Business owners and managers wear many hats. To be as productive as possible, it’s crucial that you put procedures and systems in place that allow you to use your time as efficiently as possible. One of the most time-consuming tasks that many managers face on a weekly basis is drafting an employee roster. Assessing your staffing needs, planning who will be working when, managing requests for time off and actually publishing the roster can take more time than you might have intended.
With the right approach to employee scheduling, you can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on what is an unglamorous task for many business owners. Finding a way to make this task more streamlined will allow you to spend more time doing other tasks that might be more critical to the overall success of your business. With the right systems in place, you can focus your energies on the areas of the business where you can make the most impact moving forward. 
Let’s take a look at some useful tips to help you develop more organised practices when creating your employee roster.
Use The Right Software
If you are still using pen and paper, excel spreadsheets or word docs to create your employee rosters, it’s time to try online roster software. These tools allow you to streamline the entire process and complete this task quicker than ever before. You can access historical data that will help you to determine the number of staff members you will need, and you can copy previous rosters and simply tweak them within the software. What’s more, you can also share the schedule with your team electronically and communicate with them via the platform about any changes that might be required and update them instantly. Making the move to roster software is key if you want to streamline this important task.
Start With A Template
To make the process of creating an employee schedule more straightforward, begin with a blank template of what your work week looks like. This should show when your business is open and have spaces where you can add employee details. Looking at the blank weeks ahead, you can simply fill in the gaps until you have a complete roster. Make sure that in your template, you include special spaces for managers and assistant managers who might be required on different days or for different tasks.
Create The Right Balance
While every business owner would love to have a team of stellar employees to choose from for every shift, this is rarely the case. Typically, you will have a mix of experience and ability in your team that you will need to balance throughout your roster. When you look at the staff schedule, you should make sure that you strike a good balance of experience and inexperience on each shift. The idea with this approach is that the weaker employees will learn from those that are more experienced, improving their own knowledge and skills over time. Over time, your team as a whole will become more robust, leading to fewer issues in your business in the future.
Make Your Employee Rostering More Streamlined Moving Forward
As a business owner or manager, there are a lot of tasks that you would rather be spending time on than creating weekly or monthly staff rosters. However, creating these rotas is crucial for your business to operate efficiently and should not be overlooked. Follow the tips outlined above to help you to streamline this often time-consuming process, so you have more time to spend on the more critical areas of your business as your organisation continues to grow.
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