Case Study on Employee Scheduling

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The Copenhagen based Tea Salon Tante-T (Tante T translates to Auntie Tea) has been a long time customer for BusyBeeManager – we interviewed owner Mette-Maria Viscor on how they use the application for their employee scheduling.

Owner of Tante-T, Mette Marie

Owner of Tante-T, Mette Marie

Can you briefly describe your business?

Sure, we’re in the cafe business. We run a small Tea Salon were we sell organic tea as well as home baked cakes and cookies. We also have an online shop were sell organic tea and accessories (Tea Pots, Tea Bags etc.)

What’s the URL to your website?

www.tante-t.dk

How does BusyBeeManager help you in your job? (i.e. how did you do Employee Scheduling before?)

BusyBeeManager is no doubt a great help. It’s not like employee scheduling is a really big thing for us – we are busy doing the real business – baking cakes, making tea, serving customers – hence employee scheduling shouldn’t take up much time – thanks to BusyBeeManager – it doesn’t. It is really simple now just choosing a template and then hitting that auto assign button – then after a few adjustments the shift schedule is in the inbox of the employees.

We used to have employees email their “minus days” and then on the background of this and our needs for staffing we’d put together the work schedules. Since most of our employees only work part time, they used to write really long emails on when, why and how they could and couldn’t work. It was quite a big thing to figure out how to put the work schedule together without compromising either our business or the expectations of the employees. We had this monster of a spreadsheet that we used to keep track of it – I’m so happy those days are gone now.

What is your favorite feature of BusyBeeManager?

I’m not sure – either it’s the autoassign in combination with the weekly shift templates – or else it is the ability for employees to login and submit their availability – we haven’t used that last feature for very long so I’m not quite sure – it shows great potential however. Time will tell I guess.

How much time approximately does BusyBeeManager save you monthly?

That’s an easy question – because we used to pay someone by the hours to do the schedules – it took around 8 full hours that we had to pay for every month – and that was only for doing the schedules – then there is all the time we had to answer people because they couldn’t remember their shifts etc. That’s also in the past now. Employees can login themselves and print their schedules.

How is your impression of Value for Money in BusyBeeManager?

I’d have to say that it is immense. We save around $200 every month in salary costs alone just by using BusyBeeManager as our shift scheduling tool. I don’t mind paying the $15 a month – I guess paying will also make it easier to fund the development of new features for you guys ;)

What do you think about the template and the auto assign features?

Great! I always had the feeling when I was fiddling with Excel that there must be an easier way – now I see that there is.

What could we do better?

One of the things that we miss in the application is the detailed availability – some of our employees think that it is a shame they can only select full days as either available or unavailable. I would be nice if it was possible to submit i.e. Football from 6-8 PM every wednesday- that would mean improved flexibility for the employees. We have sort of found a way to work around it though so it is not a big issue – we solved it by using the roles feature in a creative way. We created a Full Time employee role and a Part Time employee role. The Full Time role normally covers shifts in the daytime whereas Part Time covers shifts in the evening and night time. Since employees can have multiple roles – it is actually okay for us – but the employees still ask for it.

Another feature that would be nice to have is shift trading – employees generally have the opportunity to trade the shifts between themselves. It would be cool if that was supported online.

(Note from BusyBeeManager – these features are in the roadmap for this summer 2010)

Thanks to Mette-Marie for doing this interview! We hope you’ll also take advantage of our shift scheduling software or read this other case story from the retail industry!

Proper use of the staff meetings

So what do you use the staff meetings for in your business / restaurant / cafe / shop?

Coffee shop

Why use staff meetings for employee scheduling?

We talked to a few of the BusyBeeManager clients and it seems that there are different approaches to this – a few of them are:

  • Communications – keeping staff up to date
  • New menu / new products
  • Socializing – put a face on everyone
  • Shift scheduling

Communication is important – if you don’t communicate how you want things to be done, it can easily result in a lack of direction and can undermine the whole concept of your business! With a lack of focus, and no real priorities, you show a general lack of interest, and the staff will likely do the same. A staff will work only to the standards you set. To set these standards, there needs to be communication on a regular basis – that’s probably one of the best uses for the staff meeting.

