7 Scheduling Myths Business Owners Need To Know

Staff Scheduling... seems like a simple task right? Think again! All businesses with 10 or 100 employees can understand the complication of creating an employee schedule. Yes, your business is growing, which means more employees; which equals to more administrative work; which results in less time interacting with your employees and customers.

So we've put together a list (for those who are new to the industry, or for those who are looking to improving their methods) of 7 common misconceptions about scheduling.

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1 - Pen and paper, or excel sheets work just fine.

Unless you have two pairs of eyes and a 360 rotating head, referencing a separate document for employee availability can be confusing. Especially if you’re still doing schedules on paper! Different staff have different availabilities, and relying on a stagnant sheet of paper, or a non-intuitive excel sheet, can make it difficult to schedule. Especially if you're trying to make minimal changes once is has been released.

Which leads to our next example...

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2 - The availability list will never be lost.

It’s the classic case of jinxing yourself! As much as you would like to keep all your important papers in a neat pile, things can get easily get lost. Even then, availability changes, time off requests, and  coffee stains are guaranteed to make an appearance.

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3 - It's easy to get staff to cover and take other shifts.

Staff may not get it, but business owners do. Paying overtime can get costly, and availability of staff can be iron clad. Accepting shift swaps needs to be strategic; if a new hire is the only person who can cover an experienced servers shift, accepting a swap like that is a recipe for dining room trouble!

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4 - Verbal or SMS time off requests won't be forgotten.

You know that excuse children gave their teachers about their dog eating their homework? Let’s assume they weren’t lying. The same goes for managers when they forget to approve a requested day off. It happens, verbal reminders get lost in the bustle of the business, and written reminders can get lost.

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5 - The staff won’t mind if the schedule comes out a little late.

But on the contrary - last minute schedules equals to last minute schedule changes. In an industry that's powered by millenials that value a work life balance, things are guaranteed to come up.  If your schedule is inflexible, workplace happiness is compromised and it can aid to the rampant issue of employee turnover. In short, putting out a schedule without a cushion for changes can be troublesome; especially individual circumstances are unpredictable.

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6 - Calculating labor hours isn't worth the time.

Going with your gut will usually get you out of sticky situations, but in this case, taking a chance can be costly. Without the ability, or time, to compile calculations on labor hours or to review labor vs sales percentages, making scheduling mistakes can be costly.

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7 - Pen and paper schedules are the best way to schedule employees.

Maybe you tolerate using pen and paper, or maybe its something that you've grown accustomed too. But you shouldn’t have to remain using it. Change can be scary but change can bring improvement.

With an intuitive scheduling app, scheduling can be made faster. Rather than blatantly sell you our awesome and easy to use online workforce system, we’ll just try and show you the value of it!
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If scheduling software is something you are looking into, we highly recommend three features. One being ease of use (it shouldn't make your life harder), second being smart scheduling (meaning it should show labor costs, and employee shift requests on the same screen) and thirdly being software that's made for you and the restaurant industry.

Okay, maybe the list started to become a tad (ton) more biased on our end, but Push is all about efficiency. In a nutshell, our robust system is tailored to your business needs; scheduling is made easy, payroll is a breeze, and we offer real time labor and sale reports. Running a business is hard enough, let us make managing it a breeze with our streamlined workforce system!

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