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Shift Bidding

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.

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