Communications is also about new products, services and offerings. Especially if you are in the hospitality industry and serve people food and beverages – it is important that every employee has first hand knowledge about all the products – food or non food. There is also the small detail, that free food tend to make everybody show up on these meetings – making it easier for you as a manager to get your message through.

Having employees meet other employees is especially important if you hire often and it would otherwise take a long time before everyone would meet – either on duty or on the same shift. If your employees can have a chat and get to know each other in a social environment under your control – you can use this to inspire them with team spirit – ultimately this will end up in your customers having a better service because the people working at your place will seem (and be) happier, smile more, handle mistakes better and in general take better care of your guests.

So it seems that there is only shift scheduling left – we see that some of our customers at least used to do the shift scheduling at the staff meetings – why isn’t it so anymore?

One reason could be, that business owners can now build their employee schedules automatically using our employee schedule software. That way they don’t have to spend valuable time on the meetings discussing who can work when and how. This talk is simply not productive for the business. Administration that can be handled automatically MUST be handled automatically in order to run a successful business. Some even used to pay employees to come to the staff meetings (which I think they should) and then spent most of the time doing the employee scheduling puzzle…

So what’s the catch? Use the staff meetings for discussing things that are important to your business – How do we service customers? How are the new products like? Who else is on the employee roster? Don’t spend waste everybodys time doing boring administrative shift scheduling on the meetings when it can be handled online in a few minutes from home…

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How to prevent employees from burning out

Hi there,

You want your employees to do the best they can, when they are at work. Happy employees tend to give a better service for the customers and have in general a better performance than unhappy employees. So how do you prevent them from burning out and instead keep that spirit up that put the sales numbers up there?

According to this article there are numerours factors that contribute to their well being and thus numerous things you can do to keep them going:

  • Training – obviously – if they feel like they’re good at what they do – they probably are
  • Employee Rights, Employee Incentives, And Employee Time – value their opinions, involve them in decisions, devote time for just being together as a team
  • Performance and evaluation – reward good employees, motivate and help poor employees to do better

And (you guessed it?)

  • Employee Scheduling

Yes – as it turns out – proper employee scheduling can actually help your employees from burning out. If you take care to schedule the late sleepers in the evening shifts, the morning persons in the morning shifts – in general – involve them in the scheduling proces – make them propose requests as to when they will prefer to work and when they’d rather not. If it is no hassle to you – then why not strive to meet these requests?

Do you have any examples that prove this point? Please feel free to comment!

I believe that our employee scheduling software can help take the administrative pain out of meeting these requests – thus helping you as a business owner in having motivated employees and thus having a more successful business.

Take care of your employees!

Influence on Schedules gives happy and healthy employees

Wow – according to this article – is seems that influence on the employee schedules actually improves the health of the employees.

It isn’t actually a Value Proposition for BusyBeeManager, but it’s worth taking into account when considering the employee scheduling options. Having the fascist approach – Boss decides all – isn’t really helping business (they get ill it seems – or worse – they quit). But on the other hand – giving employees the opportunity to object to much, having time off too often, posing unreasonable demands or wishes to the schedules doesn’t seem like too good an idea anyway. It’s fine to keep them happy but it can easily end up with unreasonable amounts of administration.

This is where we think that an online employee scheduling solution is helpful – using this you can decide exactly which requirements / requests for the schedule that the employees can pose. And you wont have to interpret emails in order to transform them into useful data.

So keep employees happy (and healthy it seems) and keep those administrative tasks to a minimum.

A little guidance would be nice!

Hi there,

We recently added a little nifty feature that should help you get going with BusyBeeManager a little easier.

For new accounts this means, that you will see a light box appear over the schedule page once you log in for the first time. The light box tells you about three main things you need to get hold of before you can utilize BusyBeeManager properly for doing the employee schedule.

  1. Configure the settings
  2. Create employees
  3. Define staffing requirements – building a template (see tutorial videos here)

We see that some of you never really get around making the template – and if you don’t make the template – it’s pretty safe to bet that you probably won’t use the auto assign functionality either – and that’s the big time saver here.

So – we hope you don’t mind the light box and will use the tips for getting proper value from the application!

