Blog - Work. Life. Balanced.
Nov 18
2

How and Why to Encourage Your Employees to Take Vacations

By | Uncategorized | No Comments

 

Credit PxFuel

Well-rested employees are more productive. By allowing more time to be spent with family, significant others, and close friends, vacations can help decrease stress, prevent burnout, and improve work-life balance. A recent research by EY found out that for every 40 hours of free time, an employee’s stay at the company increased by eight months.

However, most employees do not take enough vacations and do not use their paid vacation time. Leaving vacation time on the table is taking its toll on employees. A recent study by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that 745,000 people died in 2016 from heart disease and stroke due to long hours.

Take, for example, what happens when an employee accumulates years’ worth of unused vacation days. These get recorded as liabilities on the company’s balance sheet, and the corporate entity must be prepared to compensate the employee if they leave or retire. Unused vacations have cost U.S. businesses $224 billion a year, making them a financial liability for employers.

At the same time, no one profits from an ambiguous time-off policy — or a workplace culture that encourages workaholism. A person who takes a vacation now and then, on the other hand, is invigorated and more focused for an overall increase in productivity.

The urgency of “use it or lose it” vacation leave days explains why employees use the vacation days that they currently have — the policy offers no opportunity for uncertainty. On the other hand, employees tend to lean on the side of rarely taking vacation time when policies provide room for ambiguity, such as when vacation days are unrestricted and untracked.

The leaders of a company must ultimately set the tone for the company’s vacation policy. This policy includes ensuring that everyone takes their allowed vacation time and cultivating a culture that encourages them to use their vacation days.

This article will explore how Vacation Bidding process aids in distributing vacation time fairly and transparently which encourages employees to use their time offs. This becomes even bigger problem where employers need to adhere to union rules or other compliance bodies while optimizing employees experience and well-being.

How Vacation Bidding Helps

Vacation bidding process allows employees to choose and plan their preferred vacations quickly and easily. Employers can set the number of people who can take vacations during any given day of the year based on the seasonality and business needs. Employees can observe how other employees intend on taking their vacations making it easy to ensure too many employees are not taking the same time off. It also gives a fair and transparent way for employees to request the vacation time they desire.

Essentially, in a Vacation Bidding, all employees can request specific time periods off based on preference criteria. The preference criteria include specifics such as simply requesting a week off, requesting one of several weeks off, or requesting multiple weeks off in a row or a day off or multiple days off. Once each employee puts in their preferences for vacation time, the company can determine how they want to award requests based on a variety of criteria. They can prioritize employees based on position, seniority, length of employment, performance, reward points or other criteria established by the organization. Employees can bid for as many preferred vacation days/weeks as they want during the vacation bid process.

From here, the company allots a specific number of employees that can take vacation time on any given day/week. Of course, the number of employees can be adjusted for peak vacation times.

This process can be repeated on a chosen frequency by the company if they have the right tools to administer it. The frequency can be monthly, quarterly, annual or any other duration chosen by the company or the business unit.

How ShiftX Automates the Entire Vacation Bidding Process

Knowing what days or weeks are available to take vacation is one of the most difficult components of vacation bidding. Even more frustrating, when an employee’s rank order is low, the problem becomes exponential.

In this regard, ShiftX provides employees with a real-time view of their available vacation dates based on their accrued vacation and seniority ranking (as defined by the company), as well as bespoke union rules (where applicable)

Employees are free to submit as many requests as they want. Employees can also view all vacation weeks and days that the administrator has made available.

The user can define preferences for the vacation weeks they wish in the Preference Criteria Section. Preferences can get divided into three categories:

  1. “I want this day/week” – The most straightforward method for requesting a day/week.
  2. “I want one of these days/weeks” allows the user to choose one day/week from a set of  weeks.
  3. “I want consecutive days/weeks” – This allows the user to get days/weeks in a row.

Furthermore, the preferences can be reordered and reviewed in sequence until all available weeks have gotten awarded.

After the initial allocation, the company will have choice to open it up to employees to request changes to their vacations during specified periods of time. They can specify the number of Change Periods and when they can occur. Employees might amend their vacation arrangements after the initial bid during change periods. Transferred and new employees can also choose their vacations during this period.

