How to save time doing the Christmas Schedule

How to save hours of your time doing the Christmas Schedule

The holiday season is a bustling time for all involved in the service industry, with an influx of shoppers and visitors eager for the best experiences. However, managing staff levels efficiently during the Christmas holidays can be challenging. With seasonal staff, extra opening hours and extra days, things can get confusing quickly. This is where the power of automated scheduling software comes into play, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable experience for your staff and customers.

Staff availability and filling extra shifts

Using StaffSavvy, you can spend minutes, not days, creating schedules for your teams regardless of size and the number of locations. Once your staff are set up on the system, they input their availability. Then, you set up your schedule, and our software will do the rest of the work for you. It's as simple as clicking a button. It knows your staff's contracts, their holiday, the hours they can't work, their contracted hours and the other shifts across all venues they've already committed to. And, when you have a space to fill in a shift, you can quickly email all available staff that match that role.

Another pain point at this time of year is shift swapping. However, with StaffSavvy, you can give staff the power to swap shifts without having to approve them yourself, as long as they have the same role. Say goodbye to scruffy sheets of paper or haphazard WhatsApp groups to track who's working when.

Staff have three options: they can relinquish shifts for anyone to take on a first come basis, send shifts to colleagues they know who want the shift or exchange shifts with a specific shift that another colleague has, all without any work for the manager.

With a 10-year proven track record, our approach is proven to work time and again to ensure you always have the right staff in the right place at the right time.

An increase in staff doesn't have to mean an increase in work for you

Onboarding seasonal staff can be seamless from the start. Ensuring a staff member is correctly onboarded with all the relevant paperwork can sometimes be a pain point. We use a step list system to simplify this and put the onus on completing the steps onto the staff members. You decide the order in which the items must be completed and set which requirements must be done before the employee is added to any shifts.

StaffSavvy was created to cater to organisations with a mix of salaried, casual and freelancer staff, all within a single schedule and payroll. No need to worry about calculating overtime payments and holiday allowances for short-term staff, as we do all that for you.

Managing complex shift patterns

StaffSavvy is highly versatile, fitting into how you already run your organisation with a focus on self-service and automation. It's our mission to help you navigate complex and ever-changing schedules to optimise your staff levels with ease. In fact, we have four different ways that you can create shifts, making the software work for all different types of organisations. The four ways to manage shifts are:

·   Bulk scheduling.

·   Regularly repeating shifts.

·   Managing shifts via a grid or timeline.

·   Managing a shift by week.

You can pick and choose between them to find what setup works for you and your team.

If you would like to book a StaffSavvy demo, we can take you through this in more detail and explain all the benefits over a short video call.