Staff scheduling tool

Staff Scheduling is the most important administrative task that needs to be executed perfectly for smooth and easy business operations. This will not only help you to organize your business, but you will get more time to spend on other business activities by which you can gain significant business returns. You save your valuable time and efforts if you have an excellent web application like busybeemanager. Now you can utilize this time for useful and profitable business operations and think about different ways to expand and flourish your small business into a large one. This way you will not only reap profits, but you will also reduce your overall administrative costs thereby increasing the savings in your small businesses. It is quite important to control your expenses these days. Due to the strained economic conditions, you need to be sensible enough and get a perfect Staff Scheduling Tool for your company that manages and organizes your modern workforce effectively.

There are a lot of workers who work on part time basis as they either have their studies on the side or they might be not able to attend full time jobs. And you need to schedule your staff so that there is no mismanagement in your business operations while keeping the staff happy. Moreover, you must always remember that a simple mistake can cause losses in any business. Hence it is advised that one should have an ideal Staff Scheduling Tool for easy and perfect operation of any small business. There are several benefits of Staff Scheduling Software tool that will surely help you to operate your business smoothly.

-          Organizing Shifts: It also helps to dispense shifts to the entire team of employees. Thus, this way it takes care of which employee will work for which shift and for how many hours. All this is done automatically, so you have to be relaxed as this staff scheduling tool does all your time consuming jobs in no time. Moreover, you can view your staff schedule online, you can prints and post it to your employees or can even mail it to your employees.

-          Job Descriptions: It maintains all the job descriptions that a company has, so you need not bother about marinating this account. Busybeemanager will do all that you need. It helps you to understand all the smallest details regarding the company staff like their shifts, number of working hours or if any employee had to work for extra hours etc. Thus, you need not bother about maintaining these confusing records.

-          Weekly work schedule: This wonderful web application is of great help as you can view the pre-arranged weekly work schedule of all the employees working for your company. So based on the requirements of recruitment, the business manager can add the necessary number of work shifts for his company. This automated system helps to do all your administrative tasks instantly and easily.

Now use your limited time in something fruitful and effective so that you really earn returns on your investments. Invest your time in some other useful and creative ideas that helps your business flourish and grow. Get a perfect Staff scheduling tool for your business today and leave all the worries about systematic planning of your business.

New feature – sign up for paid plans without credit card

Hi there,

So last week we launched a new feature for our employee scheduling software – www.BusyBeeManager.com

First and foremost we made it possible to sign up for the plus and the basic plans without having a PayPal account. We realised that many of the sites visitors may not have a PayPal account and weren’t interested in creating one for the sole purpose of checking our application out.

So now we made it possible to check out BusyBeeManager for a whole month with all the features enabled – without having a PayPal account or even a credit card.

We hope of course, that you will try it out and see how efficient it is for dealing with your employee schedules – if you’re hooked – we hope it’s easier to convince you to subscribe (and yes – you still need a PayPal account for that=)

Hope this will make more people check it out and realize the power of automatic employee scheduling!

Why you need Shift Scheduling Software

When you start up a small scale business, say a retail shop, a restaurant or a café, you have to organize a lot of things right from the day you start up. Any business, whether big or small, needs to be organized efficiently as not to spend money on stuff that doesn’t generate revenue. There are several things that you really need to know which help you to become a successful businessman.

Apart from working capital and inventory needed in your business, one has to think about scheduling the staff too. Today you will find modern workforce who work for part-time, are quite efficient and you need to schedule the staff accordingly so that you as well as they know their work schedule in advance. This is the most difficult administrative task, but you need to perform it perfectly well as your entire production depends on the management of your staff and money can very well go down the drain if you are over staffed. This not only affects the production of your company, but it will considerably reduce your overall expenses too. So if you really want to earn huge returns on your investments, you need to schedule your company staff so that you can save a great deal of your time and energy. You will be amazed to know that there are many online companies to help you as they know what the net savvy modern workers want.

