One of the biggest challenges organizations go through is organizing their resources to meet all of the deadlines. Especially in today’s age where everything is agile and the turnaround time (TAT) is souring, the issues of resource allocation is not just critical, it is vital.
You can however use automation to solve this scheduling issue easily. However, before you decide on the scheduling option you will need to make important decisions that you need to make based on how your organization is structured. There are many scheduling solutions available in the market today to help you with your automated and personalized experience. Here are some parameters that you will need to keep in mind before you are able to select the right scheduling solution for you.
- Scheduling based on Skill: Where you can schedule your employees based on their skill set.
- Scheduling based on Experience: Depending on the amount of experience your employee has, you can schedule the kind of work and the nature of work that goes to them.
- Scheduling base on Roles: Different organizations have different roles and work assigned to the different roles, this can be scheduled, organized and structured.
This said, what are the kind of features that are important for your organization? Make sure you focus on those features that are available and those that are your organization’s priority. Here are some of the features that are available that can be found in the leading solutions in the market.
- Auto-scheduling: Auto-scheduling functionality helps employees sign up for open shifts and trade work or schedules without needing a manager to organize them. This is primarily skill based and brings to the table the option to collaborate with members within a team.
- Self-scheduling: This will enable manager to create scheduling for peers or subordinates. Using this functionality, manager can enter tasks that can be moved around within the team. Employees can own tasks and mark them on completion.
- Resource-scheduling: There are solutions that also help schedule work based on skill, demography, location, availability, and so on.
- Auto-reminder: Some solutions send email or SMS or both forms of reminders to its user, keeping employees aware of tasks that are coming up and how they can schedule it into their day. These alerts ensure that employees know what is coming up and can be prepared to accommodate any changes.
- Schedule templates: Some solutions provide scheduling templates. This helps employers and employees save time instead of having to recreate recurrent schedules. Also, duplication is allowed making it easier for employees to create duplicate schedules over a period of time to keep track of the work required to be done.
- Clocking: In many organizations some of the roles do not include just sitting at the desk and working on the laptop. It sometimes involves networking, talking to people, and so on. There are scheduling solutions that provide the ability to record call time and interaction time, to ensure that the amount of time spent by employees on all the work that they are involved in.
- Enhanced user experience: There are particular solutions that offer better user experience. For instance, features like drag and drop, templates creations and so on that help users use the tool with ease.
Finally, despite the kind of scheduling you have, which is the need of the hour, remember that the employees must adhere and use the solution you are following. If there is no tracking and updates to the schedule, any top down approach will fail.