Scheduling in Workforce Made Easy by TimeTec

Workforce scheduling is crucial to business operations because ultimately the objective of scheduling the workforce is to meet business demands at low cost and high productivity.  Workforce scheduling is a complex process of assigning working hours to the workforce. Different industries have different processes and the complexity varies. Depending on the nature of the business and its workload, workforce scheduling should be done right and fit the business perfectly for companies to benefit from it optimally.

Set your workforce scheduling right with TimeTec.

 This document presents 3 Types of Scheduling to suit different types of workforce and their working environment. One organization might use one type of schedule or a combination of a few.

1.  Fixed Schedule: Schedule according to organization’s normal operating hours.
2. Flexible Schedule: Schedule according to total workweek hours but not fixed to the standard schedule’s rules. By default, the Flexible schedule is to record in-out pairs in use and calculate man-hours.
a.     Job Cost – A feature in Flexible Schedule to calculate the man-hours involved for a specific job/task done by a specific employee
3. Rotational Schedule: Schedule that covers a wide variety of work schedules and implies that shifts rotate according to the specific cycle. Some schedules require distribution of different shifts to the same employees in a day, which includes morning, swing and night shift. This schedule can cater up to 3 different shifts per day to rotate in specific cycle.

FIXED SCHEDULE

Fixed Schedule requires an employee to work according to the normal working hours of an organization.

A standard schedule requires an employee to work according to the standard working hours or normal working hours of an organization, which amounts to a maximum of a 40-hour workweek, where weekdays are working days and weekends are off days. This is the most basic schedule where working time is constant at 8 hours per day and with a 1-hour break. Hence, Fixed Schedule can be set for employees who are working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
This schedule is suitable for normal businesses, which applies fixed working hours to a majority of employees with the exception of a few, which might need some other scheduling types.

TIMETEC CLOUD
Login > Schedule tab > Clocking Schedule.

Configure the timetable and attendance rules of the Weekly schedule.


Setup the roster by adding new duty roster. Schedule tab > Group Duty Roster

The picture is showing the working calendar for the whole year for your better understanding.

Attendance Automation

Reducing Counterproductive Work Behavior Using Automated Attendance System as Tool

There are mainly three kinds of productivity labeled in the office and two of those are NOT desirable by any sane employer. One is the unproductive bunch which refers to employees who wander around not doing what they are supposed to do, not engaged in any productive activities, more of seat-warmers but they not posed any threats to the company’s goals and objectives. It’s not very hard to spot these unproductive lots; all you have to do is to look for the people who know exactly what part of them needed change to be more productive but they just refuse to do so. 

 Another undesirable group of employee is the counterproductive mix. This group of employee displays counterproductive work behavior, which refers to actions by employees that go against the goals and aims of their employer. There are numerous and broad driving forces to counterproductive work behavior such as environmental reason, training deficiency, harsh and harmful personality and many other external factors. The only group that a company wishes it had is the productive one.

 Robinson and Bennett (1995), “A Typology of Deviant Workplace Behaviors: A Multidimensional Scaling Study”, they categorize workplace deviants into four categories, production deviance that involves tardiness or goldbricking, property deviance such as theft or sabotage of equipment, political deviance for example  gossiping or favouritism and personal aggression which includes physical aggression, sexual harassment and work bullying.

 Counterproductive work behavior is not straight up corrupt or illegal behavior, but it exists in varying degree in many companies. If these behaviors are not being handled appropriately by the managers involved, a company might face a bigger problem that could potentially have negative impacts to their business. 

 Attendance data could help a company deal with counterproductive work behavior 

 If we look at the above category, production deviance can easily be identified by using attendance software; attendance data from the software can accurately point out who had been slacking in time management and with the same data, a company can identify the attendance pattern of each employee. Tardiness is not only limited to those who come late to the office. In the minds of many workers, as long as they don’t check in late, tardiness has nothing to do with them. But when using advanced automated time attendance software like TimeTec, the definition of tardiness is wider than manual attendance could ever cover. Coming in late from breaks, miss punches, leaving from work early, leaving the office to do errands, unnecessary overtime and etc are considered tardiness and these deviant behaviors can be accurately traced by modern attendance software.
Tardiness is not only limited to those who come in late for work.
Attendance Automation

Dealing With Attendance Anomalies Head On


Every company implements its own time and attendance policies based on the needs of the organization. For example, official work hours are from 9am to 5pm, break time is from 12pm to 1pm, tea-break is from 415pm to 430pm and everyone is only given 10 minutes allowance for IN and OUT times.

TimeTec supports up to 14-columns of clocking schedules which makes it suitable for all business sizes.

The implementation of the policy, however, could differ depending on the management style; some companies might treat attendance very strictly where all minutes count while some others might have a lax attitude about it so long as the work is done. In the policy, regular work hours, regular break hours, time allowances before and after these defined official times are usually explained and communicated clearly to all employees, and everybody is expected to abide by the policy. 
Absenteeism

Being Flexible About Workplace Flexibility


There is nothing wrong with sticking to the regular working hours; it has been there for ages. Employees are familiar with what is expected of them and having regular working hours will keep them in line with the company’s imposed disciplines perfectly. Ideally, that is what all employers are gunning for, one system that fits all, having all ducks in a row. In reality however, employees come from diverse economic backgrounds, they have their own set of family history; each carries with them their own set of problems or situations. People have sick family members to take care of, elderly people need attention, children need to be attended to when babysitters aren’t available, and various other problems or there are some employees who prefer to report to work at certain times in order to remain creative and productive.

Applying flexibility in scheduling might not be able to solve problems across the company but it helps to tackle a few common problems of employees and in turn can become a great tool to improve recruitment, retention and at the same time addressing employee diversity, putting the company in a better light as a company that cares. 
Attendance Automation

The Importance of Quantifying Workload in Scheduling

Workload. How heavy is yours?
How often do you hear your colleagues talk about how heavy their workloads are? Generally when you hear this, there’s no exact indication of the actual load, you just assume that it’s heavy; the weight of the work is subjective. Nevertheless, when it comes to the actual working environment, the management’s definition of workload must not be vague; it has to mean something solid, calculable. It has to be clearly identified and quantified for organizations to have a clear idea on how to manage its available resources in order to match their business demand within the given time frame. In other words, an employee can’t just claim that he is busy and couldn’t handle more; the claim needs to be supported with numbers and an employer can’t assign the tasks without knowing the workload it puts on an employee.

Take for example in a restaurant environment, how do you quantify the jobs? When a cashier infers that she is under heavy workload, what does she imply? Or when a restaurant has many customers on waiting, how to solve the problem?  In order to do this, we have to start thinking in terms of numbers to measure the tasks.
Effective Workforce Management
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)