You can save a lot of time as the shift scheduling can be done entirely automatic. That will free up enough time for you to think about new ideas that take your business to new heights. Amazing web applications are there to manage your entire staff and offer perfect staff scheduling that will help you greatly. If you are running a small business like coffee shop, bars, stores, kiosks, departmental store etc. a tool such as the BusyBeeManager shift scheduling tool will help you schedule your staff most accurately. It takes a huge amount of time and effort to manually assign shifts and work to your entire working team while still meeting their requests for days off, vacations and which positions can be filled in by whom. You need to schedule the number of hours they work for, number of shifts, number of hours worked in extra shifts and a lot of other things. But the automated application will offer all that you need. You can now free yourself from this tedious job of scheduling staff from now.

Organizing the weekly staff schedule with this web application is easy. Now you can add shifts according to the exact requirement for staffing. Thus, you will come to know which work is assigned to which employees along with their work schedule. It will also solve the problem of allotment of specific shift to particular employees. This can be done manually too, but this automated service does all that you need immediately and perfectly – that will further reduce ‘no shows’ for your shifts. Moreover, it solves all the problems related to the availability of staff, their vacations and the pre-planned number of working hours for each employee. All the work is assigned to every employee automatically, thanks to the web application tool that has immensely helped the business managers and business owners who are now able to run their business more effectively and streamlined. You can view the schedule anytime you wish to, as it is accessible online. If you want you can even print and post it to all your employees or email them directly.

Sounds cool? Try it 30 days for free – no credit card needed.

Employee Scheduling Tool

In the present market scenario, majority of small scale business owners are looking out for some effective ways to cut down costs and thereby increase their profit margins. But due to the modern workforce and high flexibility of the workers, this administrative task has rather become difficult. There are several workers who work on part-time basis for these small businesses as they have other jobs to attend to or they might be students earning a little money on the side. In order to reduce costs, it is necessary that one should have perfect knowledge how to have a flexibility of management of availability of workers, automatic scheduling process, shift trading etc. These are the main areas where one can considerably reduce the company’s overall expenses. There are several online vendors that are specifically meant to meet the growing web savvy modern workforce of the present generation.

To help the business manager or business owners to have the time to concentrate on their core business and come out with better ideas to flourish and prosper, excellent web based applications are here to take the responsibility for the employee scheduling. A small business manager who manages businesses like shops, restaurants, cafes, bars, convenience stores, kiosks and other small departments have to constantly spend a lot of their valuable time to organize the staff and plan who is to work at which times of the week. Thus, this valuable time could be utilized into creative ideas to expand the business or to make it more profitable by spending some time behind the counter instead of scheduling.

In any business, big or small, everything needs to be organized and planned so that it can be operated smoothly. So, I hope you’ll consider BusyBeeManager. We consider it one of the best employee scheduling tools available online, helps to ease the process of employee scheduling. It takes into account job descriptions or different roles that a company has, who can take a particular shift, number of working hours for each employee, that was pre-planned, days off, vacations and a lot of other things. It even helps to know how many hours did the employee work if he was assigned some extra shifts. Thus, in short, our web application really helps to organize all the administrative tasks easily.

Furthermore it automatically solves the problem of which employee will take which shift. Sure, you can assign the shift manually, but the automated system can do this instantly and automatically. This depends on the job roles, planned vacations, availability of employees in general and the planned number of hours with every employee. The web application assigns the shifts to all the employees automatically. Moreover, this web application also helps to view the weekly work schedule. So this way the business manager can start adding work shifts depending on the needs for recruitment. It will also help him to know what type of work is assigned to which employee along with the time schedule. But most probably, staffing needs will be similar for each week. You can save a weekly template that the scheduling process is able to leverage from.

Thus, the entire scheduling process becomes easier and helpful for the business manager and the schedule will be available online, whenever you want, or you can print it to post in the shop or email it to the employees.

Do check it out ;)

Welcome to the BusyBeeManager blog.

Hi everybody.

Welcome to the BusyBeeManager blog. We expect to use this blog for multiple purposes.

  1. Giving updates upon what we are currently working?
  2. Giving you usable feedback on the subject employee scheduling
  3. Pleasing Search Engines and hopefully increasing our Search Engine Rankings (so if an article appears to be a little off key – it’s not meant for you but for Google ;)

So stay tuned for more posts- coming up soon…

/The BusyBeeManager Team