The foundation of all employee scheduling process starts with familiarizing the roles of each staff in your team or branch and knowing the shift operation. In order for the team to function, you need a certain number of employees working for each specific role at a given time.
If someone who is able to bartend goes on a vacation or leaves the company, you need to find someone who can fill in the position. Without knowing your team and business, it is impossible to allocate each person into the right position.

To plan for shifts well, there are 4 essential steps you need to follow

Before scheduling, you need to know each employee's availability so you don't schedule them for a shift they cannot fulfill. One universal rule is to collect standard weekly availabilities from each employee which you will use throughout the staff's time in your company, then gather time-off (paid and unpaid) requests for the month. We've seen many managers collecting monthly availabilities of each employee in two ways.

The first case is when the employees work full-time with varying shifts. The employees of a location discuss to arrange when their paid and unpaid day-offs are going to be so that no day is short of any staff then submits to the manager for approval. The employees had more freedom to choose which days they will work which won't leave the store unattended.

When there are many part-time employees, the managers had more authority to schedule shifts since those part-time staff agreed to work certain shifts on certain days. In this case, the manager must know all employees' availabilities.

In 2018, Shiftee plans to implement availabilities feature so every staff's availabilities are tied to each employee profile and also the time-off request and leave management features. This will allow managers to save time on having to go back and forth the schedule calendar and availabilities spreadsheets. So stay tuned for our update newsletter.

Having complete availabilities of all employees, now you can plan shifts for the next week(s) with Shiftee Scheduler. Now, there are two ways of scheduling multiple shifts in Shiftee. But first, know that you need to create shift templates before using Multi-Schedule feature.

e.g. Shift Templates

Having done the chores above, let's use the following two methods of Multi-Scheduling.

This is to schedule one employee with multiple varying shifts. Select an employee, then choose each template to fill the dates on the calendar.

This is to schedule multiple employees with consistent shifts. Select multiple employees and choose a template for each, then fill the dates.

“Imagine the world without Shiftee scheduler, the managers would find themselves sitting in front of a computer endlessly working on schedule spreadsheet. We feel your pain. It's time for Shiftee.”

When a schedule for the month is finalized, what channel did you use to share the roster? Emailing a screenshot? Attaching in SMS or instant messaging? How did you make sure the employees actually got it? Shiftee shares the shift schedule with employees and the changes to shifts will be reflected in real-time. No more screenshots in your life.

When you are managing employees, there are always exceptions and contingencies. Sometimes being short-staffing may put the day's restaurant operation in a disaster. Always have the availabilities of employees handy so no surprise leave you in panic.

Having a set of specific process for employee scheduling is essential for a business operation. There are still many businesses without such process today which puts the managers and even owners in distress. Scheduling and allocating staff into shifts shouldn't be such a painful task. Try implementing the procedures and you will see the difference!

And... Don't forget to track attendance with Shiftee Timeclock Attendance.