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

Online time sheets are the most advantageous and accurate way to collect and collate staff time and attendance data. Utilising this technological advancement could save your company thousands of dollars in inaccurate wages and time theft.

There are a number of reasons your company would benefit from employing the online time sheet system, but here are the top five reasons to use online timesheets at your workplace:

1. Cost Effectiveness: It is a well-known fact that implementing online time sheet systems at your place of business will save your company money in the long run. This is due to the accuracy of the time and attendance records, meaning you won’t be susceptible to time theft or wage fraud by employees looking to get unearned dollars out of your business. Additionally, utilising online time and attendance records minimised the need for human manual handling, meaning less time has to be spent sifting through time sheets and collating the data thus saving your business the amount of an additional person’s wage.
2. Accuracy: A very obvious benefit of online time sheets is the accuracy of the online platform. By getting your staff to log on and off at the beginning and end of their shifts, you’re able to see exactly when they arrived, and exactly when they left. This eliminates the option for getting a friend or colleague to clock on or off for them, as they need to access their online time sheets themselves. More accurate data can also be collected from online time sheets as the data entry is automatic, bypassing the need for human input thus reducing the room for error.
3. Avoid human error: Following on from the accuracy of online time sheets, this method of staff time and attendance is beneficial because it avoids human error. By inputting all staff time and attendance manually, your company is subjected to human error which can throw off accuracy and cause larger scale problems in future.
4. More simple and streamlined: By utilising online time sheets your staff will have access to a simplified and streamlined online platform to log their clock on and off times. Rather than battle the confusion of multiple pieces of paper or spread sheets, online time sheets are accessible and present all necessary information in one easy to use online space.
5. Reliability: Using online time sheets is one of the most, if not the most reliable method of time and attendance data collection. Eliminating human error and significantly reducing the ability for time theft and wage fraud, online time sheets are the most reliable source for all staff clock and off information.

Book in a demonstration and see how you can change your business in 2014

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

Last week was the last week before school goes back, Jacob my youngest who is 9 had his hair looking like Jeff Thompson one of our famous cricketers. Thommo was well known in his day for his shaggy hair. I was also due for a trim so off we went to our local hairdresser.

My hair is significantly shorter than Jacob’s so the young apprentice who cut my hair cleaned up while I sat down and waited for Jacob. We were the only people in the salon at the time getting our hair cut. The salon had 6 workers at the time, it looked like one apprentice, a manager and the remaining four could have been fully qualified hairdressers.

While waiting for Jacob I observed the apprentice grab a piece of paper and started walking over to the 4 girls in the back corner having a chat waiting for the next customer. I learned later the piece of paper was a weekly time sheet for the salon. It looked like they were filling in for the final day of the pay week as the sheet already had information.

About this time I decided to go to the post office as I had some mail to do, I have been using the same local post office for more than 10 years. I lined up at the post office as it is always very busy. Yong who runs the post office is as efficient entrepreneur as you will ever see. He has an incredible memory and always spends time with his regular customers letting them know he cares they frequent his shop often.

I was called over to Yong to complete my mail and as quick as I was being served by Yong another customer to my right was being served by Chris. Chris has worked for Yong for as long as I can remember, when Chris does not work Yong’s wife comes in to work. When I took a closer look the person to my right was the apprentice  hairdresser who had just cut my hair. I noticed she was handing over a weekly time sheet to be faxed. I assumed at this point it was going to a head office to be processed for payroll.

I asked Yong while being served how much does it cost to fax 1 page and he replied $2.00 or $2.50 I could not quite hear at the time.  I went back to the hairdressers to get Jacob and they were still finishing his hair, getting it just right so he was happy with the length he kept and mum would be happy with the length that he goes back to school with to start year 4.

I had a couple of minutes so opened my iPad and googled the name of the hairdressing salon, I found the company website quickly which was very modern, then I read on the front page of the salons website the company has 28 salons now. I did not know the small salon in my local shopping center was part of a 28 store company.

This got me thinking of course about the time sheet. I have been involved in employee time and attendance for more than 15 years, we have provided solutions over the years to many types of businesses, some that you would not even think would need to have employees clocking in and out. If my hairdresser has 28 locations and each location has on average over a month 10 employees and managers per week we are now talking about 280 employees and 28 time sheets, one for each store.

Where ever the time sheet got faxed to, back to head office where administration is completed we will assume, I am sure a payroll person will be sitting in their office ready to process these 28 time sheets manually every week.

What is wrong with this story I ask myself….

• Employees filling out manual time sheets can easily put down incorrect times
• Managers who want to be friends with employees can easily approve employees coming in late by changing a start time of 9:15 back to 9:00am
• Managers at each store will be manually managing rosters for the staff week in week out
• Head office has no visibility, Head office can only wait for time sheets to be faxed through to see what is happening out in the stores.
• 28 stores sending 28 faxes is costing at least 56 dollars every week.

What if you could implement an electronic rostering solution across all 28 stores?
What if the cost of the faxing alone equaled 20% of the cost of an electronic system?

• Employees could only clock in and out electronically, no more manual time sheet changes
• Managers can roster staff electronically, workers could easily be shared across multiple locations without the need for multiple phone calls
• Head office could have live and instant visibility on employees arriving at every one of the 28 locations from their computer or mobile phone
• Payroll could receive electronic data that can flow directly into payroll

Would you stay with a manual time sheet system today or consider these advantages in your business?

Read more about how you can make your payroll more efficient and reduce costs or book in a demonstration