Mon, Oct 4 2021 | MakeShift Employee scheduling trends: Empower staff to boost retention and improve the Employee Experience

We are a long way from the First Industrial Revolution and rather than slowing down, changes to the workplace are only speeding up. The last 22 months accelerated this already rapid pace of change.

As we look at the evolving workforce landscape, it's clear COVID-19 has had a major impact. The pandemic prompted people to reevaluate life, work, and everything in between.

According to a study from the HR company Morneau Shepell, a quarter of US workers are considering changing where they work. The race to attract and retain talent just got a lot more competitive. 

Flexibility, particularly when it comes to work schedules, has emerged as a non-negotiable demand from employees. If employers hope to recruit, retain, and keep their staff happy, they will have no choice but to offer flexible scheduling that is built around the employee - their availability and day-to-day life - and not the other way around. 

Businesses that are going to compete will have to massively invest in their employee scheduling tools and the scheduling experience, both for the managers/schedulers and the employees. A cloud-based web and mobile staff scheduling solution like MakeShift is going to be vital to optimizing the scheduling process and improving an organization's bottom line. 

MUST WATCH | PainFree™ Scheduling for Agile Businesses - MakeShift

As the go-to employee scheduling solution for companies in fast-paced industries like healthcare, retail, hospitality, recreation, transportation and others, MakeShift has helped brands like LaSenza, Air France, Alberta Health Services, Best Western make scheduling a pain-free experience. This led to us being recognized as an employee scheduling Best Seller app on the ADP Marketplace.

So, when ADP needs a pulse check on the employee scheduling market, they turn to MakeShift. Our CPO and COO Nicole Craig sat down with ADP to discuss the key trends MakeShift is seeing in the scheduling and time & attendance space. 

SEE ALSO | MakeShift rises to Platinum Partner rank on the ADP Marketplace

1. 1. The role of Scheduling and Time & Attendance technology as we come out of the pandemic.
   2. The Employee Experience - how the employee experience around scheduling is so important with the current labor shortages and increasing turnover (empower your people, communicate better and be flexible!).
   3. Choosing the right partner - it's imperative to pay attention to how your partner integrates with your other systems (example - payroll).
      
      

   Watch the interview highlights or read the full transcript below.

2. 
   
   When you are ready to make scheduling your people PainFree™

    

Employee Scheduling Trends Interview with ADP and MakeShift - Full Interview Transcript

ADP: Nicole, I was really hoping you could speak to some of the trends that you guys over at MakeShift are seeing around the scheduling and time space, as Canada starts to open up and we get more people back to work.

MakeShift (Nicole Craig): Yeah I think one of the biggest things that we're seeing is a lot of the changes are happening because of the massive labor shortage that we're seeing in Canada right now. So we've been a little bit slower to reopen as our neighbors in the south have been. They opened up a lot quicker and they're seeing the biggest labor shortage that they've had in decades. And I think that's only going to become more of a problem in Canada as things start to reopen here, as people took some time over Covid to re-examine their work and their career and decided what they want to be doing.

We're seeing a massive wave of people quitting their jobs, leaving the jobs that they were in, and switching careers completely. So that's been a big trend within the retail, hospitality, and food and beverage space which were also the industries that were hardest hit by Covid.

They were shut down for the better part of the last 15 months especially in Canada right? So their employees were looking to other careers and as these businesses have started to reopen they no longer have access to the same talent that they had pre-pandemic.

So businesses need to get a little bit more creative in terms of how they're attracting and retaining that talent and a big piece of that is the scheduling and time experience.

Employees now have the upper hand right? With the supply and demand issue, there are not enough employees to do the work, so the employees have the power here and they want more control over their work schedule and around their flexibility.

So as that relates to scheduling, businesses need to be cognizant of that and make sure that they have a scheduling solution that empowers the employees. It allows them to set the preferences for when they want to work they can control when they're working so they can put their shifts up for bid or shift exchange, pick up shifts if that's what they want to do, and have more flexible time off. So we're seeing that as a big shift.

We're also seeing a lot of companies that were switching from manual pen and paper processes over to an online scheduling solution and a big driver of that is the employee experience. No longer having a schedule posted in the back office but now employees have it at their fingertips, that's a big one!

We're also seeing that contingent labor is on the rise. It's a really easy way for businesses to staff up and scale resources as their operational needs are changing. And those changes are happening frequently, right?

New restrictions are put in place every couple of weeks. There are new processes that businesses have to implement as they reopen. So that's a great way for them to staff their businesses really quickly. And they need to make sure that they can onboard those employees and those contractors in the quickest way possible in the most seamless way possible.

