So, you’re in the market for an employee scheduling platform? Before diving into the most expensive solution with a marketing buzz, pause and reflect — not all solutions are the same. The key to success is understanding the scheduling software features that align with your specific needs to find the best platform that fits your business.

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In this article, we’ll introduce you to the top features and help you make a personalized scheduling requirements checklist to compare and analyze potential platforms. We’ll also guide you through a software selection strategy that’ll lead you to the best solution to your problems. Let’s dive in!

Article Roadmap

• Key Requirements
  • Schedule Management
  • Security and Compliance
  • Shift Management
  • Time and Attendance Tracking
  • Collaboration
  • Employee Management
  • Leave and Absence Management
  • Reporting and Analytics
  • Mobile Capabilities
  • Platform Capabilities
• What Is Employee Scheduling Software?
• Primary Benefits
• How To Choose The Best Platform
• Next Steps

Key Requirements

According to a 7Shifts survey, the top team management challenges for businesses in 2024 are:

• Hiring
• Employee Retention
• Labor Costs

Modern workers hold vastly different expectations and perspectives on the role of work in their lives. Now, more than ever, individuals are committed to shaping their work schedules according to their preferences and desired flexibility.

Choosing the right employee scheduling software is essential to meet this modern demand for flexible yet consistent work schedules. Here are the key scheduling software features you need to create this experience for your employees:

Schedule Management

The cornerstone of effective scheduling is having the right tools at your disposal to add, reschedule and cancel shifts when needed. Employee scheduling software offers drag-and-drop tools, integrated calendars and color-coded layouts to help you design and edit schedules efficiently.

You can define rules to automatically publish schedules to relevant departments and specify access permissions to allow managers and department heads to edit schedules. Most systems offer filters and search options to find relevant information across multiple departments quickly.

Scheduling software maintains a database of employee skills and preferences, allowing you to assign tasks based on qualifications and skills. The system sends conflict alerts when you assign tasks to unavailable employees or against someone’s preference.

Advanced solutions also offer built-in AI to create schedules and minimize human errors. You can define rules and let the AI automatically generate and assign shifts based on availability, skills, training and preferences. This not only streamlines the scheduling process but also optimizes workforce deployment, enhancing overall efficiency.

Security and Compliance

Your scheduling solution should be a fortress, safeguarding your business’s confidential information, including employee databases and scheduling details. Look for platforms implementing multi-factor authentication for employee logins to prevent unauthorized access.

While most platforms offer various employee account types with different roles and access permissions, the best ones go further, tracking every change to promote accountability within the team.

However, security isn’t just about defending against external threats; it’s also about managing legal compliance to sidestep issues and penalties. Here are three major compliances your software should either automate or assist in managing:

• FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act): Covers areas like minimum wage, overtime pay eligibility and recordkeeping requirements.
• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): Safeguards employee data and ensures the respect of privacy rights.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): Promotes a safe and healthy work environment, which includes incident reporting, safety training tracking and overall workplace safety management.

• FLSA Compliance
• GDPR Compliance
• Labor Laws Compliant Scheduling
• OSHA Compliance
• Role-Based Permissions
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Visibility Control

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Shift Management

The right software will not only streamline your scheduling workflow but also give you more control and flexibility over shifts. You’ll get customizable templates to create multiple shift types, including open, recurring, rotating and split shifts.

You can call out candidates to fill vacant shifts and assign tasks based on skills and qualifications. Team members can view assigned tasks, exercise the option for first refusal and even swap shifts with coworkers.

Most solutions allow you to hold auctions for open shifts, letting employees bid on available shifts. This not only offers employees a choice but also introduces an engaging and efficient way to fill open slots.

The system automatically notifies concerned parties for upcoming shifts and allows employees to take notes and provide feedback after completing tasks. It enhances transparency and provides valuable insights for continuous improvement.

Incorporating these scheduling software features helps you cater to the diverse needs of your workforce, promoting efficiency and satisfaction across your team.

Time and Attendance Tracking

Time and attendance tracking is an indispensable scheduling software feature. It streamlines payroll calculations and adds a layer of precision to labor cost management and budgeting.

