While Scheduling Employees in various shifts to get the work done is a challenging task in itself, ensuring that employees are scheduling successfully, keeping the multiple constraints such as location, time, number of workers needed to do a task in mind, adds to the complexity. That is why the person responsible for assigning shifts to the employees has to be vigilant enough to know which people are available on a particular day and even the time slot. If this is not done perfectly, the very essence of scheduling employees to maximize sales and reduce labor costs is lost. Sounds complex, right? To ensure that this error-prone and critical task is carried out accurately, organizations are leveraging the workforce scheduling software regardless of their size. Workforce Scheduling software skillfully provides you with details about the employees on leave or unavailable at a time slot. Thus, the chances of error and confusion compared to the same process done manually on a sheet of paper are almost negligible. Let’s take a look at the potential benefits of using workforce management software for your business: Manage schedules of different departments: If you find it hard to juggle between managing the employees of various departments, scheduling software can be your best companion. Minimize human errors: To err is human is a very popular proverb, and it’s true at large. Even if you a digital spreadsheet to carve employee schedules, errors like understaffing can still creep in. Scheduling software lets you automate the task by providing all the required information in one place and even alerts you if you miss something. Cuts down on redundant tasks: Scheduling employees essentially means creating and assigning shifts week by week and month by month; this task is repeated endlessly. However, with employee scheduling software, you can create templates and use them in the future and even copy the past schedules, thereby saving a lot of time. Employees can collaborate on scheduling: Cloud-based employee scheduling software lets the employees swap shifts and change time slots. Thus it makes sure no conflicts arise. Create a knowledge base: Scheduling software can also predict employee requirements during peak seasons based on the past data stored in the software. Whoa! That’s more than you can think of. Now that you know how employee scheduling software can improve the efficiency and productivity of your employees and reduce labor costs let’s deep dive and find out about the hottest employee scheduling software available in the market.
Soon
Soon is a powerful and versatile workforce management software that helps you manage your employee’s time, attendance, and performance all in one system. It is an effective tool for managing payroll, leaves, and shift patterns. The platform is also quite good at producing reports and measuring employee productivity. Additionally, Soon provides tools for monitoring employee work performance and adherence to company policies. Companies can use Soon to keep track of every employee’s hours, create shift schedules, and check performance metrics. Soon is designed to be simple and easy to use and helps you manage your workforce. It has many features that can help businesses improve their productivity and efficiency. Companies can customize the platform to fit the needs of the business. Key Features
Quick and straightforward onboarding of employeesAdvanced leave management by creating leave categories, reviewing and approvalFew minutes to create accurate and error-free dynamic schedulesAutomate crucial recurring tasksComprehensive team management activities include creating groups, assigning specific tasks, capturing attendance data, etc.Boost team productivity through the personalized schedule shared inbox and conversational change requests.Easily incorporates third-party software like HR, automation, admin, security, communication, customer service, etc.
Soon is crucial for the customer care and support team to effectively and efficiently manage workflows. The platform will be available for a 30-day free trial. Its pricing structure is adaptable to accommodate both small and large businesses.
Breathe Rota
Rota from Breathe makes your team scheduling simple and efficient. This tool comes with a drag-and-drop roaster builder with simplistic role assigning and sharing options. Besides, you can save any roaster template for future workforce scheduling. Additionally, the cloud-based applications and notifications keep everyone on the same page. Rota also features a personal dashboard for the employees to accept, decline, and swap shifts. Moreover, the timeclock helps to prepare automatic timesheets. You can start with Breathe Rota with a free 14-day free trial to get first-hand experience to smooth workforce management.
Shiftboard
Shiftboard is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses track workforce scheduling and managing details. It mainly focuses on the employees employed on an hourly basis where work scheduling, real-time interaction, and providing feedback are essential to carry out daily tasks. Apart from employee scheduling, Shiftboard also includes time and attendance recording, applicant tracking, and onboarding tools. Thus, Shiftboard is known to help cut down labor costs and improve employee productivity in the long run. What makes Shiftboard different from other software is that it is highly customizable. So you can configure it to meet the unique demands of your business. The key benefits of using Shiftboard are as follows:
Optimize Scheduling: Customize work profiles, team schedules, and business rules to meet the work scheduling challenges. Shiftboard informs you about the employee availability preventing you from scheduling the workers who are not available.Real-Time Alerts: When you assign shifts to the workers, Shiftboard automatically notifies them. Besides, automated reminders help ensure that they do not miss their shifts.Demand Planning: Well-organized historical data helps you optimize the work schedule resulting in cost-cutting and lets you align the work schedule with that of your clients.Platform Independent: Your workers can view and manage their assigned shifts using the web browser from any operating system. Android and iPhone users are free to use the apps.
