An Employee’s Work From Home Experience Having an Effective Employee Scheduling System

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to impact businesses worldwide. Most affected include the Casinos, Airlines, Cruise Lines and Hospitality industries. Companies are forced to stop unprofitable operations and significantly reduced their workforce to overcome the economic strain caused by this pandemic. Organizations have developed different strategies to continue vital operations and remain in business. A work-from-home option for employees and reducing their working hours has been a popular approach amongst businesses but also can create headaches for schedulers. Automated online rostering systems simplify scheduling by helping to identify the critical work needed and roster employees to meet existing and forecasted demand. This reduces the added burden on schedulers who otherwise need to manually identify and schedule limited staff numbers to the outstanding demand.

Work patterns define which days an employee works, times they work, and how much of their entitlement remains if they take time off. We suggest using programmable work patterns if employees work a fixed rotation every week or over several weeks.

Using an automated online rostering system with the working patterns feature enabled, the schedulers will create work patterns and apply them to the employees. The system then takes over the rest of the shift allocation automatically. This process reduces scheduler workload and minimizes the risk of human error. Automated online rostering systems will allow adjustments to the working patterns of employees dynamically reflecting changes in the workforce and the demand.

The goal is to create a less confusing and more streamlined work schedule for all employees, improving our engagement and overall remote work or work from home experience.