Done manually, the task can take hours. With each new schedule they create, managers must balance the needs and preferences of their employees with the projected customer demand for any given business day.

And when things go wrong with a schedule, it can throw a serious wrench in operations and do serious damage to employee morale.

The good news is that the most common staff scheduling mistakes are quite preventable — thanks to modern technology.

Here are some of the most common mistakes managers make when scheduling staff that can be easily remedied by modern tech.

Not respecting time off requests

Managers of stores, restaurants and other customer-facing businesses are inundated with tasks both big and small all throughout the day.

It’s not uncommon for employees’ time-off requests or other scheduling requests to be accidentally forgotten — fallen to the bottom of a stack of paperwork.

When managers forget those requests or don’t make enough of an effort to honor them, they have to move into damage control mode. This might include scrambling to find replacements, upsetting employees who have to work when they weren’t expecting to work, or making other concessions for employees who needed the time off. For some smaller businesses, a mismanaged time-off request might even lead to having to close your business’ doors for a shift or two if a suitable replacement can’t be found.

Part of the solution to this problem is to make schedules far enough in advance that any necessary corrections or oversights can happen right away.

But another solution is to make the time-off request process easy and clear. Modern HR software and scheduling programs allow employees to make requests electronically, and see for themselves when and whether managers have had a chance to review and approve them.

Not having a system in place for schedule changes

We just talked about how much of a headache it can be to accommodate last-minute changes to the staff schedule. However, some last-minute changes are simply inevitable.

Employees will always have to occasionally deal with family emergencies, accidents, and illnesses. That’s why managers should have a standard plan in place to deal with those changes when they do come up.

That plan should include how schedule change requests are communicated, clarity on who is allowed to switch with whom (for example, maybe employees are only allowed to switch with employees who have similar skill levels or pay rates), and how those changes will be approved.

Scheduling software can help by allowing employees to post requests for schedule changes and providing a central location for all employees to communicate and see which shifts are available. In fact, these programs can make it easier for employees to swap shifts with one another with little need for management’s involvement.

Scheduling with the appearance of bias

Schedules are a huge part of your employees’ lives, and they will absolutely notice any sign that they’re not being scheduled fairly.

The appearance of bias or preferential treatment can be damaging enough to employees’ morale, but the problem can get even worse if that bias appears discriminatory. The appearance of discrimination based on characteristics that are protected in your jurisdiction — even if that discrimination wasn’t intentional — could possibly open the door for legal trouble.

When schedules are created automatically by scheduling software and replacements are also assigned automatically by that software, there’s less of a chance for discrimination (intentional, unintentional, or perceived).

If managers are inclined to give certain employees special treatment based on their performance (for example, scheduling top performers for the busiest shifts), make sure to keep clear records of that performance so that you can provide evidence for your decisions.

In fact, some staff scheduling programs include performance management features to make this type of record-keeping easier.

Not accounting for local employment laws

Governments all over the world have taken steps to protect workers’ rights. Local laws in your jurisdiction may take the following measures in the interest of employees’ health, safety, and wellbeing:

• Limiting the total number of hours employees can be expected to work each day or week — and dictate the pay they’re entitled to for overtime hours
• Mandating breaks throughout the day at certain intervals or at certain lengths
• Restricting the number of last-minute schedule changes that employers impose on their staff
• Guaranteeing workers a minimum number of hours of work each week
• Specifying the number of hours required between shifts (for example, employers may not legally be able to schedule someone for a night shift followed by a day shift the following morning)

Modern workforce management software can monitor these kinds of compliance regulations automatically. It may alert managers when employees are nearing overtime limits or when their schedule doesn’t meet regulatory requirements for breaks or total hours scheduled.

Even in the absence of local law, users can establish their own standards to ensure fair treatment for employees.

Not reviewing the software-generated schedule

Top-of-the-line scheduling software like Deputy can quickly create the kind of staff schedules that used to take hours.

First, it builds the shift structure with a feature called “autobuild,” accounting for factors such as sales forecasts, bookings, and foot traffic to estimate how many people are needed. Then, it fills the schedule with the right people using the “auto-schedule” feature, which accounts for employees’ scheduling preferences and expenses per shift. (For example, you can prioritize the schedules with the lowest total staff cost).

These features can be very powerful. However, software-produced schedules are only as good as the information the software can access. Your business’ scheduling needs can change each day in ways that software alone can’t anticipate.

Software-produced schedules are only as good as the information that software can access.

That’s why each software-produced schedule should be reviewed manually by a manager who personally understands the abilities of the staff and the needs of the business. And the manager in charge of scheduling should be willing to revisit the schedule in light of feedback and input from employees.

Finally, if you’re interested in adopting some of this technology for your own small business, we can help.

Cloudscape Technologies specializes in empowering retailers and restaurateurs in the Middle East to build cloud-based software solutions. We recommend and implement best-in-market software that takes their businesses to the next level. In fact, we’ve personally worked with retailers who have saved 7 hours each week after implementing scheduling software.

Plus, when scheduling software integrates with a cloud-based point of sale system, you can see your sales data overlaid with your staff data to get even more insights into optimal scheduling.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can equip your store or restaurant with the best cloud-based software tools on the market.

Small business owners, in particular, often have to deal with an overwhelming number of tasks on their to-do lists. They’re often personally involved in the operations of the company on all levels. They are also on-call constantly in case things go wrong.

It’s easy for small business owners to get weighed down by unimportant tasks that distract from more important work, such as working on big-picture strategies. And when small business owners can’t focus on the work that has the most important consequences for the company over time, the business almost always suffers as a result.

With that in mind, any tactic that allows owners to buy back their time can have huge benefits for the entire company. Could any of the following tools be saving you hours each day?

Automate Time-Consuming Tasks with Software

These days, there are software-as-a-service options designed to automate almost every detail-oriented, repeatable task small business owners face. These software programs “live” on remote servers, so small business owners don’t have to worry about handling things like software installation, security, or updates themselves.

Perhaps more impressively, many of these cloud-based technologies can integrate with each other to create tech solutions that can save even more time.

For example, the biggest software time-savers for restaurants and retailers are cloud-based point-of-sale software and cloud-based inventory software. These programs deliver huge time savings on their own, making formerly-tedious tasks like stock counting and sales reconciliations a breeze.

But they also have the potential to connect with dozens of programs that handle tasks like accounting, HR, marketing, customer relationship management, email marketing, customer loyalty, and more.

With these tools, tasks like staff scheduling, staff communications, payroll, invoicing, and billing also takes a fraction of the time than they would do manually.

Using integrated programs can simplify your work and processes even more. For example, account details for customers, employees, and vendors may pass back and forth seamlessly among the programs with no need to enter information twice. Financial data and sales details are shared automatically among your accounting, point of sale, and marketing programs. With the right integrations, you won’t waste any more time compiling data manually or switching back and forth between programs.

Go Paperless

Compared to paper, digital files have many time-saving advantages. Thanks to modern, cloud-based software tools, digital files are easily searchable, backed up automatically in the cloud, and accessible in moments from any internet-connected device.

If you haven’t gone paperless yet, consider how much time you could save each month searching for files, trying to replace missing or damaged hard copies, and compiling the data you need to get the reports you need.

Many SaaS programs come equipped with custom dashboards so owners and managers can check in on important KPIs at a glance.

When you use software to manage your operations, it’s easy to run custom reports and filter your data to identify trends and insights that can go on to save your business time and money in other ways.

It has never been easier to check in on your business’s financial health.

Document Your Processes

Most small business owners don’t bother documenting the actions they’re responsible for each day at work.

For one, the process of documentation can be time-consuming in itself. It may also seem that some jobs are too obvious to warrant documentation. And if you’re just getting a business started or in the midst of making changes, you may still be hesitant to make any process official.

However, documenting processes so they’re easy to replicate has enormous time-saving benefits.

The biggest time savings may come during the onboarding process. Every time you make a new hire, you can rely on those documents to expedite training. It’s never safe to assume that the experience you’ve gained about the best ways to do things in your business will be obvious to others. Without documentation, you’ll spend many more hours with each new employee teaching them the ins and outs of their jobs.

But documentation also improves daily operations in other ways. Sticking with one documented process will make things run more smoothly and eliminate confusion. It will clarify the “right” processes for employees. Over time, it will make everyone’s jobs easier and reduce the number of “fires” that the owner has to put out.

Finally, documentation also makes difficult tasks easier to outsource, as we’ll discuss next.

Delegate to Experts and Consultants

Many small business owners are hesitant to delegate their work.

They tend to have a lot at stake with the company personally, so delegation requires a lot of trust. Plus, in the short term, delegation actually takes more time: Time to document the work required (as we just mentioned), time to search for the best candidates for the task, and time to train and evaluate them until they can do it well.

No wonder that small business owners often resort to doing the work themselves.

However, owners who don’t learn to delegate will find that it’s impossible to grow their businesses.

If you don’t start delegating your difficult work to experts, you may start losing ground to competitors. They’ll be saving lots of time, and that can give them a serious advantage.

If a difficult task can’t be automated with software, there’s still a good chance that you can find someone who can do it more quickly than you can, and who will make fewer mistakes.

When it comes to delegation, you have several options. Start by identifying the tasks that tend to create bottlenecks or the tasks that tend to frustrate you the most on a personal level. Then, consider who is best equipped to take care of these tasks for you. You can hire an employee, a freelancer, a consultant, or an agency.

Tasks that are ideal for delegation may be ongoing, or they may be one-time tasks to get you through a particularly stressful period.

For example, there are entire companies that specialize in helping other businesses move from one location to another or perform full annual inventory reconciliations.

There are also companies like Cloudscape Technologies that work with small business owners to identify and implement the best new cloud-based software programs for their companies.

Making an Investment

You may have noticed that many of these time-saving solutions don’t work immediately.

It takes time to choose and learn new software, creates systems for documenting internal processes and identify people you trust with your work.

However, these efforts can go on to give your business a serious competitive advantage over time.

Start with the tasks that have the biggest potential for time-saving, then continue to improve from there.

There are other perks to making more free time for yourself as a business owner. Even if you don’t see the value in taking occasional vacations from work, there is always the possibility of an emergency or health crisis that will keep you away from your business. Making sure that your day-to-day runs as smoothly as possible in your absence may help ensure that your business keeps its doors open — and make it more attractive to potential buyers.

If you want to talk to us at Cloudscape Technologies about upgrading your software, please contact us for a free consultation. We are certified partners with leading cloud software developers including Vend, Unleashed Software, Xero, Lightspeed, and Shopify, and our expert staff has years of experience delivering expert solutions to clients.