During a change period, employees can choose from days/weeks that the administration has added to accommodate new employees and weeks that other employees have exchanged.

In the end, it is up to each company to decide how many days off an employee will receive. But, with the right tool at your disposal, vacation distribution can be quite a breeze. With ShiftX, collaborate with your colleagues to figure out how to improve the as-is processes and map out the to-be processes at your organization.

Oct 18
2

Improve Employee Retention with Flexible Work Schedules

By | Shift Bidding, Vacation Bidding | No Comments

Businesses worldwide are having issues with employee retention. Before the global pandemic and the subsequent shutdown, turnover rates were already at their highest. According to a U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics press release issued on March 17, 2020, in 2019, the national turnover rate was 27.9%. Yet, in 2021, the turnover rate is currently 57.3 %.

These numbers, accompanied by the general workplace climate across all industries, are disturbing and frightening for business owners and employees alike. Throughout the United States, businesses have closed their doors permanently or closed early due to being short-staffed.

Something needs to curb this trend, or businesses will have trouble finding and keeping employees until it is impossible to open.

Fortunately, there is a solution to improving employee retention and morale that is agreeable to business owners and employees: Flexible work schedules.

What are Flexible Work Schedules?

Flexible work schedules incorporate technology and time to curate a workweek that offers work-life balance for employees.

Sure, many industries need to have employees on-premise during all productive hours. However, the shutdown proved that businesses could function without employees chained to a desk for forty hours, or more, a week. This transition provoked on-premise employees to seek out work-from-home positions. To combat the benefits of work-from-home positions, you can offer your employees a flexible work schedule allowing employees to work based on their schedule while still remaining on-premise.

Benefits of Flexible Work Schedules

There are many benefits of flexible work schedules for employees and employers, encompassing a positive, engaging work-life balance.

For Employees

Employees want to work in an environment where they feel heard, respected and acknowledged. Offering flexible work schedules is a great way to accommodate these aspects, resulting in improved workplace morale and a lower turnover rate.

According to a recent EY press release, 54% of employees polled worldwide would consider leaving without flexibility in where and when they work.

Here are the benefits that support this new seemingly non-negotiable insistence on flexible work schedules:

  • Commute: Time spent traveling to a destination day in and day out only costs the employee money and time. Therefore, your business will become a more economical option if you can offer a better commuting schedule by enacting compressed work days, flexible daily hours, or telecommuting.
  • Improved Personal/Family Life: By offering flexible work schedules, your employees have improved family life. Not only do they get to enjoy time with their loved ones around their schedule, but they also have an opportunity to save on childcare costs, especially if telecommuting.
  • Opportunity to Work at Their Best: Everyone has that time of the day where they do their best work. Some people work better early in the morning, in the afternoon, or even late at night. By implementing flexible work schedules, you allow employees to work on the day that suits them best.
  • Employees Feel Appreciated: When your company has a policy of putting the needs of your employees first with flexible work schedules, employees feel appreciated. This appreciation goes a long way, making employees more likely to work harder and better for you since the company appreciates their time and talent.

For Employers

On the surface, flexible work schedules offer a lot of benefits for employees. Yet, when you look at the result of companies employing flexible work schedules, plenty of employer-specific benefits become clear:

  • Higher Morale: Creating a good working environment is essential for continual production and quality. The happier your employees are, the better they will perform for you. Flexible work schedules create higher morale because it helps employees feel like the business is taking care of their needs as a person, instead of just a number on a roster.
  • Better Attendance: When employees have flexible work schedules, they have the freedom to navigate anything life throws at them much easier than if they had a set, rigid schedule. Therefore, instead of taking off work to complete the chore, employees can go to that doctor’s appointment or get their oil changed in their flexible time and work when finished. In this situation, the employee gets everything done without stress while also attending to their workplace duties.
  • Loyalty: When an employee knows that the company they work for makes an effort to give them a good work-life balance, they are likely to be loyal to that company. This loyalty directly reflects employee retention and turnover rates. If employees are happy with their job and schedule, they will make more effort to stay instead of looking for the first opportunity or reason to jump ship.
  • Improved Customer Service: If you offer the best scheduling, your employees will be happier during their working hours. This happiness will spill over to customer service, inevitably negating why 58% of American shoppers switch brands: subpar service.
  • Employers Can Demand Better Talent: If you have a desirable job, you can demand higher talent. If you employ flexible work schedules, there is a high likelihood that you will have a more desirable applicant pool. Therefore, you can be more selective with who you hire without worrying about being short-staffed.

