Regardless of how small your team is, a staff roster is crucial to the running operations of your business. Without rosters, confusion would arise as staff would constantly arrive and leave whenever they please, shifts would remain uncovered and there would be no indication of how long a staff member worked.

If you use a simple paper time sheet currently we all know the times written down are not the actual times. As soon as an employee is late when using paper time sheets they will write down the start time of the shift not the actual time. If the shift starts at 8:00 and the employee arrives at 8:06 they should write down 8:06 but we all know the majority of employees given the freedom will simply write 8:00

A roster puts your business in order, but instead of using an out-dated technique such as manual time sheets, there is now a simpler and faster way to prepare a staff schedule. Staff Rosters has discovered the web based rostering solution to solve the hundreds of problems Australian businesses encounter every day.

 Online rostering is a simple and straightforward web-application

Online rostering is effective, time-saving and beneficial to all involved. All changes can be emailed, sent via SMS or sent completely free with the free employee staff rosters app available on iPhone and Android to alert staff of any last minute changes or annual leave approval, and these rosters are environmentally friendly. If you have ever had to print out a new roster after every change you make, you will understand how much you will benefit from just a click of the button to change what you have originally written, saving you paper expenses and time.

Imagine the employees having the roster delivered to their own mobile phone, syncing automatically with their calendar taking into account availability.

Staff Rosters provides a roster template for all clients to revolutionise the way your business manages their staff roster. From comparing rosters against the previous week to easily viewing daily, weekly and monthly costings, there has never been a better way to schedule your staff’s time and attendance. For more information regarding online rostering, start a 30 day trial and we will book in a training session or book in a demonstration

Rostering has come a long way, the days of spreadsheets and pen and paper should be long gone. Today you can now communicate with your staff electronically giving your employees the power to communicate back electronically saving you the business owner or manager or supervisor hours every week.

What is an open shift?

An open shift allows a manager to offer the shift to any available and appropriately trained employee who works in the location. Creating an open shift will send an invitation via email or SMS to all recommended staff members, offering them the shift. The first employee to accept their invitation will be rostered to the shift, and any attempt by another staff member to accept a shift will be denied. This can be advantageous for a manager looking to rapidly fill a number of shifts, or to fill a particular shift as quickly as possible if an employee calls in sick with no warning.

Introducing Open Shifts/Schedules

Open shifts or schedules allow you the supervisor, manager or business owner to create schedules with start and finish times leaving it up to employees to grab the available schedules. No more chasing people to fill positions.

Once you create the open schedule any employee or casual or contractor that is suitably qualified to take the open shift can claim the shift right from their own smart phone. Perfect for businesses that use a lot of casuals, uni students and the like. Simply create the shifts you want employees to fill and they will be filled.

Employees simply claim the open shifts they want that they are qualified to take as soon as the email arrives

Try staff rosters for free and start working smarter in your business

Rostering systems over the past 3-4 years have really evolved with access to the internet now in the hands of nearly every working employee. Smart phone sales have rocketed over the past 7 years around the world.

Inline with smart phone sales has been the massive growth of apps. You can find an app for just about anything you can think of. The cleverest of apps for employee scheduling includes the ability not only for the employee to start and stop a shift. Employee scheduling apps have come a long way now giving the ability to put the employee roster directly onto the employee phone weeks in advance. Employees can now sync their smart device calendar to receive their schedule automatically populating the employee calendar with the shifts they need to work over the coming period.

This type of clever technology would have really helped Starbucks recently where it became clear over 130,000 employees were mostly kept in the dark about upcoming schedules. Starbucks have this week made an announcement that they will post the employee schedule at least one week in advance…….wow would you be happy with this, so for ever Starbucks have been making it very difficult for employees to know what they are doing next week.

With the busy lives we all lead today, millions of casual workers who in many cases may have more than 1 casual job need visibility about the workload they have. Being casual is tough, you don’t even know if you are working tomorrow sometimes and in many cases have no idea if you are working next week.

Don’t let your company become main news across websites around the world.