Shiftboard offers two workforce scheduling software variants to meet the demands of production-centric and service-centric organizations. Their enterprise plans are highly scalable and cater to more than 100,000 workers.
ScheduleAnywhere
ScheduleAnywhere is an online workforce scheduling platform that helps managers schedule the employees working in different departments and locations. It empowers the organizations to oversee staffing requirements, track work hours, respond to time-off requests, assign overtime, notify workers about their work shifts, and more. This workforce scheduling software is programmed to meet the requirements of different industries and sectors like retail, business services, transportation, government, energy, healthcare, public safety, and law enforcement. Managers can assign and schedule shifts, rotate work shifts, and create shift patterns. The ability to schedule multiple employees and copy entire schedules eliminates the need to re-entering work schedules. Other benefits are as follows:
Eliminates the probability of assigning overlapped shifts so that no employee is over-booked.Get insights and generate reports, including employee details such as location, shift timings, departments, and more.Employees can choose their preferred communication medium to get notifications regarding their assigned shifts.It is possible to choose from different schedule ranges such as 1-day, 7-day, 14-day, 28-day, and 42-day schedules. Besides, they can be color-coded to spot sick days, vacations, and other leave types.You also track your employee’s training, skills, certifications and automatically alert them before 90 days of their expiration.
ScheduleAnywhere is pretty affordable, and the plans start at $25 per month. You can request customizations in the plan depending on your business size and other add-ons you choose.
Humanity
Humanity is an employee scheduling software apt for small, medium, and large companies that assist their owners and managers in assigning work and schedule shifts to the employees.You can fine-tune the software to make them cohere with the company’s standards. Humanity is also compatible with mobile devices so that you can handle employee scheduling and tackle problems from anywhere. Humanity includes striking scheduling features, like drag-and-drop capability, assigning shifts to the employees based on their skills and work level. Apart from the team managers, employees benefit from this scheduling software. They can swap their shifts and request time off from any location. They can also view their schedule on the Humanity mobile app. Humanity employee scheduling software offers the following features:
It is used in more than 175000 businesses worldwide to fulfill their employee scheduling needs such as real-time scheduling, managing shift timings, and approving day-off requests.This powerful scheduling application has an integrated Time Clock that lets you accurately track the employee shift hours, calculate attendance and export the precise timesheets generated for payroll management.Leave Module integrated into the Humanity employee scheduling app makes it easier for the workers to request day-offs. So it becomes easier to know about the staff availability in real-time.Humanity also allows you to import KPIs that can help predict the future scheduling pattern backed up by data insights.
Humanity offers three employee scheduling subscription plans. The starter plan costs $3 per user per month. Its enterprise plan can be customized according to the needs of large-scale companies.
ZoomShift
Zoomshift is another workforce scheduling platform that lets you schedule work shifts and assign work to the workers that work on an hourly basis, such as freelancers. Being a cloud-based software, it lets you respond to time-off requests, assign overtime work, and check the availability of workers. This helps keep conflicts and confusion at bay after you create schedules. Once the schedule is created, ZoomShift implicitly notifies your employees about it on their preferred communication platform. Employees have an option to request shift swaps and trades. ZoomShift has an integrated time clock that lets you track work hours if you are not happy maintaining manual timesheets. It also provides valuable insights regarding when the employees are late to work, working early, or working out of their schedule. You can also create payroll reports and export them to the payroll software to initiate payroll processing. You can access ZoomShift from the web browser and its native mobile app. Key benefits of using ZoomShift as your scheduling platform
Create work schedules without any hassleDesign scheduling templatesApprove time-off requestsManage shift swapsMonitor overtime shifts and eliminate shift conflictsTrack employee work hoursSend scheduling notifications to workersGenerate and export scheduling reports and work hours for payroll purposes.
ZoomShift subscription plans start at $2.50 per user per month for small organizations. Premium plans suitable for medium-scale organizations cost $4 per user, and a custom plan is available for large companies.