Start Your Flexible Work Schedules Today

Scheduling is never fun, especially when you try to compromise and adjust to each of your employees’ specific needs. Yet, this is what having flexible work schedules is all about. So, what do you do?

Enter ShiftX!

ShiftX is the all-in-one scheduling solution, which takes the headache out of the scheduling process. ShiftX offers features such as:

  • Live or Automatic Shift and Vacation Scheduling
  • A Simple Dashboard with Cross-Platform Synchronicity
  • Cloud-Managed Operations
  • API Integrations
  • A Completely Customizable System for Your Business

With ShiftX, you can be as involved in the scheduling process as you want to be, with the assurance that everything will continue smoother than ever while you invest your time in your more pressing duties.

In short, having a good employee-centric scheduling tool will help improve employees’ work-life balance and improve employee retention. The world is changing, and as long as your company evolves, your business will be better than ever with the right tools to guide you. Such an evolution will also interest talented employees that help you succeed in ways you never thought possible.

So, contact ShiftX today to learn more about how using ShiftX can benefit your business.

Dec 23
3

Holidays Done Right

By | Vacation Bidding | One Comment

Credit PxFuel

What do you do when everyone wants Christmas off?

Some businesses can have holidays off for all employees. Those lucky workers, typically white-collar, don’t have to be there to answer the phones or keep the business operating. Many businesses have to or choose to operate through the holidays. For some businesses, holidays are the busiest and most profitable days of the year.

In the US, employers are not required to give any holidays off, pay overtime for holidays, or have holidays off count towards overtime calculations. Only if your company has annual sales of more than 500K you are even required to pay overtime (+50% for hours over 40).

However, most companies provide some holiday time off as part of their benefits package to attract/retain employees. On average, US employees receive 7.6 paid holidays. 96% of US Businesses provide paid time off for New Years Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Also 57% of companies offer some form of holiday premium for holiday workers.

So what if the holidays are the busiest times for your business and you need more employees rather than fewer? Airlines face this problem in the transportation industry. There is a spike in travel on and around the holidays. Airlines deal with this problem in a unique way. First, they give employees vacation weeks for the number of holidays they typically have (typically ten days or two weeks). Next they have employees bid based on seniority for the weeks they will get off. The company sets the number of vacation weeks available for each week of the year in the bidding group, naturally reducing the weeks for the busiest times of the year. Employees bid on the weeks they want based on seniority.

Vacation bidding is where ShiftX comes in to automate the process. Administrators pick a group, allocate weeks, and configure the bid parameters. Employees can enter preferences and let the system select vacations based on their preferences in order of seniority or actively bid during their bidding window. There is complete transparency in real-time for the weeks allocated and weeks that are available.

ShiftX saves a lot of time for administrators and allows employees to bid from anywhere via their mobile devices. With ShiftX, you get fair and transparent vacation allocation for your entire company even when you can’t give everyone the holidays off.

Sep 05
0

How Shift Bidding is Better for Employees

By | Shift Bidding | No Comments

In this article, we will explore the challenges of shift-based work and what we can do to make it better for employees and businesses. Surprisingly, the majority of the US workforce is hourly. In the US, 58.3% of workers or 80.4 million people are hourly workers. If your organization requires 24-hour operations like police officers, firefighters, nurses, and transportation workers this can involve some pretty irregular shifts. Other businesses that are open for long hours like restaurants, grocery stores, etc. can also have odd schedules.

Of those hourly workers, 15 million Americans or 19% work irregular schedules. Employees are not working these irregular schedules by choice; the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that employees work alternate shifts 51% of the time because its that nature of the job and another 13% due to employer mandates. Working abnormal shifts for long periods can have many adverse effects.

