Cutting confusion, delays in deploying employees

Attracting and retaining quality employees has been a challenge in the service industry for years. Seasonality, a tight labor market and ongoing COVID precautions make efficient scheduling and deployment of employees even more critical to the bottom line. If you’re still relying on spreadsheets or handwritten charts to schedule employees, now may be a goodtime to consider automating this part of your business.

Managers spend about 3.14 hours per week—about 20% of their workweek—creating employee schedules, according to Clockify. Manual scheduling increases the likelihood of errors, including double-booking an employee or inadvertently putting an employee into overtime. A manually created schedule can also make it difficult to redeploy employees if someone calls in sick, quits or has to be terminated. Most companies today run lean, staffing only the employees they need with little backup for unexpected absences. Confusion over who will cover for an employee or how jobs will be rescheduled can cause additional loss of time.

For outdoor service companies, like landscaping, irrigation, roofing and siding or exterior painting—weather plays a critical role in getting work done. Getting hit by a labor shortage during good weather can put projects behind schedule.

Good scheduling software makes planning easier for managers and employees. Look for easy-to-use features and navigation for all stakeholders. Can employees track their paid time off or vacation hours and schedule them through the system? Can managers rearrange team members to address absences and easily communicate those changes to the team? Intuitive tools, like rearranging workers using a drag-and-drop calendar, can make adoption by your team easier and faster.

Reporting tools within scheduling software can also make owners and managers more efficient. Today’s workers want better balance between their jobs and personal lives. Reports can identify employees who may be consistently working extra hours, costing the company overtime and setting the stage for burnout. These tools can also identify those whose absences have created problems with other employees or customers. Scheduling software that integrates with sales and revenue data—like the highest transaction times for your business—can help managers adjust schedules to cover busy times, while not overstaffing low-traffic hours.

For employees who work outside the office, perhaps visiting multiple customers or job sites a day, some scheduling software includes routing. Using customer or work-order location data, the software can use GPS to map the most efficient route for a single employee or a work crew. Integration between scheduling software and other tools—such as customer relationship management (CRM) data, work orders, or delivery locations—can help ensure employees minimize driving time.

As with any software selection, knowing what you’re looking for can make the process easier. Start by looking at pain points—where are employee scheduling problems costing you time or money? Next look at where scheduling software could make your company better—such as improving customer satisfaction or reducing customer wait times.

Be sure everyone who will use the software gets to test-drive it before purchase. Are the user interfaces intuitive for managers and employees? Do notifications, such as text messages to customers about employee arrival times, work as described?

Integrations can be tricky, so make sure you have a clear understanding from the vendor on how they will assist your company in connecting their software to the other systems you use. You may want to consider a comprehensive system, rather than one that does only scheduling, even if you start with just scheduling and add other modules later. Many vendors have tiered offerings that let you start simple and get familiar with the system before paying more for additional features.

EServ’s HR Helper function includes time off tracking and requests by employees, time clocks with geofencing for field jobs, and an easy drag-and-drop interface for creating and rearranging work teams. Our small business operations software for the service industry integrates these and other employee-related tasks with our customer request system, estimating and sales process, parts inventory and vehicle maintenance tracker to give small business owners a comprehensive operating software.

If you’re interested in being part of the EServ Evolution, please complete our contact form and a member of our team will be in touch.

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