There are more digital tools available to business owners now than before. From accounting to payroll to customer relationship management (CRM), project management (PM), inventory management, logistics, and more, there really is no end to how companies can use business software to enhance organizational processes.
One particular type of business software that has become increasingly popular over the past few years is staff rota software, which aims to help business owners manage their staff rotas more efficiently.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly what rota software is and how it can help businesses move forward.
What Is Rota Software?
Simply put, rota software allows businesses to schedule who is working and when using a centralized system. This information can then be shared and accessed by all staff members, ensuring that they are looking at the same, easy-to-understand work rota. Rotas can also be viewed online anytime, and any changes made are immediately reflected across records.
How Rota Software Works
The human resource manager is often responsible for creating schedules, so using rota software starts with him or her. Once the schedules are finished, the employees get notified so they can check their work schedules. Employees can then request for schedule swaps if needed via the rota software, subject to management approval, of course.
Benefits of Using Rota Software
Rota software offers several advantages to businesses. Below are six of the major ones.
Create Staff Rotas
Creating staff rotas is not the most glamorous aspect of being a business owner, but it is a process shared across industries and is a part of day-to-day operations. Even so, creating staff rotas should by no means be a time-consuming task.
Instead of spending hours creating your staff rotas each week, rota software makes the entire process quicker and more straightforward by automating scheduling processes and removing the need for laborious tasks, such as data entry. Designed to be intuitive and easy to use, these platforms allow business owners to create staff schedules much easier than before.
Plan Staffing Needs
Rota software also allows business owners and managers to access historical data that is useful for planning staffing needs more accurately. By looking back on the same day the previous week, month, or year, managers can gain more insights into how busy any coming day could be. With this data, they can plan staff rotas more confidently, ensuring enough staff members are there to meet their customers’ needs.
While this feature is useful for organizations operating in retail, in particular, any company that follows the retail calendar can benefit from accessing their historical rota data.
Make Changes
Requests for shift swaps and times off (e.g., sick leaves) can all present serious issues for employers. While these changes can cause a lot of confusion with rostering, rota software can actually help them manage things better.
Depending on preferences, managers can allow employees to swap shifts within the platform and communicate any issue about their rota directly through the software. Updates and changes to the rota can be sent to all employees to ensure they always get updated with the latest changes to their schedules.
Handle Annual Leaves
Prior to the introduction of digital business tools, most managers would request employees to enter leave requests into a designated notebook or diary. Nowadays, however, rota software can manage this.
With all requests for annual leaves and times off going through one system, it is much easier for employers to have a clear understanding of staff availability for any specified period.
Annual leave requests can become confusing when they are not managed correctly, and employees can grow unhappy quickly when their requests are forgotten, lost, or overlooked. Rota software eliminates this issue, ensuring all requests are recorded in one location.
Comply with Legal Requirements
Among the regulations that businesses must comply with are those related to labor laws. Employees are only required to render a specific number of hours per week, and beyond that, employers must pay for overtime.
In addition, employees are entitled to sick days and annual leaves, depending on their tenure. Manually monitoring these can take time and could be prone to error, especially when there are tons of employees in the organization. But with the help of rota software, it’s easier to track employee hours and ensure that the organization does not violate labor laws.
Securing employee data is also a must to comply with privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Most rota systems have standard security protocols built in that help organizations comply with privacy regulations.
Fosters Scalability
Manual rota creation and management are time-consuming. Imagine having to create hundreds of employee profiles one by one when the business grows—that’s equivalent to precious time and human resources that could be invested elsewhere.
On the other hand, using rota software is efficient, regardless of the number of employees you add. Aside from that, you can outsource the task and automatically send notifications to affected staff members.
3 Things to Consider When Choosing Rota Software for Your Business
When selecting a rota management software, there are several factors to consider, but the major ones are:
- Time logging functionality: Choose a rota software that allows staff members to log in when they start their shifts. This capability does away with the need for cumbersome timesheets.
- Built-in messaging tool: An integral part of rota management is informing employees about their schedules and communicating changes promptly. A rota software that has a built-in messaging functionality can help ease the burden of manually sending out notifications one by one to employees and ultimately helps avoid miscommunication.
- Employee availability plotting: When employee availability is visible, you avoid the hassle of scheduling someone who will be on his or her day off or approved holiday. Rota software with this feature allows you to plot schedules for available employees only.
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Rota software has changed the game for many business owners, allowing them to take control of their employee rostering so they can prioritize productivity and cultivate increased capability to perform excellently in the workplace.
