Shift scheduling tips for events managers
Hosting events might be full-on, but building your rota doesn’t need to be.
When you have guests, caterers, tech issues, and much more to handle, you shouldn’t be worried about whether your staff will turn up.
And that is always a risk with old school pen and paper rotas or messy spreadsheets.
Did employees see the latest changes? Fear no more. Findmyshift makes it easy to build a weekly rota in just a few clicks.
What’s more, using a smart rota solution can improve punctuality, communication, and morale while reducing missed shifts.
Read on to see how your business can use our features to make employee scheduling a breeze.
Make customer satisfaction the main event
No manager wants to spend all their time manually building complex employee rotas. (At least, no manager that we’ve ever met!)
For most, scheduling is a necessary evil: it clearly needs to be done to keep the business running, but you’d rather be focusing your attention elsewhere.
Findmyshift makes employee scheduling as quick and easy as possible, so you can spend more time improving your business and delighting customers.
Drag and drop shifts in seconds
Our intuitive scheduling tool allows you to assign shifts in just a few clicks using simple drag and drop controls. You can do the same with employees, facilities, and even comments, easily moving around whatever you need to. Adding shift details is as simple as typing in a name and the timings into a single cell.
Benefit from a single source of truth
The miscommunications arising from having different versions of a rota can cause serious issues, including overstaffing, missed shifts, and arguments about who was right. Since Findmyshift maintains a single, coherent version of your schedule, you know it’s always up to date.
That means that whether you’re viewing your rota at work or employees are checking their shift times at home through the mobile app, everyone is on the same page.
Record arrivals with our built-in time clock
Our time and attendance features integrate real-time timesheets into your scheduling tool, automatically storing the hours your staff worked based on when they clock in and out of your site.
You can also set up notifications for when staff don’t show up for their shift, giving you as much notice as possible when you need to source cover or know numbers for safety reasons.
Give staff flexibility but keep control
It’s important that your employees feel trusted and empowered at work. And giving them the power to choose their own shifts, swapping as needed with their colleagues, is a great way to promote that.
But you can’t always simply waive all control. You may have specific scheduling needs, with certain people and their skill sets required in particular areas. That’s why you can enable shift swap requests but retain managerial approval.
Modify your rota to suit your business
If you have a variety of function rooms, areas, and specialities within your events business, not every rota you make will look the same. That’s why it’s easy to add custom formatting, new columns, and extra information to your schedule, making it unique to your business.
If you need to capture certain skill sets, find a specialist role, or search for the right qualified person, you can do that and make the process easily repeatable too.
Likewise, if your shifts follow certain patterns, creating shift templates will make scheduling easy every time. Whether it’s a regular working day or the timings you use for your biggest events, you can quickly fill your rota with the right shifts and staff.
Build in breaks for busy employees
Your staff work hard, especially when there’s a big event on. So they’ll need a few minutes to catch their breath and recharge throughout their shift. Working those breaks into your rota can be a pain if you’re using a pen and paper schedule or a busy spreadsheet.
Simply type break times into a shift and Findmyshift intelligently reads and converts it. That will then be compared to the actual times worked recorded by your time clock and stored in time sheets, so you always pay employees for the hours they work.
Forecast demand and schedule in advance
While the events you host might be one off affairs, there are likely seasonal trends in your quiet and busy periods. Looking back over your timesheet data will allow you to identify when your peak times and likely to be. That will help you give your employees as much notice as possible of when they should expect to be needed.
You can schedule shifts as far in advance as you like, allowing you more foresight in your planning while employees can make their shifts work for them—rearranging or swapping if need be and figuring out their own time off around their shifts.
Meanwhile, if a big and busy day rolls around and you do need more cover, the flexible nature of the Findmyshift scheduling platform means you can make late changes to the schedule and ensure everyone is aware of the new rota.
Notifications and messages reduce no shows and missed shifts
With plenty of built in features for messaging, automated reminders, and schedule changes, it’s never been easier to keep employees updated about changes to their working hours.
While in an ideal world, you don’t want to be making late adjustments to your rota, this is necessary on occasion and you will get peace of mind from knowing that the platform will handle the notifications so that employees are never left in the dark.
Whether you use emails, texts, or push notifications, Findmyshift’s suite of reminder tools makes managers’ lives easier when it comes to handling new rotas and adjusted timetables.
Simple pricing that grows with your business
You might be thinking that all this functionality doesn’t come cheap, but it does! Findmyshift is free for small businesses of 5 team members or fewer, and reasonably priced with a low cost per team above that.
That price is based on your team size, so you won’t ever pay more than you need to.
Find our full pricing plans here: Findmyshift pricing.
Discover all our features with a free trial
We offer an easy 60-day trial with no strings attached. No registration, no credit card, no mailing lists. Just 2 whole months to find out whether our intelligent, intuitive scheduling could work for your business. Give it a try today.