3 Ways to Increase Employee Happiness Through Scheduling

A lot of managers and owners hate dealing with employee scheduling, and for good reason. If you’re building weekly schedules on paper or using a spreadsheet template, the process is time-consuming and complicated, especially when you have to deal with last-minute changes to your team’s availability, time-off requests, and seasonal variations to your business.

Switching to an employee scheduling app like Homebase can help. It’ll have you, on average, about five hours per week. With Homebase, publishing a schedule usually only takes a few minutes, and syncing timesheets to your payroll provider takes just a few clicks!

But what’s even better than saving all that time is that using Homebase can make your employees’ lives better too.  Here are three ways using Homebase can increase your team members’ job satisfaction. 

1. Track timeliness, and factor that in when you’re planning employee schedule adjustments.

Homebase tracks your employees’ on-time percentage, which can be helpful in assessing an employee’s performance. With that information, as you’re building the employee schedule, you may want to prioritize and manage time-off requests, if you can’t grant time-off to everyone that’s requested it.

2. Encourage your employees to update their availabilities as soon as something comes up for them.

With Homebase, your team members can adjust their availabilities in advance, meaning if they can work Tuesday this week, but can’t work Tuesdays in two weeks, you’ll have that information as you’re building the schedule.

Getting advanced notification of availability changes is a win-win for both you and your employees. It gives you a little extra time to find coverage if you need to, and allows your employees to have a more flexible work schedule.

On our paid plans, you can even require manager approval for availability changes, so if you hired someone specifically to work Tuesdays, a manager will have to approve any changes that prevent that person from working on Tuesdays.

3. Let your team members trade shifts when something last-minute changes their availability.

Things come up, sometimes at the last minute. With Homebase, you can allow employees to trade shifts with each other on our mobile apps. This should reduce your employee scheduling work, but a manager will always have to approve the swap, so you can be sure that the replacement is trained for the role.

One easy way to keep your employees happy is as simple as rewarding their hard work with more flexible scheduling that allows them to work when they’d like to work.