managed effectively and efficiently, your business can benefit significantly in the following ways: 

• Reductions in absenteeism and unpunctuality: effective employee rostering provides workers with their requested shifts well in advance and will ensure they arrive on time. This reduces absenteeism and ensures your employees know when and where they are working, and the hours they have to work. 
• Cost savings:  The visibility that employee rostering provides ensures you can manage profits across different projects and reduce under or overstaffing, which will save on costs. 
• Maximise client satisfaction: by implementing an efficient employee rostering process, you can ensure that your clients’ needs are met in terms of their cleaning services required within the times, budget, and locations specified. Since client experience and satisfaction directly impact profitability and referrals, it is essential to continue to provide a good service that will keep your customers happy.    

The benefits of employee rostering are clear, but how do you manage this process within your business? The key is to utilise a workforce management solution to enhance the productivity and efficiency associated with employee rostering. Below, we look at the 5 crucial components to consider when choosing this type of software solution. 

5 Crucial components to consider when developing effective employee rosters? 

There is no doubt that staff rosters are essential to your business success and add value, but not all rostering software and scheduling solutions are the same. We highlight 5 crucial components to look out for when choosing an employee rostering solution for your cleaning services business. 

1. Scheduling and rostering functionality – the solution chosen should enable you to efficiently and quickly schedule and roster your employees against the cleaning contracts, workflows, availability, and employee skill sets. You should be able to do this both manually and automatically to enhance flexibility and facilitate any necessary shift swaps. 
2. Easy integration – the solution you choose should be easily integrated into the other systems that you utilise, like payroll systems, benefits administration, reporting capabilities etc. This enhances onboarding and enables you to consolidate all information from one single location and perform more tasks quicker, making the human resource management process and payroll integration process that much easier. 
3. Track employee time and attendance by location – it is essential to track the amount of time your employees are taking to complete a job at any given location. This provides valuable insight into task management and productivity which can highlight any issues or problems that could be affecting your bottom line. 
4. Automated reporting – Analytics, metrics and reporting are essential to understanding what is working and what areas need improvement. Your employee rostering solution should have this capability and provide you with relevant insights that you can use to make informed business decisions regarding workforce planning, talent management, and profitability. 
5. Demand forecasting – the employee rostering tool that you choose should allow for demand forecasting. This enables you to look at historical data and make predictions for future trends and demands that could impact your business. This ensures that you can plan and meet customer demand accurately and effectively manage recruiting in relation to demand, allowing you to meet your customers’ needs.

One solution that makes all of the above possible and has made employee rostering that much easier is Adapt IT’s EasyRoster. We showcase this solution in more detail below.

What makes EasyRoster the employee roster software of choice?

The EasyRoster technology has been developed with the cleaning services industry in mind and is based on over 25 years of industry experience. This workforce management technology focuses on assisting you in maximising your labour efficiency and the employee rostering process. The secret to the effectiveness of this solution lies in the features and modules this innovative platform provides. These include:

• Contract management – details regarding each site or location are captured and maintained in EasyRoster. When roster and attendance hours or shifts are registered for a site, they are compared to the requirements of the contract or site – providing you with a bird’s eye view of all jobs and operational requirements, allowing you to roster your shifts and employees efficiently. 
• Personnel management – details regarding each employee are captured, managed and maintained in EasyRoster. This allows you to choose and assess the right employees for the project, site, or job. 
• Staff scheduling per location – scheduling (rostering) of personnel shifts is done per location and may be done manually or automatically. This allows you to ensure that the right employees are at the right locations, enables you to track and get overtime alerts, monitors non-productive time, and provides sales data that you can use to determine the profit per site. 
• Time and attendance per work location – the capturing of actual attendance details is done per location and may be done manually or automatically. This allows you to pull reports and make the necessary adjustments to attendance, including the tracking of breaks, clock times etc., to ensure that sites are correctly covered and that wage costs are kept to a minimum.
• Minimise wage costs – through the data reporting functionality, you can highlight incorrect rostering and attendance regarding the number and grades of personnel rostered or posted at a site, projected and actual wage costs, overtime, non-productive time, site profitability etc. This enables you to keep day-to-day real-time control of operations to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum and personnel requirements are precisely met.

Conclusion 

For businesses relying on staff shifts, and managing several different employees across locations, getting employee rostering right is critical to business success. This is why it is so important to find a rostering business tool or scheduling software that suits the specific needs of the businesses within this industry. The EasyRoster solution ticks all these boxes and can be used to help you maximise efficiency, reduce labour costs and improve customer experience. For more on how EasyRoster can impact your rostering process, book a demo today.