The Pressures of Being a Manager: 7 Corporate Scheduling Challenges You May Encounter and How to Deal with Them
Being in management is something that comes with its own set of ups and downs. The livelihood of employees depends upon proper scheduling and a comfortable work environment. One slip up could lead to a disaster that at times can’t be recovered from.
An example of this is with none other than Starbucks, who found themselves having to change up how they schedule their employees. Yes, you heard it right, Starbucks was faced with scheduling challenges that had affected the lives of a family forever due to requiring too much from a single mother, who over time lost a relationship and hurt her relationship with her family. That was on top of putting her through one of the most stressful times of her life.
With that said, one can’t afford to ignore the fact that this is an ongoing issue in the world of business. A disadvantage like this could help a company reach their demise before they have a chance to grow. For the sake of humanity, let’s look at 7 corporate scheduling challenging and how to avoid them entirely.
1. Unstable Schedules Don’t Allow for Smooth Operations
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 17% of workers were experiencing issues with unstable schedules. Maybe it has improved over time, but then again it could have gotten worse as businesses fail to embrace what the modern world brings to the table. The window of opportunity is before us, but slacking has become an epidemic in the business world.
Whether a company is plagued by utilizing on-call shifts, clopening shifts (where employees end up closing the location and show back up in the wee hours of the morning to open the next day), or rotating shifts, it needs to come to a stop. Enough is enough. Proper scheduling that helps employees live a comfortable life can work wonders.
2. Failure to Streamline Employee Requests Wastes Time
Managers need to be focused on one thing to make each day a successful one, and that’s developing those who make the brand possible as well as growing revenue. When a manager is forced to manually deal with certain processes that can be automated, they become distracted from the overall goal. Thus, leading to being stuck in the same spot for undetermined amounts of time (which has been seen to last anywhere from weeks to years if not indefinitely).
3. Employee Fatigue Has Proven to Lead to Disasters
While we all know that employee fatigues hurt production rates, it has done a lot worse over the years. As described over at HuffPost, it has led to an airplane crash, nasty oil spill, and a couple of nuclear plant accidents. There’s no room for error in business, regardless of what industry you might have found yourself in.
Some industries are more dangerous than others sure, but why risk it if you’re in one of the safer industries of today’s world? We continue to see cases every day where employee fatigue has produced a negative effect on companies. It’s something that comes as a last thought to many, unfortunately, but hopefully, soon they’ll wake up to reality.
4. Failure to Run Good Numbers = Failure of the Business
Protecting the bottom line is one of the top tasks a manager is charged with. For a company to reach the highest level of success possible, cost-effective operations are essential. Even in a world where technology continues to evolve and provide opportunities to make this a lot easier, it is also one of the ignored aspects of the business. When operations get too expensive, companies fold over time and that’s the bottom line.
5. Not Having a Finger on the Pulse Hides Opportunity
How can you embrace growth opportunities if you don’t have your finger on the pulse? How can you tell if someone is alive if you don’t feel their pulse as they lay there unconscious? How can you get there if you don’t know where you’re headed?
You can’t! Therefore, tools and processes need to be able to help you put the finger on the pulse of your company. What this does is it lets you see/feel the pulse of the brand and uncover those priceless opportunities every manager seeks. Informed decisions are more solid.
6. Bad Productivity Rates Limits Growth Potential
Employees are the lifeline of companies, they contribute to the big picture. However, if you forget to enhance their productivity they can’t do as much as they could if you did. Long hours, uncoordinated schedules, and time-wasting tasks all hurt the growth of a company. Why would managers even think about doing this? It beats us, but they are every single day.
7. The World Evolves & The Game Changes
We are in a new era, and one of the most memorable ones of all time. It is one that is driven by modern technology that evolves day in and day out. It evolves in a way that makes an even bigger impact on humanity as we know it.
However, this also presents managers with one of the biggest challenges of all time. They must learn how to evolve while staying aligned with their company’s overall purpose. If they don’t, somebody else will and it’s just a matter of time before it leads them to their demise. In a world where it’s easier than ever to reach the world, outperforming the competition is the easiest it has ever been. Failure to evolve has been and will continue to be the death of many businesses.
Now, it’s time to embrace the simple solution to it all.
With the cold truth out of the way, there is a simple solution that can help you overcome every single one of these setbacks. That’s using online time clock and employee scheduling like Time Clock Wizard to streamline the way that you do business. Not only will this route make it easier to do the schedule every time it comes out, but it will also make an everlasting improvement on your company.
The best way to embrace this opportunity is to use it in combination with other processes. Things such as enhanced employee communication, improved employee training, and flawless HR processes are just a few of the things it goes together with.