Consequences of Poor Employee Scheduling

The base line of any business is to achieve profitability. Employee scheduling has a major impact on company’s profitability. Scheduling staff to meet business requirements is an organizational goal. In previous times there were traditional office hours and shift work. Now It has become complicated especially because of extended or 24/7 working hours on one hand and on the other employees working shifts, flexible working hours, split-working, job share or part-time hours etc.
Business managers who undertake this task of employee scheduling manually spend considerable time to deliver good schedules and in case the manager fails to deliver an optimal schedule the consequences of poor scheduling will be apparent in company’s operations, revenue generation, employee satisfaction, retention etc. Most important, it will also have impact on the brand image of the company.

Poor employee scheduling can lead to chaos in the company’s operations. This will be perceived as being arbitrary and will invite ad-hoc changes for reasons not connected with the business. This will lead to repeated corrections and amendments and appear as a rough guide of the work schedule. This leads to loss of credibility of the schedule in the opinion of employees and desire to get changes as per the employee’s preferences and it is difficult to encourage an ordered and responsible approach to staff deployment.

In case of poor leave scheduling overall head count may be met but there may be poor skill mix leading to loss of proper work-flow and productivity. Furthermore in the absence of a definable work-flow, managers find it difficult to timely deliver consistent staff schedules associated with company goals.



Consequences of poor

employee scheduling is generally seen in the form of workplace stress, staff conflicts, poor productivity, increased absenteeism, and ultimately poor retention of trained workforce. Staff finds it difficult to manage when they are confronted with unplanned schedule changes at short notice, especially those with responsibilities.

Effective scheduling, which includes matching specific skills with specific needs in the most cost effective manner, is vital to achieving goal of the company as well as these type of resource management tools also provides best possible financial results. The soft wares available for employee scheduling have features to generate good schedules and provide a crucial link between the financial and productive side of the business.

The costs associated with poor employee scheduling are difficult to define. Misunderstood schedules can be very costly to any company. Controlling overtime costs is a benefit most companies understand, but much higher costs are involved in less obvious areas of activity as payments for work not performed, reduction or a temporary halt in production, possible reduction in the quality of work, vacation scheduling, negative effect on the morale of the employees, training expenses of replaced employee and administrative costs. Poor resource management leading to poor retention of employees influences employee relationship in a negative way and can also result in poor public relation. Reduction in the quality of products leaves a negative impact on the brand name.

Barriers in Efficient Employee Scheduling

Optimum Human resource utilization by the means of efficient resource scheduling has always been central to success of the organization. Human capital is intangible and elusive and cannot be managed the way organizations manage jobs, products and technologies. There are many attributes of each individual and variables of each interactive resource which influence the total quality work out put. These can be categorized as the knowledge, skills, life experiences, morale and it’s motivation, abilities and interpersonal relations, to name a few. The value of employees is increased The profits earned by a company are governed to a major extent by Efficient Employee Scheduling, which is definitely a complex task. If this activity of Employee Scheduling is carried out manually it becomes a very cumbersome process and is prone to many errors. Work flow requirements for the process of good staff scheduling requires much more than what is achievable with paper and pencil or with spreadsheets. when employees are working in shifts, have flexible working hours, work part time,share jobs and split works etc. it becomes especially complicated to manually schedule the resources . The use of resource management software overcomes barriers of manual resource scheduling.

The barriers in optimum resource utilization are mainly related to resource scheduling deficiencies, lack of educational and training records of the employee, inadequate staffing, time and attendance, clear job description, job analysis, diversity (racial / ethnic diversity, more women in the workforce, single-parent households, dual-career couples, domestic partners, working mothers and family/childcare), loss of employee loyalty, health safety and security issues, the companies going global leading to multicultural environment, technological shift and use of Internet, older employees not trained in modern techniques or exposed to today’s work culture, need to accommodate working mothers and fathers through parental leaves, ensure equality for women in respect to employment advancement opportunities and compensations, job sharing, part time and contractual employment with their job analysis, more sensitivity to the growing need for policies, procedure to eliminate sexual harassment, conflicts and their resolution, work place negativity etc.

On top of this, global nature

of big organizations does not help in efficiently scheduling resources. Resources are more mobile than ever, this is good from operational point of view but a night mare for a resource coordinator, as they have to keep real time record or resource engagements and future commitments. Therefore a resource management software can provide better management where organizations can make huge profits.

For moving forward all these issues need to be addressed, as these are a barrier in high performance work practices. Environmental scanning, anticipation and flexible, foresighted and strategic deployment of resources is the key to ensure effective and efficient use of human talent to accomplish organizational goals and to gain that edge of advantage over competitors which makes the company not good but great. Using modern day resource scheduling software that can manage different types of resources and show informative reports can also help to a great extent.