Employees can use biometric logins for attendance tracking. Depending on the platform, your staff can track time using a mobile app, POS kiosks or manually input work hours.

The system automatically clocks out employees upon shift completion and prevents early clock-ins to curb malpractices and ensure time-tracking accuracy. It can track over time and calculate associated costs based on your business’s pay rates. This feature simplifies payroll processes and ensures compliance with labor regulations.

Advanced solutions can also accommodate breaks between shifts. The system sends reminders for upcoming breaks and diligently tracks break hours, ensuring your staff adheres to your business’s shift-break compliances.

Collaboration

An employee scheduling platform allows you to broadcast team-wide announcements and create individual chat portals for 1:1 messaging. Read receipts offer visibility into message acknowledgment, ensuring employees receive your instructions and announcements swiftly. This coordination promotes efficient decision-making and problem-solving.

For enhanced managerial oversight, the manager logbook helps record important notes, observations or updates. It enables you to maintain a comprehensive record and ensure that relevant information is easily accessible to the managerial team.

• Message Broadcasting
• File Sharing
• Manager Logbook
• Newsfeed
• Read Receipts
• Team Messaging

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Employee Management

Effective employee management is key to promoting a productive and engaged workforce. Employee scheduling solutions help you train new hires by embedding training material into the interface.

Beyond that, self-service portals serve as a one-stop shop for all your employees’ needs. Employees can view schedules, interact with team members, swap shifts, track time and submit leave applications.

These portals also store employee skills, certifications, qualifications and preferences. You can set document expiry reminders and track renewals to ensure your team remains compliant.

Advanced scheduling tools also help track and control budget and labor costs. You can define pay rates and budget considerations to receive automated alerts when certain schedules or tasks exceed budgetary limitations.

Going the extra mile, some platforms even track employees’ fatigue levels. This innovative feature sends alerts when tasks are assigned to overworked employees, facilitating a balanced workload distribution and preventing burnout.

• Certificate Tracking and Expiry Reminders
• Employee Groups
• Employee Profile Management
• Employee Self-Service
• Labor Cost Tracking
• Labor Forecasting
• Multiple Task Assignment
• Task Management
• Stress Profile and Fatigue Management

Leave and Absence Management

These solutions offer customizable templates for configuring the leave application and approval funnels based on business policies and structure. You can plan efficiently and prevent scheduling conflicts by automatically tracking each employee’s leave and PTO balances.

To manage specific periods of high demand or critical work periods, you can blackout certain dates in the system. It prevents time-off requests during designated blackout periods, ensuring a capable workforce during crucial times.

• Configurable Leave Policies
• Leave and PTO Balance Tracking
• Time-off Requests
• Half days
• Time-off Approval
• Blackout Dates

Reporting and Analytics

Most solutions offer customizable templates to create reports on employee performance, cost and engagement. You can track employees’ time and attendance, shift history and working hours to determine their effectiveness. The system also lets you define rules to generate yearly or monthly audit reports.

Advanced solutions offer built-in business analytics tools to create custom visualizations and dashboards to track business-specific metrics. It also helps you analyze sales patterns to forecast demand and adjust workforces accordingly.

• Audit Reports
• Scheduled vs. Actual Time Worked Comparison Reports
• Shift/Schedule History Reports
• Time and Attendance reports
• Custom Dashboard and Visualization
• Customizable Report Templates

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Mobile Capabilities

All modern scheduling solutions are mobile-optimized, allowing you to manage operations on the go. A native mobile app with built-in push notifications and chat portals helps communicate with your team and track operations. Some mobile apps also offer geofencing capabilities to track employee movements across your facility using their phone’s GPS.

• Geofencing/GPS
• Mobile Scheduling and Time Tracking
• Chat Portals
• Native Mobile Apps
• Push Notifications

Platform Capabilities

Beyond the core features we discussed above, there are a few nuances that an employee scheduling platform needs to be a robust and all-in-one solution. For example, it should simplify administrative tasks and not complicate them.

Look for features that let you organize your business’s scheduling data and find information quickly. Configurable workflows ensure that the platform adapts to your business’s unique processes.

