If you are running a company having more than 1 general shift, i.e., from 9 am to 5 pm, it’s possible that you deal with the problem of not having an appropriate number of employees in each Labor Shift. This is a very common problem that double-shift companies face quite often. This problem can easily be dealt with by a production shift schedule. This can be a proper software running on the web, or an Excel sheet that you share with employees on social media, to just a piece of paper where you write names of employees with the shift they will be working.
In any regard, a production shift schedule is a useful tool that helps achieve better productivity and enhanced performance of each shift. Not only do you have peace of mind by seeing that each shift is working perfectly, but there is also no problem with overcrowding or fewer employees available in peak hours.
Production Shift Schedule Guidelines:
Understand Your Team Members:
This is a very important part of preparing a production shift schedule, and the reason many managers or supervisors can’t make an effective schedule is simply that they don’t understand their team members. For a shift schedule, workers are just names, but as an employer, you can understand what each employee is capable of. This means you can design a perfect shift schedule by understanding the expertise of each employee, their overall behavior, any overtime limits, and also their behavior towards each other.
Making a Shift Plan Based On Core Employees:
If you have to think for a while to choose which one is the best employee in your team, maybe it’s time to keep working on the above-mentioned point. When you know and understand your team members, you can make better work plans based on their capabilities. This basically fulfills the need to make each shift more efficient and effective. By designing each shift around the best available choices, you can instantly improve the overall behavior of other team members.
Make Communication More Effective:
There are basically two points that you need to focus on when improving communication among your team members regarding the shift schedule. The first one is to make sure that all team members understand where to find an updated schedule file. This can be anywhere from a shared folder on computers to a social media group that all members can access. Secondly, there should be definitive information on who the senior person in each shift is and what each person is supposed to do. This will allow the team members to solve their issues within the shift and not include higher management in small disputes.
Allow Team Members to Participate:
This is probably a very interesting part of the production shift schedule, working because this means you don’t have to do all the work by yourself. You can certainly ask some or even all of the employees to participate in designing the shift schedule. You can start by asking 2-3 key employees to take part in deciding who should work in which shift and what duties should be assigned to each employee, and then gradually you can ask more and more employees to take part in and help to design a perfect production shift schedule that suits everyone’s needs.
Allow Some Space to Employees in Schedule Planning:
It is a fact that when you keep your employees happy, your business grows. If your employees are satisfied with work conditions and they feel they are not forced to do something they don’t want to do is what makes a company go higher and bigger. You can achieve this by keeping records of the preferences of each employee regarding shift schedule and using that information to design the work program. This will not only make employees happy but it will also increase their job satisfaction and overall productivity. Moreover, you should also allow the employees to find their substitute for a shift when they can’t come to work. Forcing someone is not the answer here, as things will work out great if you just let the employees find who is willing to take their shift and do them a favor that they can return later.
At the lowermost part of the labor schedule template, it helps you to note down special points or instructions for the improvement of the overall process. Similarly, the remarks area will let you document labor force behaviors and your observations. Thus, free online templates for labor and staff scheduling provide great help to employers and managers to enhance their action plans and outcomes.