Show your staff you care, book in a demonstration or start a 30 day trial

If you run a business that deals with large numbers of staff and you are already using online time sheets, you’ll be well versed in how cost effective online time sheets are. Regardless of the size of your business, online time sheets are the most beneficial and cost effective means to track and monitor your staff productivity and time and attendance.

Using the platforms of online time sheets, certain tasks such as staff and project tracking, project monitoring, financial expenditure and wage information is easily configurable and as it is collated in one simple to use program. The traditional methods of paper documents or digital spread sheets often work out to be more expensive, time consuming and unreliable as they rely solely on human input, which can result in errors, discrepancies and lengthy wait periods.

Some people might think that converting your organisation to an online time sheet system is costly, disruptive to business operations and time consuming. The truth however, is it is a far less invasive procedure and costs far less than assumed. Most modern online time sheets are available for very affordable costs, and cost very little to install and train staff.

The cost saving and time and attendance solutions offered through the introduction of online time sheets makes company budgets much easier to devise and stick to, as these online platforms lay out all expenses and costs incurred so that management can actively predict the revenue and expenditure of the company. This is a very innovative and beneficial feature, as businesses can now plan more accurately for the future with little financial wavering.

If you’re looking to make your office more efficient and cost effective, implementing an online time sheet platform at your workplace is one of the first steps to take. Allowing all office operations to be logged and monitored, as well as tracked and analysed, online time sheets provide a platform for planning and actively reduces or removes the need for human interference when data collection and organisation is involved.

A much more accurate and affordable method of monitoring time and attendance , the use of an online time sheet eliminates the need for a person to struggle with entering all the hard copy data into a computer system. By doing this automatically, your online time sheet platform saves thousands of dollars in man hours required in data collection and collation, not to mention the accuracy of staff clock on and off times which can actively remove the costly threat of time theft and wage fraud.

Book in a demonstration to see how clever products have become

As cloud software has burst onto the scene over the past couple of years we have seen some spectacular products and we have seen some dismal failures. I am not going to name products here, I will more talk about what to look for when selecting your cloud rostering or time and attendance solution.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud rostering and cloud time and attendance?

The 2 biggest advantages of going to cloud really do outweigh the disadvantage

No hardware/software infrastructure required – you can go completely without any hardware and have no software installed on your computers in the business, this for me is the largest advantage for small business as you need no IT expertise to get your system up and running. Some of the excellent cloud based rostering solutions will allow you to start setting up your account as soon as you sign up for a 30 day trail, within a couple of hours your account can be set up and you will be rostering for next week from your computer, iPad, Tablet or mobile phone, it really does not get any easier.

Communication – When you move to a cloud rostering or cloud time and attendance solution one of the biggest advantages you get is better communication, with nearly every person carrying a smart phone today you can push information to your employees and they can communicate back through the same channel on the smart phone or a computer. I have seen some of the employee time clocks over the years come out with all sorts of features that allow employees when they clock in at the time clock to look up information like how many hours they have worked, what time they clocked in and out over the past seven days and more. These features while sounding clever only congest the employee time clock at a time when people just want to clock in and out.

The only way today to share information with employees is give them an app they can load onto their smartphone giving the employee their own personal self serve kiosk experience that they can access anywhere and anytime.

When thinking about disadvantages there are not many, having the ability to manage your system where ever you are by phone, iPad, Tablet or computer works well for most in the busy life we all lead every day.

Some systems could drop out when no internet is available and this would be the biggest disadvantage of the day, when was the last time you lost internet on your mobile phone? Smart apps will hold data when the internet is not available automatically pushing the information to and from the smart phone as soon as the internet connects again.

I was just reading an article this morning about Goolgle working on replacing computer screens altogether in the coming years with voice activation and instructions moving to a new phase of ease of use. In the coming years you will not even have to manually build your rosters or write emails to communicate with employees, you will simply be able to say what you want and google will look after the rest……the technology has been around for decades but the changes coming in the near future will simply blow you mind.

Book in your own demonstration here