If you’re creating or managing time and attendance with a Staff Roster using a spreadsheet, or worse, paper, you’re wasting your valuable money, time and energy.
It takes most people anywhere from 1 to 4 hours a week to Roster staff and set accurate schedules. Mathematically speaking, if your hourly rate is around $25 then your wasting as much as $5200 every year. That also equates to around 208 hours or 8.5 days on the beach.
We’re all guilty of using spreadsheets at one time or another to create rosters. The problem with spreadsheets is they require constant re-keying of information. You can’t search them. They don’t show you any staff availability. Unless you have created complex ranging formulas you can’t easily predict wages. You can’t duplicate rosters without renaming a bunch of stuff. And they don’t have any staff information in them – requiring you to constantly look elsewhere for phone numbers, addresses and so on.
The easiest way I know how to create a roster is to add staff to a week – not a shift. Forget creating shifts – that’s for multi-national outfits or factory’s of hundreds of staff, all with their big budgets. If you’re a small business you need something off the shelf based on weekly data entry. Simple, add staff to days of the week – instead of creating complex shift formats that hardly ever comply with actual goings on.
The biggest problem with spreadsheets is they offer no feedback during data entry about staff availability. We spend hours and hours making calls or asking questions, writing post it notes, and relying on missed communications, in order to identify when staff are available. Imagine if, as you add a staff member to your weekly roster, it shows you exactly on what day and times they are available. It would also be useful if staff were able to update the availability schedule themselves so that you can see who’s available when adding them to the roster.
Spreadsheets fail at the basic need of communications between managers and staff. They are not integrated with your contacts so you can’t quickly see a phone number, or make the call from inside the spreadsheet. Email poses the same problem – you have to go to your contacts program to email staff.
Another drawback of spreadsheets is they do not accumulate data on a periodic basis over time. You either have to copy the sheets and rename fields or save the file with a new name each time. This makes it virtually impossible to search for staff and roster schedule data when you need it quickly.
Rostering using spreadsheets is a waste of time and money. You could literally be spending more time doing other things, or catching up on some rest. Give yourself a break and look for a smart, quick roster program.
This is what to look for in Roster software: