Healthy work culture: tools to create efficient employee schedules

One of the most important components of a company is its culture. When you have a culture that encourages employee happiness, it can make a massive difference to how your company performs. As studies have found that companies with happy employees outperform the competition by 20% and earn 1.2 to 1.7% more than peer firms.

So, when you make any changes or additions to important components like the employee schedule at your company, you should be extremely meticulous. This will ensure that it only has a positive effect on your employee culture and no negative effects at all.

Therefore, to help you create an employee schedule that creates a happy work atmosphere and culture I have put together this quick guide for you.

#1 Ask employees what they want

A healthy work culture will only exist if you know what your employees want. It should match their requirements, personalities and skill sets collectively. This is why while creating a schedule that promotes a positive culture, you need to find out what your employees want.

Start by either interviewing employees individually or by getting them to take a survey. Find out things like their favourite time to work at, the colleagues/team members they prefer working with most and other questions that will help you gather better information about what they prefer at work. Also, ask questions that will better understand their personalities.

You can easily set up this survey by using a tool like Survey Monkey.

Next, conduct a group meeting so that your employees can sit together and discuss what an employee schedule they prefer would look like. Make sure you record this meeting and get someone to take notes.

Taking these two steps will help you create an employee schedule that pleases your employees both individually and collectively. When you run surveys like these it shows your employees that you care. This assurance will spur them to work harder. They just want to have their say as found by this study.

For example, Facebook conducted a survey and asked 30% of its employees whether or not they were personally committed to improving their work experience there. This resulted in the employees being 12% more likely than their colleagues to request a curated list of additional tools and resources to help them become more engaged at Facebook.

#2 Set up the schedule

After you gather the data from the above method you can set up the schedule. Combine this newly acquired information with data from other sources like the best-performing companies and your previous employee schedules to set up a schedule that not only promotes a healthy culture but also boosts performance.

Make sure you execute this step by using a dedicated software to manage your employees’ schedule. Modern software comes inclusive of templates, AI and more advanced features. This will save a lot of time.

You should set up this schedule at least 2 weeks in advance.

Making minor improvements to employee scheduling and ensuring that the schedule is executed properly can improve your sales by 3% at least. When GAP began releasing employee schedules 2 weeks in advance and made some other changes to their schedule their labour productivity increased by 5% which helped them earn $2.9 million.

#3 Allow employees to communicate and make changes

After you release the schedule, you will find that some of your employees will get back to you to inform you that they would like some changes in timings. To make things easier, you should let employees communicate with each other directly and make changes to the schedule by themselves. Employees can themselves contact their colleagues and find people who would be happy to cover their sift while they are absent. You should only step in if it is absolutely necessary.

In the above study with Gap, one of the other changes they made was allowing employees to swap shifts with each other through the scheduling app without the requirement of approval from the managers.

This will not only give you less work to do but will also improve communication between employees. This will help promote a healthier work culture.

#4 Measure employee happiness and productivity

You won’t create the perfect version of the employee schedule in your first attempt. It will take several attempts before you create something all of them will be happy with. This is why you should measure employee happiness and performance periodically (at least every month). It will help you check if the schedule is faring better or if things have worsened.

This should be measured by two methods. One of them is through the aforementioned interviews and collective meetings. You only need to change the questions you ask. This will help you check their happiness levels.

To measure productivity, you mainly need to compare the productivity levels and company performance before and after the implementation of the schedule. You can even install employee tracking on your employees’ devices (laptops and phones) to check the effect the new schedule has had on them.

You can use the data you get from these two methods to modify the schedules. Through this experimentation, you will be able to create a newer and more accurate employee schedule and work culture.

A company that has great success with better tracking employee activity is Afton Manufacturing. After implementing better employee time tracking methods, they realised that they were losing 10 minutes a day per employee. And after making necessary modifications in the first year alone they were able to save up 300 hours and $6,000.

Conclusion

These are the 4 steps you must take to create an employee schedule that promotes a healthy culture. It requires a lot of work. But you will see the effects of it in increased profits.