How Scheduling Automation Improves Employee Morale

In Times Like These
It’s close to the end of 2020, and everyone in healthcare is gearing up for another projected wave of COVID-19 outbreaks.

The US healthcare system is in the ninth month of crisis management. As the weeks drag on, the normal stressors weathered easily before have become hair-trigger flash points with staff. Issues of fairness, transparency, visibility, and accessibility have all taken on increasing urgency as managers struggle to maintain stability and employee morale during extremely challenging times.

Crisis moments can be clarifying and never has it been more critical to narrow in on what employees care most about.  

What’s at Stake?
Top 10 employee wish list benefits vary survey to survey, but what is always included? ^{1, 2}

Topics related to time.

Flex time. Paid time off. Holidays. Sick time. Working from home.

And what’s the one thing tying all that together?

The Schedule.

Frequent readers of this blog will recall our recent post, Improving Employee Engagement in the Pharmacy. Today we want to touch on employee morale, and how frequently the schedule is at the heart of both.

Time to Level-up
In the historic times we’re living in, it’s no longer adequate to only manage common scheduling tension points. Permanent solutions are needed to these common complications:

• Shifts that start out unstaffed due to a scheduling oversight – or end up double-staffed

• Leave requests that get lost or are not responded to in a timely fashion

• Leave requests and scheduling decisions that are not perceived as fair and consistent

• Complaints that the scheduling process is not transparent

• The scramble that results from a last-minute sick call

Many of you have had to deal with some if not all of these issues. One problem feeds another and your employee morale just took a quick nose dive.

High employee morale and engagement are drivers of organizational success ³, so why not eliminate these recurring issues completely? It’s time to end the rumors regarding fairness and transparency around the schedule once and for all.

Improve Morale with Focused Change
Start your team out with consistent, fair scheduling every day. Viewed from this lens, an automated approach to scheduling rapidly moves from “nice” to “necessary”.

Manual scheduling – spreadsheets, paper, highlighters, and white out – is bad enough. To make matters worse, most team members that schedule other employees are never trained on how to best create or manage a schedule. One outgoing scheduler trains the next and so on. Systematic? Not really. Comprehensive across shifts and departments? Most certainly not. As stated by Rosalee Allan, former COO, PAML, LLC (now LabCorp):

“Supervisors are trained in a lot of aspects of their job, but I’ve never seen anybody sit down and officially train supervisors on how to schedule.” ⁴

At StaffReady, we approach this need very intentionally. We provide the training and bring your team onboard the software at no additional charge. As you bring new schedule administrators on over the years, training is always available should you need it.

Automation Pros
StaffReady provides a fully-featured platform for automated scheduling. We consider ourselves your trusted scheduling adviser. Your rules drive the process – not a cookie-cutter template provided by an unknown and untested vendor.

Consider:

• Your staff make a time-off requests in the application – which is time-stamped – and is then acted upon by the supervisors or managers in your department. An audit trail is visible for both parties to see. No surprises, no drama.

• Manage several different types of leave – PTO, FMLA, Maternity, Jury Duty, and more – completely customizable to your organization’s needs.

• Scheduling and time-off requirements unique to your institution or your collective bargaining rules are easily handled.

• Accessible from any modern internet device – laptop, workstation, tablet or cell phone. Make time-off requests with soccer and school schedules close at hand.

• Manage complex requirements for differently qualified staff on the same shift in the same department.

• Provide the management team the scheduling visibility they need across multiple departments or an entire enterprise.

The tools you need to eliminate scheduling chaos and frustration are here. Making positive changes during this time of high intensity will gain you solid points with your staff and improve morale.

Right Person, Right Place, Right Time.

Interested? Drop a line to info@staffready.com or sign up for a demo here.

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¹ https://www.staffsquared.com/blog/top-10-employee-benefits-to-keep-staff-happy-and-engaged/

² https://hbr.org/2017/02/the-most-desirable-employee-benefits

³ https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-talent-management/articles/why-morale-and-engagement-are-so-important , accessed 10/20/2020.

⁴ Scheduling Automation at PAML, case study, internal documentation, 2013.

Photo Credits: Ion Chiosea