Efficient roster management is essential for any business with a workforce. However, manually managing employee schedules can be tedious and prone to mistakes. While spreadsheets may appear to be a convenient solution, they may not suffice as your business expands and your staffing needs become more complex.
Thankfully, there is a remedy available – AlphaBiz Solutions’ MYOB Advanced . With MYOB Advanced Workforce Management, you can streamline your rostering processes and tackle the challenges associated with managing rosters using spreadsheets. This blog post will delve into how MYOB Advanced Workforce Management can assist in resolving these challenges.
The Importance of Efficient Roster Management
Managing rosters effectively is crucial for any business with a workforce. Efficient roster management can ensure that the right number of staff with the necessary skills are scheduled to work at the right time, leading to increased productivity and reduced labour costs. Here are some reasons why it’s important to manage rosters properly:
Cost Savings
Effective roster management can help you save money by ensuring that your staffing levels are optimised, reducing labour costs. Comparing actual hours with rostered hours helps determine whether excessive overtime charges and potential staff physical and psychological stress are two of the many benefits utilising roster management within your workplace.
Improved Productivity
Proper roster management can improve productivity by ensuring that you have the right number of staff with the necessary skills scheduled to work at the right time. This can reduce the risk of understaffing, which can lead to reduced productivity, and overstaffing, which can lead to unnecessary labour costs.
Increased Employee Satisfaction
Efficient roster management can increase employee satisfaction by providing your staff with clear visibility of their schedules in advance. This can allow them to plan their leave management around their work schedules, reducing stress and increasing job satisfaction.
Improved Customer Service
Effective roster management can help improve customer service by ensuring that you have the right number of staff with the necessary skills scheduled to work during busy periods. This can lead to shorter wait times and faster service, improving the overall customer experience.
Business Goal Achievement
By properly managing your rosters, you can help your business achieve its goals. Effective roster management can help you ensure that you have the right amount of staff with the necessary skills to meet customer demand and improve productivity. This can ultimately lead to increased revenue and expansion opportunities for your business.
The Challenges of Managing Rosters in Spreadsheets
Although spreadsheets remain a prevalent tool for managing rosters, they pose considerable challenges.
Time-consuming
Manually creating and managing staff rosters in spreadsheets can be a time-consuming task. It requires data entry, such as staff availability, shift times, and dates, as well as calculating hours worked. This can lead to a significant amount of time being spent on roster management, taking valuable time away from other important tasks. The process can be slow and prone to errors, leading to wasted time and effort.
Error-prone
We know all too well how easily a simple key stroke error can corrupt or provide incorrect information. Spreadsheets have no control structure in maintaining the validity of the data.
Limited flexibility
Spreadsheets provide limited flexibility in managing rosters. As businesses grow and staffing requirements become more complex, spreadsheets may not be able to accommodate the additional data and calculations required. This can lead to a decrease in efficiency and accuracy in roster management. For example, as businesses expand and hire more staff, the number of shifts and shift patterns may increase in complexity. Managing this intricate information in a spreadsheet can become quite challenging.
Lack of visibility
Spreadsheets do not provide real-time visibility into staff availability or scheduling conflicts. As a result, roster managers may not have the necessary information to make informed staffing decisions, leading to understaffing, overstaffing, or scheduling conflicts. For instance, when a staff member is sick or unable to work, spreadsheet-based roster managers might remain uninformed. This delay can result in staffing shortages and possible revenue loss, making it difficult to manage effectively.
Solutions for Efficient Roster Management
To overcome the challenges of managing rosters in spreadsheets, you can use workforce management software like AlphaBiz Solutions‘ MYOB Advanced Workforce Management. MYOB Advanced Workforce Management provides the following key features for effective roster management:
Setup Roster Templates for Quick Creation
With MYOB Advanced Workforce Management, you can quickly set up a roster template for roster management, allowing you to create new rosters with ease. This saves time and effort, making the roster management process more efficient.
Copy Shifts Instantly
MYOB Advanced Workforce Management allows roster managers to copy shifts from an existing roster to a new one instantly. This feature saves time and reduces the risk of errors in the roster management process.
Automate Your Roster with “Smart Roster”
MYOB Advanced Workforce Management’s “smart roster” automation feature instantly fills shifts with staff who are available and have the right skills while following Award rules. This ensures that staffing decisions are made based on real-time information and reduces the risk of scheduling conflicts.
Identify and Resolve Rostering Issues
MYOB Advanced Workforce Management’s roster user interface highlights issues such as overlapping shifts, conflicts, and breaches of rules. This feature provides real-time visibility into roster management, allowing roster managers to make informed staffing decisions.
CONCLUSION
For a growing business, relying solely on spreadsheets to manage staff rosters may pose significant challenges and limitations to your business. As the organisation grows, so do the complexities of staffing requirements, and spreadsheets may not be adequate to keep up and it removes management from more productive work. Errors and inefficiencies in roster management can result in unnecessary labour costs, decreased productivity, and dissatisfied employees. Thus, it is essential for your businesses to adopt more effective and reliable workforce management solutions to manage their rosters.
Comprehensive and efficient ERP solution for managing rosters.
Take the first step towards efficient and effective roster management. Book a demo with our team of experts today to learn more about our MYOB Advanced Workforce Management.
