How can Scheduling Software Reduce Employee Labor Costs?

31 Dec, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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As a business owner, you want your organization to thrive. An important part of ongoing success is tracking every aspect of operations—from facilities management to supplies ordering. You must also keep track of costs—including labor costs, which many analysts claim is your highest expense.

To control labor costs, you must understand who works when for how many hours at what rate. Gathering this type of insight requires careful:

  • Planning
  • Scheduling
  • Analysis
  • Reporting

But here’s the problem—finding the time to complete all these necessary tasks, when there are so many other things on your list of things to do.

If these business analytics seem beyond your reach, then maybe it’s time to consider something new—such as an online-work schedule solution that not only helps you create accurate work schedules quickly and easily, but also shows you at glance:

  • Employee pay rates
  • Weekly costs per employee
  • Overtime warnings

Rather than spend time performing in-depth manual analysis with paper and pen, online scheduling software from What Time Do I Work automates the entire process and creates a real-time 360-degree view of your labor costs. Offering point-and-click simplicity, What Time Do I Work is a comprehensive yet easy-to-use online scheduling solution that enables you to:

  • Enter employee information, including names, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, and requested time off
  • Create a new schedule by simply moving time slots to the appropriate names on your schedule template
  • Immediately correct mistakes, if you happen to select a name for a time slot that the employee requested off; simply move the time slot to a different name
  • See real-time labor hours, labor costs, and overtime hours; this information automatically updates directly on the schedule
  • Improve profits and boost your organization’s success

To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our web scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up.  For complete information on our web scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/


How do you create a Time-off Policy

17 Dec, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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For many companies, managing vacation and time-off requests is a constant challenge. You need to maintain adequate business coverage and support while understanding that your employees have times when they need to take time off.  The outcome of not having a formal policy in place about when and how to submit requests results in employees asking for time off by:

  • Talking to you in the hallway or your office
  • Calling you on the phone
  • Sending you an email
  • Scribbling the days and dates on a piece of paper and dropping it on your desk
  • Taping a note to your office door

These types of requests are not only hard to deal with on the fly, becasue of the no boundaries on “acceptable ways to request time off,” but you are also tasked with trying to keep track of who requested what time off. And if you have two employees requesting the same days off, who gets first dibs?

There are many different options and ways to create policies, but the most common in the service and health industries is to create a “time-off bank.” Here’s how the bank works. Let’s say each employee is allowed 160 hours off each year, which equates to 20 work days. The bank includes time off for:

  • Holidays
  • Vacation
  • Sick days
  • Personal days

You can’t always give all your employees all of the holidays off, so they can use their banked time to request  vacations or personal/sick days off. Each employee is responsible for scheduling the days he or she wants off from work, using a single prescribed method, within the needs of the business. You can require that requests are submitted for planned time off within 2 weeks of the date, and that they must submit requests on special forms that are filed away for you to refer to when creating upcoming schedules

This plan offers many benefits to employees. They can:

  • Ensure that their time off request will not be forgotten
  • Assume responsibility for their own time off; they make their own choices, and they need to abide by them. For example, some employees might prefer a day off for religious holidays, rather than the Fourth of July.
  • Draw from their time-off bank for emergencies, such as caring for a sick child.  Remember, the bank is for all time off—holidays, vacation, sick days, and personal days.

The plan also offers many benefits to you. You will:

  • Spend significantly less time managing time-off requests; all requests will come to you through the standard form submitted in the “time-off request box”
  • Create more accurate schedules that require fewer changes, as you no longer have to try to remember who asked for what time off?
  • Empower your employees by letting them make more choices about how they spend their time away from work
  • Create a more positive working atmosphere at your company

All of these ways are great, but they are still time consuming, especially when going through all the requests each time you make the schedule. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way for the requests to be waiting for you right on the schedule? How about knowing when each request was submitted so that you can grant requests in a first come first serve method? The solution is available today from WhatTimeDoIWork.com and there are many other benefits far beyond tracking time-off requests and auto-populating them right into the schedule.