  • Work Impacts
    • Degraded Performance
    • Higher Accident rates
    • Higher turnover rates (average tenure of restaurant staff is one mo and 26 days!!!)
  • Health Impacts
    • Sleep pattern disruption
    • Mental health issues
    • Increased Mortality Risk (11% greater for all causes of mortality)
  • Life Impacts
    • No regular family schedules
    • Inability to schedule things like classes to further careers

 

If working irregular shifts is bad for you, then why do so many 9 to 5 workers benefit from schedule flexibility so they can avoid traffic, handle special events, and just be there for their kids? I believe giving employees some choice so they can manage their lives more effectively makes all the difference.

How can managers give employees more choices? Managers already face many challenges:

  1. Predicting Staffing Needs
    • Understaffing – Can cause poor customer service, exploding overtime costs, and stressed-out employees.
    • Overstaffing – Wastes money and often disappoints employees that get sent home.
  2. Satisfying everyone’s schedule preferences
  3. Creating, distributing, and keeping schedules current
  4. Handling last-minute changes caused by absences or increased demand.
  5. Dealing with and reducing staff turnover

 

The old way of scheduling, by having a manager create a weekly schedule manually makes it difficult to overcome these problems. What do employees want from their schedules:

  1. Choice and flexibility to express what they want and choose the best options for them.
  2. Fairness and transparency so employees understand shifts available to them and why.
  3. Predictable schedules for longer periods (more than a week) with more advanced notice so employees can make plans around work.
  4. Employees don’t want back-to-back shifts, on-call scheduling, or too few hours to make a living.

 

Scheduling is fundamentally a dynamic situation that managers and employees need tools like ShiftX to schedule effectively. Instead of managers trying to pick schedules for employees:

  1. Publish a Bid: Managers create a bid by entering needed shifts or importing shift predictions based on past data.
  2. Select Preferences: Employees select their top shift preferences.
  3. Execute Bid: Employees bid on shifts based on a priority order that could be tenure based, performance-based, attendance-based, rotating, etc. Everyone clearly understands their priority and can see what more senior employees have selected to make their best choices. The bidding process gives employees choice, transparency, and fairness. Employees can choose to live bid or let the system bid for them based on their preferences.
  4. Distribute Schedules: Schedules are automatically distributed, and notifications help keep everyone on time.

 

When things happen, you need self-service, automated ways of handling them. Services like:

  • Shift Swap: Self-service shift swapping trusts employees to cover shifts in a controlled way. Managers can enforce rules for before shift blackout times, overtime, skill matching, and automatic approval.
  • Absence Requests: Self-service absence requests allow employees to report absences quickly, understand consequences, and managers to more quickly cover shifts.
  • Open Shift Optimization: When those open shifts happen, open shift optimization creates consistent, desirable shifts that reduce overtime needs.
  • Overtime Optimization: Employees can express interest in overtime, define their availability, and bid on overtime when it becomes available. Managers can easily post shifts and get them covered more quickly.
  • Check In/Out: Self-service check in and out allows managers to know when employees are at a location and on their shift.

 

The ShiftX platform has modules covering all of these services using cloud-native and mobile-native technologies.  Check ShiftX out at shiftx.ai.

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform

Dec 25
0

What the Gen-Z Workforce Wants

By | Uncategorized | No Comments

Credit Ben Taylor on Flickr

I have never been a big fan of articles that try to group people by age. It feels about as credible as horoscopes; however research sometimes provides us with important insights about each generation. Gen-Z describes people born after 1995 (roughly). As Business Insider states, “Generation Z is the youngest, most ethnically-diverse, and largest generation in American history, comprising 27% of the US population.” This means Gen-Z will dominate the workforce, and we need to understand how to work with and provide great tools for them.

Gen-Z is passionate about inclusion;  49% identify as non-white. Gen-Z has never known a time without the internet but did live through the pre-IPhone era (before 2007) and pre-social media era (before 2004). They are comfortable with digital technology but surprisingly prefer face-to-face interaction. Gen-Z doesn’t need to be “always reachable” as much as millennials. They use their smartphones more than any other device for 15.4 hours a day. Gen-Z responds more to videos (YouTube is their favorite app) and images (Accenture). Gen-Z doesn’t have an attention problem; they have a highly trained eight-second filter.  As digital natives with innumerable information streams coming at them, they had to develop a fine-tuned filter.