When I Work
When I Work is an employee scheduling platform available on all popular web browsers. It helps businesses and organizations create and modify employee work schedules, assign work timings, and add new tasks. Apart from this, it also lets you track work hours, fill work shifts, and manage employee attendance. Managers can handle the work schedules and track work hours directly from the native mobile apps. Employees receive notifications on the mobile apps about the shift allotment, and they can request a shift change from there. Managers can handle the leave requests and approve them on the platform. Thus, it helps minimize conflicts and errors when creating work schedules. You also get an option to import employee data as CSV files to avoid manually inserting the data. When I Work can integrate with payroll processing software, such as Gusto, QuickBooks, and ADP, facilitating faster payroll generation. It handles the onboarding process of new employees, approves time off, approves shift trades, and fills the work shifts. It also lets you confirm shifts, assign tasks, and chat with the employees to keep them updated.When I Work also supports private chats and group chat that helps facilitate communication.Employees can notify their availability, ask for time off and participate in shift trade. Where I Work costs USD 2 per user per month for small businesses, and larger companies need to opt for the enterprise version that can be customized as per their needs.
Sling
Sling is an efficient employee scheduling and collaboration platform designed to help a wide range of businesses, employing workers on a shift basis to manage employee shifts, work hours, payroll, and other tasks. Its centralized dashboard lets you configure custom shift templates to schedule work, access employee availability, respond to time off and shift swap requests. Sling has an integrated time clock feature that lets the employees record the accurate clock in/clock out, track work hours and even get late arrival and incomplete entries notifications on the mobile apps. Thanks to the single shared work calendar, admins can assign shifts and tasks to the workers of different work sites. Sling comprises four central features tasks, shifts, messages, and newsfeed. Chatting capabilities lets the employees communicate through posts, links, videos, and photos to discuss swapping shifts and notifying the changes made. The platform also has Shift templates that managers can use to assign work shifts without designing them from scratch. These templates also come with built-in filters such as date, position, department. They come in handy to quickly search for specific information. Similarly, employees too can request time off and shift trade requests through the employee portal of Sling workforce scheduling software. The free version of Sling offers a fair number of features. But you can always upgrade to the premium and business versions costing USD 3 and USD 4.
Workforce
Workforce is an end-to-end cloud solution that offers scheduling & attendance management capabilities to the HR managers of the organizations. Its unique drag and drop editor lets the managers automate creating schedules by keeping in mind the employee location and availability constraints. The workforce scheduling software automatically ensures that you comply with the laws and notifies you if this schedule violates the company policy or labor laws. Workforce scheduling platform can successfully integrate with the popular Human Resource Information Systems and Payroll Generation software like Gusto, ADP, Paychex, Square, Sage, and others. The workforce also has an app that keeps employees updated about the latest developments even when they’re occupied with work. However, workers can choose other mediums, such as SMS, Email, to receive shift updates. If an employee requests a shift cancellation, managers can quickly broadcast the vacant shift details so that any available employee can swap their shifts. Interestingly, Workforce lets you analyze the historical scheduling data to know how many workers you need to schedule for a location or on a particular day. This goes a long way in helping you optimize your work schedule. Besides, creating work schedule templates and keeping them handy for the future is also possible on this platform. Workforce’s scheduling capabilities are offered in the business subscription plan costing USD 4 per user per month. You can sign up for a 14 day free trial before purchasing the software.
Deputy
Deputy is a popular human resource management platform that provides inbuilt employee management and workforce scheduling capabilities. Its sophisticated rostering feature lets you schedule work shifts, assign tasks, and automatically calculate the overtime work duration. Deputy scheduling software can also track the work hours and attendance of the employees using the in-built time clock. Besides, the in-built communication capabilities come in handy to make general announcements. This end-to-end workforce management solution can easily integrate with popular payroll management, POS, and HR management platforms to offer added performance and management features. Deputy’s AI-powered and intuitive mobile app lets you manage work shifts regardless of your location. Moreover, the kiosk app specially made for iPad allows the employees to self serve themselves and record the clock in and clock out time. Deputy automatically notifies the workers about their shift appointment through their preferred communication medium such as email, SMS, push notification, and more. Employees also get an option to cancel the shift appointed to them, and the managers can then schedule another employee in their place. The benefits of using Deputy as your workforce scheduling software are as follows:
Handle several work locations and departments from one accountFasten the payroll generation process and handling of administrative tasksGet confirmation of shift approval by employeesAssign tasks to the employees in shifts and track their progressReduce redundancy in the handling of schedules and timesheetsKeep your data safe and secureNo special hardware and software needed
Deputy scheduling software costs USD 2.50 for every user per month billed monthly. Before purchasing the paid version, you can use the trial version for thirty-one days.
Wrapping Up 👨💻
So we’ve reached the end! These are the best workforce scheduling software amongst the tons of workforce software in the market that let you manage your employee and work shifts seamlessly. If you’re wondering which software is the best for you, there is no single answer; it depends on the requirements and standards of your company. You may also look at some of the best resource management software. Watch the video version of this article below.Do Like and subscribe to the Geekflare Youtube channel.