  • Automatic alerts to scheduling conflicts and overtime hours
  • Calculation of Labor costs as the schedule is created
  • Posting of the Schedule online allowing employees easy access without picking up the phone
  • Communications sent to your entire staff as soon as a new schedule is posted.

We are so sure that our software will solve your scheduling needs that we offer the first 30 days at no charge, with no obligation.

Learn more here.


Tracking and Scheduling an Evolving Staff

12 Dec, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Regardless of your industry—retail, hospitality, healthcare—the most important asset is your employees. Once you find good people, train them, and consider them part of your team, you want to keep them on-staff for the long term.

The reality of the situation is that “change happens.” Workers go back to school, start a family, move to a new city or state, suffer an injury, or choose to start a new career. Regardless of the reason, you have to deal with an ever-changing employee roster, and that makes tracking employee information and creating weekly work schedules challenging.

If you use traditional paper-and-pencil methods, adding/deleting/changing employee information and creating work schedules is a time-consuming task. You must update contact information, preferred hours, time-off requests and rates of pay. You must adjust vacation schedules and holiday coverage to accommodate old and new workers. The bottom line—you have a lot of work to do every time a current employee leaves and a new hire arrives.

There is a better way—one that allows you to throw away your paper-and-pencil records and schedules,  It’s called online scheduling software, and it’s available today from What Time Do I Work.com.

By storing all information in a secure cloud, What Time Do I Work software makes it quick and easy to add, delete, and update employee information. You also benefit from 24×7 access to everything you need to create schedules—names, preferred shifts, time off requests, hours/week, etc.  Best of all you can run reports to track each employee’s:

  • Hours worked per week/month
  • Rate of pay
  • Department
  • Vacation time
  • Sick time
  • Emergency time off
  • Overtime
  • Current Contact Information

You can use our advanced yet easy-to-use software to create a clear and accurate picture of each employee’s work history. This type of information is very valuable when it’s time for giving raises or promotions, providing extra hours or time off.

To discover for yourself just how much time and energy you can save by using our web scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up.  For complete information on our web scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/.


How to Schedule Efficiently In the Cloud

14 Nov, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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When you look to the future and see yourself repeating the same manual scheduling process, every single week, from now until who knows when, how do you feel? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? Exhausted? Bored? Or perhaps a combination of all four.

Let’s consider that the “same old thing” is creating your restaurant’s weekly staff schedule. Every week, you:

  • Pull out a new schedule sheet or spreadsheet
  • Gather together this week’s requests for time off and preferred shifts
  • Get prepared for requests to come in after you complete the schedule
  • Plug in names to time slots
  • Take a break and drink some coffee
  • Return to your office, review the schedule for accuracy, and correct any mistakes
  • Tentatively post the schedule on a wall somewhere

Now let’s consider a new future—one where creating the weekly staff schedule is a fast, easy, and stress-free task. In this new future, there is no paper, no pencil, no spreadsheet, and no haphazardly received requests for time off and shift changes. No more need for a calculator to avoid overtime shifts. This new world also includes virtually instantaneous changes to schedules to accommodate illness or emergencies, with automatic real time communication to all employees about updated schedules that are available. Even more, this brave new world of job scheduling reduces no-shows because your workers are better informed about when they work (and can set up alerts to remind them of upcoming shifts).

When you look to the future and see yourself repeating the same manual scheduling process, every single week, from now until who knows when, how do you feel? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? Exhausted? Bored? Or perhaps a combination of all four.

Let’s consider that the “same old thing” is creating your restaurant’s weekly staff schedule. Every week, you:

  • Pull out a new schedule sheet or spreadsheet
  • Gather together this week’s requests for time off and preferred shifts
  • Get prepared for requests to come in after you complete the schedule
  • Plug in names to time slots
  • Take a break and drink some coffee
  • Return to your office, review the schedule for accuracy, and correct any mistakes
  • Tentatively post the schedule on a wall somewhere

Now let’s consider a new future—one where creating the weekly staff schedule is a fast, easy, and stress-free task. In this new future, there is no paper, no pencil, no spreadsheet, and no haphazardly received requests for time off and shift changes. No more need for a calculator to avoid overtime shifts. This new world also includes virtually instantaneous changes to schedules to accommodate illness or emergencies, with automatic real time communication to all employees about updated schedules that are available. Even more, this brave new world of job scheduling reduces no-shows because your workers are better informed about when they work (and can set up alerts to remind them of upcoming shifts).