Bulk actions come in handy when you need to perform operations on multiple departments and employees simultaneously, saving time and effort. Customizable fields allow you to tailor the platform to specific business needs, ensuring that you capture and organize information in a way that makes sense for you.

Additionally, keep an eye out for the system’s API, as it influences how the platform connects and interacts with other third-party solutions you use. The platform should not only connect with your existing systems but also leave room to integrate potential solutions you may use in the future.

• Bulk Actions
• Configurable Workflows
• Custom Branding
• Custom Fields
• Custom Tags
• Multiple Language and Timezone Support
• Customizable API
• Platform Integrations

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What Is Employee Scheduling Software?

Employee scheduling software is a tool that enables you to create and manage work schedules for shift and hourly workers considering employee availability, skills and budgetary constraints. These systems automate administrative tasks like sharing schedules, tracking tasks and sending reminders, allowing you to focus on more crucial operational needs.

While emphasizing the importance of employee scheduling software, James DeLapa, Director of Digital Marketing at Wrike, said:

We can automate time-off requests and approvals for the most part and even automate schedule-building around any time off during a particular period. Scheduling still requires human oversight, but we don’t need to build a new schedule from scratch every week – we can automate that – and it’s much harder to make oversight errors.”

These platforms help allocate shifts efficiently, control costs, plan schedules and ensure optimal workforce coverage across seasons. Additionally, you can centralize your team communications in a single platform with built-in messaging options.

Primary Benefits

Following are the benefits of scheduling software:

Streamline Scheduling

Intuitive drag-and-drop tools help craft schedules and the system automatically alerts you for conflicts with staff availability and budgetary limitations in real time. You can set rules to seamlessly collaborate with department heads, allowing them to edit and make necessary changes before publishing the final schedule.

Once the schedule is out, employees receive instant notifications for their assigned tasks and have the flexibility to express preferences. These scheduling software features simplify the process and promote a smoother and more efficient operational flow.

Sudhir Khatwani, Director of The Money Mongers, Inc., said,

One major challenge in employee scheduling is balancing staff availability with business needs. It’s a delicate balancing act to keep operations running smoothly. Scheduling software has been invaluable for streamlining the process, reducing errors and easily accommodating time-off requests. It serves as a digital peacekeeper, keeping everyone aligned and minimizing conflicts.”

Enhance Communication

Matthew Ramirez, Founder of Rephrasely, told SelectHub:

One of the biggest pain points is trying to find a way to communicate with employees about their schedules. We used to do it manually, but that was a hassle. With scheduling software, we can now easily communicate with our employees about their schedules, and it has made a huge difference.”

With centralized communication tools, employee scheduling platforms ensure that important announcements reach the entire team instantly. It fosters a more connected and informed workforce, reducing the likelihood of miscommunications and enhancing overall team collaboration.

Additionally, employees can use self-service portals for efficient communication regarding schedule changes, time-off requests and shift swaps. This streamlined approach to team communications is a crucial factor in improving employee engagement.

Eugene Klimaszewski, Founder of Mammoth Security Inc., said:

Effective communication is integral to employee engagement and morale. We ensure transparency in our scheduling process. This involves regularly updating the team on any changes and encouraging open feedback. We also use group chats and digital boards for quick updates and queries. Keeping the lines of communication open helps in building trust and a sense of inclusion among team members.”

Improve Employee Engagement

According to an employee satisfaction and retention report, 79% of workers said their work schedule directly impacts their likelihood of staying with the employer. And 46% of them expressed that lacking consistency in weekly working hours would drive them to seek employment elsewhere.

Today, consistency is the name of the game. Employee scheduling software helps you achieve the right mix of predictability and flexibility to enhance job satisfaction and retain valuable talent. It lets you share schedules in advance and empowers employees to manage their work-life balance.

Simplify Compliance

The system automates adherence to various labor regulations by automatically tracking and managing compliance requirements. It reduces the risk of legal issues and associated penalties, ensuring that businesses operate within the bounds of the law.

Not only that, it maintains a record of communications and scheduling changes to aid audit processes. You can also define rules to automate recordkeeping based on business requirements.