What does Gen-Z want from work? Their top three must-haves for a first job aren’t very surprising:

  • 70% Health insurance
  • 63% Competitive salaries
  • 61% A boss they respect and trusts them

Their career priorities also aren’t very surprising:

  • 89% Stable career path
  • 87% Competitive Salary and benefits
  • 84% Work-Life balance

However, their intolerance for certain work practices is very surprising. There are some things Gen Z won’t tolerate from employers:

  • 35% Being forced to work when they don’t want to
  • 34% Inability to use vacation days when they want to
  • 30% Back-to-back shifts

To summarize, Gen-Z wants work flexibility, prefer smartphones for digital interaction, demand quick interaction, have a keen sense of equality, and demand trust. ShiftX provides smartphone delivered, self-service, work flexibility tools that provide the transparency and trust Gen-Z requires to manage their schedules.

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform

Credit: ShiftX

Shift and vacation bidding allows employees to have more choice and transparency in their schedules.  Self-Service Shift Swapping and the ability to express Overtime availability give employees more trust and say in their schedules. Employees can clock in/out, request absences, and check in/out equipment all from their smartphones. To learn more about ShiftX visit https://shiftx.ai.

 

Sep 14
0

Scheduling Without Chaos!

By | Uncategorized | One Comment

Hi there, I’m Amanda. I am a Lead Quality Assurance Analyst and multiple hat wearer (depending on operational needs) at ShiftX. I’m a happy part of this cutting edge & fun startup, ShiftX, which is led by some of the smartest, and most talented innovative minds in the tech industry.

My career, interestingly, has come full circle. How so? Back in my early 20’s, I was hired to be an America West Airlines reservations call center sales agent. It was one of the most demanding jobs I’ve ever had (if you’ve ever worked on the phones, I’m sure you can relate). However, this experience set the direction of my career (who’d-a-thunk-it).

Through the difficulties and challenges this job presented, I am forever grateful for the experience. You might be wondering how this has any relevance to today. Well, a particular pain point regarding the scheduling process, that not just reservations agents experienced, but also customer service & gate agents and many others with rotating schedules or shifts, was that it was 100% MANUAL. It was a manual process for both the Admins creating/assigning the schedules, as well as the agents who bid on the schedules.

I recall this process being one of the most stressful occasions. Admins would type out hundreds of schedule lines with various shifts and days off, then print and staple thousands of these papers. Once we as agents got our hands on these pages filled with shifts, we’d study them and carefully make our selections. We would go around asking our peers (the folks that had higher seniority than ourselves) what their likely selection would be so that we can attempt to figure out what shifts would potentially be available to us. We would be assigned a bidding day and time, and we would go to a conference room where the admins would be sitting behind some tables with the schedules printed out in front of them. These schedules would be all marked up with the assignments of all the previous agents who bid before me. I’d go in, see what lines were available, and make a selection based on whatever shifts that were remaining. There were occasions when I was on a long call with a customer and would be late to make my shift bid selection. Oh, the agony! I knew that lower seniority agents were getting the opportunity to get the shifts for which I planned so carefully. It was a reality that I’m certain all agents have experienced at one point or another.

Fast forward a lot of years later; I am now part of a team that solves that very issue and more. ShiftX does the scheduling without any of the chaos. What does that mean? We are focused on the airline industry. Our goal is to make the scheduling process easy, save time and improve employee satisfaction. So that means taking the entirely manual process and automating it. Admins will no longer spend countless hours creating shifts and assigning them. Agents will no longer need to spend days studying several pages or tap on shoulders asking others what they will bid. The best part is not missing or being late to make your scheduled bid selection because of a long customer call. Agents now can prioritize their schedule bid line preferences ahead of time. So, if the agent is unable to make their live bidding window, no problem! The system auto-assigns in order of seniority and by the agent’s preferences. What a huge relief!

I’ve lived through the trials and pains of being an agent, which has ultimately brought me to a team solving the problems of past Amanda. I get to be part of the solution in removing those problems of old. When I reflect on my time as an airline agent, I feel so fortunate and grateful for the foundation and education that it has given me. At ShiftX, I contribute to solving the scheduling problem for my old co-workers and all airline employees. For me, this is truly an exciting time!