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Working with a large number of part time staff can be a real struggle. The work rota is the hub of employee management for these types of business and is something that is often slaved over for hours. As the manager it is your responsibility to be proactive and ensure everybody knows where they are working and when. Unfortunately, creating the rota initially is only the start. Shift swaps, unavailability requests and sickness regularly throw a spanner into the works of many a manager’s workflows and often require a frustrating amount of phone calls and rearrangement of the rota. Often, staff would forget about shift changes, resulting in even more work and frustration. Not only this, but being understaffed can often have adverse effects on a business, with standards of service, care or quality often slipping under the extra strain.

Organising an efficient rota is one of the most time consuming activities for small and medium businesses. However there are a few solutions that can relieve the strain and open up more free time for concentrating on more important areas of a business.

Currently, many businesses rely on a simple paper rota, often printed from a template every week and filled in manually. This suffers from many of the pitfalls mentioned above, so many managers look towards technology to try and find a better way to manage their staff.

Spreadsheets & Google Docs The first option is to use a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft excel or google docs. Offline software software like excel is not much better than the traditional pen and paper, but online spreadsheets like Google docs can offer a few advantages. Firstly, you can allow access to employees so they can log on from anywhere and see the most up to date version of their rota. You can also perform calculations to total up hours worked, wage expenses, among other useful data. Where these systems fall down is in the communication between managers and staff. Time off requests and shift swaps still have to be managed by other internal systems and may require phone calls and in-person meetings.

Specialised Software There are a number of specialist software products (such as RotaCloud) out there for managing staff rotas and schedules. These offer an array of features specifically for help ease the burden of constantly rescheduling shifts and employees. They allow managers to build the rota online and employees can log in and view the rota from any device, request time of, request shift swaps other useful features. More often than not, there is a small monthly cost, but if your budget can cover this, it is well worth the investment for the time and stress you will save for yourself.