Playing favorites is a natural habit of humans — we gravitate toward people who minimize our headaches or relate to our likes. Such favoritism can manifest itself in many ways, from the waiter who gets the bigger tips to the child who can stay up a bit later than their siblings. But when favoritism creeps into workplace scheduling processes, big problems can ensue.
When managers play favorites by assigning better shifts or more flexible schedules to certain employees, progress toward business goals can veer off course. While this special treatment isn’t always intentional, the organization will always suffer as a result. However, these types of problems are easily avoidable if the correct scheduling and administrative protocols are followed.
While managers may find it difficult to avoid a natural tendency to favor certain employees, emerging scheduling technology is helping balance out inadvertent biases. With automation and self-service tools, workplaces can ensure shifts are filled with the right employees while remaining compliant. And these tools also provide benefits beyond favoritism.
Empowering employees. Choosing a digital workplace to schedule shifts eliminates the chance of unintentional biases. A digital workplace enables employees to sign up for the hours that fit their lives, putting the scheduling in their hands, rather than those of a staffing manager. All of this occurs within the predetermined rules of the organization, ensuring the needs of each party are met.
Maximizing employee availability. When employees are left out of the scheduling process, they lack the autonomy to make their work calendar fit their personal lives, leaving them disengaged or frustrated on the job. Allowing employees to manage their schedules cuts out stressful shift changes and searches for replacements. By visualizing available shifts digitally, rather than spreading shift availability across paper schedules and private lines of communication, employees often see more opportunities for open shifts that fit their schedules, ultimately maximizing availability and ensuring full staffing.
Improving employee engagement. Digital workplace platforms can transform employees’ relationship with their employer beyond scheduling. This provides managers an opportunity to reaffirm employees’ commitments to their job. By facilitating easy, open lines of communication between employees and across an organization, employees become continuously engaged. Digital workplaces also provide access to information and training programs in a digestible format that leads to employees autonomously completing and remembering training modules. Further, open lines of communication allow employees from all levels to have increased transparency in responsibilities and shift management, making all employees feel valued.
Increasing retention rates. Implementing a digital workplace keeps lines of communication clear and open across the organization. Democratizing the scheduling process and forming a communication link to higher-ranked managers increases job satisfaction and allow issues to be resolved before they become problems. In turn, employees will be more likely to stay with the organization for the long-term. Leveraging a digital workplace as a digital bulletin board also ensures information is dispersed evenly and equally. Transitioning these common workplace practices to one digital platform that works with employees leads to higher employee satisfaction — and increased retention rates.
Using a digital workplace to enact small changes, like predictable schedules and open lines of communication, put the power back in the hands of hourly workers and frees up managers to focus their time and effort on hitting KPIs. Digital workplaces are proven to lead to happier workers, more productive managers, and lower employee turnover. A digital workplace is the clear choice for organizations across all industries to better the lives of both hourly workers and staffing managers.