If the new future sounds like the right future for you, you can get it now by choosing our online employee scheduling software. Our unique program has advanced features yet easy-to-use. Some of the great time and money saving features include:

  • Build new schedules based on saved versions of past schedules
  • Speed up the scheduling process with all the needed employee information—name, contact information, preferred shifts, time off requests, departments, pay rates, hire dates—in one central location
  • Create conflict-free schedules; if you make a mistake, such as try to schedule an employee in a time slot he requested off, the software alerts you immediately
  • Store all schedules and employee information in the cloud, where it remains available 24×7 from anywhere
  • Eliminate random phone calls and other ways that employees request time off
  • Free up time in your own schedule for more important activities—like running your business
  • Significantly improve employee communications because workers:
    • Can see when there are open shifts, and offer to pick up extra hours when they want
    • Receive each week’s schedule and all schedule changes on their smart phone or email
    • Can find their own replacements without having to bother you

No matter what your industry, What Time Do I Work’s Online Scheduling Software has the solution to your scheduling needs. Discover for yourself just how much time and energy you can save by using our employee scheduling software. Sign up today for your no obligation 30 day Free Trial at https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/free-trial/.


No-Call control over fluctuating schedules

07 Nov, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Whether your organization operates in retail, healthcare, hospitality, casinos/gaming, or fitness, you face the challenge of managing fluctuating schedules. You have full-time and part-time workers, as well as those who work only nights, only weekends, not on holidays, or any combination of those. While you pride your organization on flexibility and the desire to accommodate your workers’ lifestyles and availability, creating schedules that work for your employees and your company is an ongoing battle.

In addition to special requests for time-off, you must also handle the scheduling changes that occur at various times of the year:

  • During the school year, you have to work around class schedules.
  • At holiday times, you need to accommodate seasonal parties and family time.
  • In the winter, you have to juggle slow customer traffic and bad weather.
  • At any time of the year, you need to prepare for unplanned illness and emergencies.

Regardless of the reason why, you end up changing your work schedule weekly to meet your staff’s changing needs. Using traditional scheduling methods like paper and pen or spreadsheets usually results in revisions, trashed and re-posted schedules, not to mention untold numbers of calls from your employees, asking, “What Time Do I Work?”

Today is the day to say “good-bye” to your traditional scheduling methods and say “hello” to something new. You can trade in your paper and pen for online scheduling software from WhatTimeDoIWork.com—a revolutionary employee scheduling software that not only saves you time, money, effort and frustration, but also allows you to handle fluctuating schedules with ease.

By creating all your work schedules online and storing them in a secure cloud environment, you benefit on many levels:

  • Remain up to date – All your workers’ contact information—names, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, time-off requests, skill sets, etc.—remain up to date and available 24/7.
  • Save time –create weekly work schedules quickly and easily on your PC or laptop—anywhere, at any time.
  • Get more efficient — effortlessly avoid errors and conflicts with automatic alerts, our software lets you know when there’s a problem, such as scheduling a worker in a time slot he/she requested off.
  • Automate the process –complete your schedule by clicking Save, and the schedule is automatically stored in the cloud.
  • Enhance communications with employees — Rather than posting a paper schedule (only available in the office), click Post, and the schedule is automatically distributed to your employees’ email addresses and/or smart phones, eliminating calls about “What Time Do I Work.”

An added benefit of storing all workforce schedules and employee information in the cloud is that it remains available to all your workers all the time. This means that when an emergency arises, an employee can simply access the cloud, find out who isn’t scheduled to work, and find a replacement. Workers can update their information in real-time, and everyone in your company will be up to date on what’s happening.

To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our web scheduling software, take a few minutes to watch our informative video at https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/free-trial/