Diana Zheng, the Head of Marketing at Stallion Express, told us:

Scheduling software is critical in assuring legal compliance. It allows us to track work hours correctly, preventing complications such as overtime breaches. It also helps employers comply with labor rules governing rest intervals and minimum shift lengths.”

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How To Choose The Best Platform

The global employee scheduling software market is expected to grow at a 14.78% CAGR to reach $820.01 million by 2027. In such a growing market, there are options galore, and it’s easy to jump into a misfit solution.

The repercussions? Wasted time, frustrated employees and operational inefficiencies. Choosing the wrong software can be like fitting a square peg into a round hole — it just doesn’t work.

To avoid such traps, we introduce our straightforward nine-step process, lean selection methodology. It helps you analyze your situation and identify the pain points in your current process, whether it’s communication gaps, time conflicts or inefficient resource allocation.

Then, it enables you to prioritize the scheduling software features that directly address these pain points to ensure you choose a platform that aligns with your business needs. With this systematic approach, you’ll sidestep the misfit dilemma and pave the way for a scheduling system that fits your business like a glove.

To further aid you in your journey, here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself to outline your requirements:

• How many employees will you schedule?
• What scheduling customizations are crucial for your operations?
• How can you enhance team-wide communication and collaboration?
• Which other software will need integration with the new platform?
• Which features do you need to simplify legal compliance management?

Here are a few model questions to start conversations with potential vendors and understand their offerings:

• What company sizes do you typically work with?
• What are your platform’s core strengths?
• Is your platform compatible with my existing systems?
• What security and data protection tools do you offer?
• What are your customer support and training options?

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Next Steps

Navigating the employee scheduling software landscape demands a strategic approach. The key is to create a personalized selection strategy that considers all your challenges and helps identify the best scheduling software features that align with your operational needs.

Before we wrap up, here’s our parting gift to you — a free requirements template. Easily customize what features you want and then find out which products are the best match.

So don’t wait! Select an ideal platform and revolutionize your scheduling workflows today!

What are the most significant scheduling changes you’ve faced? Did the software have a positive impact on your operations? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below!

SME Contributors

James DeLapa is a seasoned digital marketer, with over eight years of experience in SEO strategy and implementation. Currently, as the Director of Digital Marketing at Wrike, he leads a global team in driving internal link strategies, site-wide layouts and optimizing keywords for clicks and conversions. His expertise extends across industries, including finance, senior care, law, commercial real estate, automotive, and healthcare, where he consistently delivers impactful SEO solutions to fuel business growth.

Diana Zheng, Head of Marketing at Stallion Express, is a results-driven professional with a background in fitness, hospitality, and education. With a proven track record in revenue generation and relationship building, she has successfully led two personal training businesses. At Stallion Express, Diana empowers Canadian eCommerce sellers with comprehensive shipping solutions. Passionate about travel, she enjoys meeting individuals with diverse backgrounds and exploring ideas for personal development.

Matthew Ramirez is a serial entrepreneur and investor, as well as a Forbes 30 under 30 alumni. He grew and sold his first company, WriteLab, to Chegg in 2018, where he worked for three years as Director of Product Management. His new company, Rephrase, develops cutting-edge AI applications that help journalists and other authors create compelling and varied content for their audiences.

Sudhir Khatwani, the Director of The Money Mongers, Inc., boasts a wealth of experience in digital entrepreneurship and content strategy. With over five years at the helm of The Money Mongers, Sudhir has garnered recognition from top platforms like Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, and SHEfinds for his expert insights. With a proven track record of leadership and innovation, Sudhir continues to make impactful contributions to the digital landscape, driving growth and fostering collaboration across industries.

Eugene Klimaszewski has devoted his career to finding effective security tools to prevent crime and keep communities safe. He is the founder and driving force behind Mammoth Security Inc., an organization providing effective security solutions throughout the Northeast – from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy to urban municipalities, businesses, and homes. Outside of his professional achievements, Eugene is an avid skier, a traveler, and an advocate for urban communities and the right to live and work in a safe environment.