People Management
2 min.

Solving the Employee Availability Puzzle

Samuel Roy
November 25, 2015
Post-it on a wall

Are the communications surrounding schedules effective in your business? If you've answered yes, don’t read any further!

However, if you admit that there's room for improvement, this article could be of great benefit to you. You'll understand the negative effects caused by simple shortcomings in the communications surrounding schedule management.

Do You Ask Your Employees to Provide Their Availability by Email? On Paper? Do You Do This Often?

In many businesses, this approach has been established for many years. Employers and schedule managers have the daunting task of organizing and making sense of all the information given to them by employees. They're well aware of the effort needed to take into account the peculiarities and quirks of everything and everyone.

This influx of information often forces schedule managers to build workarounds, often using Excel-type spreadsheets, in order to retranscribe availability in a more comprehensive and easily browsable layout to use when planning schedules. Since this task is highly prone to human error, it’s understandable that employers sometimes make mistakes.

Important Observation

While using employee availability forms makes things easier, managing this manually requires considerable time and energy. It’s also the cause of frustrating omissions, which also have the potential effect of infringing on labor relations.

Even worse: traditional efforts to manage availabilities and the time dedicated to them doesn't add any additional value!

Now, How Would It Happen if the Organization Used Agendrix?

  • Your employees would submit their availability themselves from an interface designed specifically for this task, directly from our web or mobile apps. Schedule managers no longer have to compile, print, file, transcribe and interpret information.
  • The employer and the schedule manager see employee availabilities appear automatically in the schedule planning interface. In the image below, the green line represents Thursday, October 22 time slots' during which Josephine Miller and Grace Colin prefer to work. The red line represents a period for which Grace Colin isn't available. Therefore, she shouldn't be scheduled. Where there is no red or green bar, employees are available to work. Finally, the period of time under the waitresses name represents the number of hours desired per week.

Technology can greatly improve the management of complex cases, such as employee availability. Using an employee scheduling software for this purpose will help you make better decisions.

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