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Vacation 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.

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.