What would you do with seven more hours a week?

Managers like you spend about an hour a day on manual shift planning, but a shift planning tool frees up your time and makes business run smoother.

The right scheduling and HR system saves managers a huge amount of time by making communication, scheduling, employee management, and payroll accessible from one place. Many businesses still use pen and paper for a number of business processes. By consolidating data and streamlining processes, these businesses can save up to 7 hours a week.

Planday is light years ahead of our old system where nothing was digitised. Employees can request shifts or change and swap them. Everybody loves it and can really see the benefits. Employees like the simplicity of Planday.

Adrian Hendry, Director at Avondale Care

What is shift planning?

Shift planning is the process a manager goes through to schedule when each employee will work. Unfortunately, when a manager plans employee shifts, they often have to edit the schedule to accommodate last-minute requests or fix errors in employee availability.

Traditional shift planning involves writing down schedules by hand or creating a spreadsheet, and then posting the final schedule at the workplace. The good news is that managers no longer have to shift plan in such an inefficient way. Modern shift planning uses cloud-based software, which makes it easier and faster for managers to create and share schedules that meet everyone’s needs.

Hear how Planday customers use our shift planner to simplify their scheduling processes

How easy is it to create a shift plan in Planday?

Creating, publishing, and editing schedules all happens in one place in the shift planner app. Each shift you create can be saved as a template for future shifts, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you open the app to make a schedule.

Schedules can be viewed on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. From the top-level view, you can see the each hour worked by each employee, as well as what each employee earns for their time. Each shift in a schedule can be moved with drag and drop ease, and each shift has the ability to be as detailed or as minimal as you desire.

What should you use a shift planner app like Planday for?

There's a simple answer to that question: You can use Planday to create staff rotas very quickly. A shift planner like Planday is a collaborative tool that helps managers plan and schedule shifts for hourly employees. It’s also a communication platform where employees can share their availability, swap shifts, and access their schedule online or from a mobile device.

A shift planner is designed to simplify employee scheduling, by offering templates for different shifts, and syncing with your other payroll and time clock systems.

The staff planner allows you to organise your staff members into groups that you create and name. As a restaurant manager, you can create separate groups for back of the house and front of the house, and then place employees into their appropriate groups. As a manager, you could then use those groups to build schedules specific to them.

You can also organise staff by skills, so that each employee with a specific skill can be grouped together and assigned tasks. Shifts can be skill-specific, so that only employees with the required skill have the ability to claim those shifts.

The shift planner also tracks requests for time off, so that you cannot accidentally schedule an employee who has approved time off. If you have compliance in mind, the shift planner has a compliance warning feature that allows you to monitor overtime hours.

In the past, a manager may have managed staff and payroll with a notebook in his pocket. Planday allows us to connect with our staff and control our payroll costs. We can also react faster to changes, which is critical these days.

Steve Drozdiak, Financial Controller at the Oxford and Cambridge Club

What are the benefits of using a shift planner?

Using shift planner technology has a range of benefits for both employees, and the business. Consider this:

- Mobile access. 55% of hourly workers would want to use a mobile shift planning app if they were offered one

- Faster scheduling. Only about one-third of hourly employees receive their schedules with less than three days’ notice.

- Easier and more reliable shift-swapping. 86% of employees say that work-life balance is a necessary part of the job.

- Higher morale, better customer service. Employees with flexible schedules that allowed them to pursue interests outside of work report fewer mental health problems.

Benefits for the manager

  • Flexible scheduling
  • Fewer miscommunications
  • Less employee turnover
  • Less spending on recruiting, hiring, and training
  • More time for management and customer interaction

Benefits for the employee

  • Better communication
  • Easier shift-swapping
  • Improves mental health
  • Reality meets expectations
  • Workplace morale and performance is higher
  • Better health, fewer sick days
  • Mobile is a format they use regularly

Planday's expert advice on how to create a shift plan

A great shift plan staffs your business with the right people at the right times. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy. There are two main things to balance: your employees’ needs, and those of your business.

Know and honour your employees’ availability, and their capabilities. When shift planning, you should:

  • Schedule a mix of employees.

    Use both new and veteran employees during shifts. Too many new employees may cause challenges in customer service, but too many veteran employees may be too costly.

  • Honour employee schedule requests

    Keep updated records on employee availability around their school, family and personal obligations. Have a policy for handling sick days, and for accepting vacation requests.

  • Look out for burnout

    Don’t schedule “clopens,” and keep an eye out for over-scheduled employees. A shift planner can help notify you of these risks.

  • Manage expectations

    While some employees may only want to work ten hours, others may have been hired with the expectation of working 20 a week.

  • Avoid miscommunications

    When employees trade or pick up shifts, they may not always go through the right channels. A shift planner can keep communication in one spot.

  • Follow your local laws

    Plan overtime and breaks according to laws in your area.

Hear how Planday customers simplify their shift planning processes

How a shift planner like Planday can help your business grow

The other major component of shift planning is predicting volume based on last year’s numbers and upcoming events. You want to do what’s best for your business, and this won’t always line up with every request your employees make.

From a business perspective, your shift planner should help you:

  • Stay on-budget

    Modern shift planners sync with other systems, helping you avoid overspending on labour.

  • Provide excellent customer service

    Picking employees with the right training at the right times is essential.

  • Look out for burnout

    Don’t schedule “clopens,” and keep an eye out for over-scheduled employees. A shift planner can help notify you of these risks.

  • Create your shift plan early

    There will often be last-minute conflicts or requests from employees, or unprecedented changes in volume. The earlier you create your shift plan, the better.

  • Account for business growth

    You should be scheduling more people over time, with the expectation that business will grow steadily.

  • Optimise your staff's skills

    Choose cross-trained employees for slower hours to save on labour, since they can do multiple jobs simultaneously.

  • Keep up with changes in technology

    A shift planner can automate menial tasks, improve communication, and make your job a whole lot easier.

Planday’s shift planner app keeps everything running smoothly

Planday's shift planner software and app enable you to drag and drop shifts, track your staff work schedule, assign tasks and communicate with your employees – all with the touch of a button, enabling you and your staff to collaborate seamlessly from anywhere at any time.

Planday schedule view