So that means businesses need frictionless scheduling and time solution. Employees can't be spending hours getting training on that. It needs to just be very intuitive and easy to roll out so anything that's going to be creating operational efficiencies and saving time, that's key. and that's what an online scheduling and time solution can offer.

ADP: Wow! Um so much good stuff there  Nicole. And you know what I have been talking with a lot of different partners right now and a lot of different businesses out there and that employee experience is so important right now.

You make some really excellent points there. So for the businesses out there who may be struggling with employee engagement and that experience around the tools they're using. Do you have any tips or do you see anything that these businesses should be looking for when they are, you know either looking for new partners? Or maybe looking inwards at what they're doing? Is there anything that kind of jumps out at you guys there?

MakeShift: Yeah really just looking at something that puts the employees first. It's a lot of money and very expensive to have high turnover. If you can retain your existing talent that's going to be key. And making everything as simple to use as possible really helps.

So with the scheduling solution that's got a mobile interface and a web interface that's going to make sure that all of your staff can use it and it's simple to use and it gives them the most control and the most flexibility around their schedule. 

For example, things like shift exchanges. If you don't have a scheduling solution that helps facilitate that, the schedulers are getting phone calls from their staff consistently. They're constantly making manual changes. That's expensive. That's wasted administrative time. That's also employees picking up the phone to communicate. If you have an online solution that communication becomes a lot easier and it puts the power in the employee's hands to manage their schedule. 

So I think just looking for something that's:

1. easy to implement
2. flexible, and
3. empowering for employees 

Those are three key things.

ADP: Yeah, totally. And I think you mentioned it earlier that the industries that have been hit the hardest may be taking the longest to reopen. You know retail hospitality. It's probably frustrating enough for these employees with the changing legislation and the rules day in day out. So I imagine for the employees and the employers, the ones changing the schedules on the fly, it probably goes a long way just to kind of have that ability to quickly either opt in or out of these changes or at least just kind of be in the know of what's going on and hopefully release some of that stress and frustration around this situation we've been stuck in for a little while.

MakeShift: Absolutely, being able to pivot and move quickly is key and you can't do that with manual processes.

If a schedule needs to change really quickly because your staffing levels have changed or your resources have changed you need to be able to communicate that to your staff in real-time. And so that's where an online scheduling solution comes into play. Everything is in real-time. Everything's automatic.

ADP: Right, so if you could just kind of summarize everything we just talked about for businesses that were looking for a partner, would I be fair to say that these businesses should be thinking about and approaching this problem with the employee experience in mind?

MakeShift: Yes. With the employee experience in mind and obviously they have the challenge of trying to operate their business, they're wearing multiple hats now. The job that they left is no longer the same as the job they're coming back into. So it's very different.

They need to make sure that they have a system that's very flexible, easy to implement, and can accommodate those quickly changing schedules and needs.

ADP: Awesome love it. You know on that note, you know MakeShift and ADP  have a pretty unique partnership. And something that's really important to us and I think very valuable to the businesses we partner with, is the way our back-end payroll and HR integrates with MakeShift's scheduling and time tool.

Can you speak to why that integration is so imperative?

MakeShift: Yeah, so a few years ago integrations were nice to have. Now it's a necessity.

It's not really acceptable to have multiple business software managing your workforce that are all completely independent and standalone. That means a lot of manual and duplicate entry across multiple systems. There's a lot of room for human error in that scenario because you're constantly manually updating the same data in multiple different systems.

So it has to be integrated or it's going to be very time-consuming, very administrative, and very error-prone. We're seeing a lot of clients that are coming to us now; the integrations are the first and foremost thing they care about. If we don't offer the integration they have to move on. So it's absolutely key.

Especially with scheduling and time that affects how employees are getting paid. If those time punches are not making their way over to a payroll system in an automated fashion, that it requires an administrator to pull a report manually, it's just very time-consuming.

If it's automated it's all happening behind the scenes. It's very seamless, easy to use and it feels like one solution even though you might be using separate apps. So I think it's just a necessity going forward and it's going to be more and more important for clients.

ADP: Yeah, you absolutely nailed it! At the end of the day, we are trying to try to make things easier for everyone so if we can mitigate any errors, that's a big win for our clients. 

Nicole, appreciate the chat. There's a lot of uncertainty still ahead of us but also a lot of really exciting times. Thanks for sharing your insights with me today.

MakeShift: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Bye Derek.

ADP and ADP Workforce Now are trademarks of ADP, Inc. or its affiliates or licensors. The information in this document was prepared by QuickBooks Time and QuickBooks Time is solely responsible for its accuracy and completeness. ADP makes no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of any information contained herein.