What is Opening Shift? Solutions for the Common Challenges

Explanation of Opening Shift:

An open shift is a scheduled shift that is not specifically assigned to an employee. These shifts can also be organized through the app. In this, managers create an open shift on a schedule template with their employees in a shift app like Home base. Eligible employees can apply for shifts through this app. Many employees may request to take a shift at a time. But it depends on the manager who approves and rejects these requests.

Open shifts usually occur when the manager or business owner is planning the schedule. And they should realize that they don’t have any specific employee who is available for these shifts. This is because opening shifts are organized through which it is necessary to organize your team or streamline your staff’s schedule.

It’s easy to avoid open shifts with the Home base Schedule Planner, a mobile app, and weekly schedule templates that allow you to create shift policies, predictive scheduling, auto-scheduling, rotating schedules, and more. Thus open shifts, shift swapping, and shift trades are not as common as everyone is comfortable with their routine.

Below you’ll find more home base open shifts offers solutions to help you avoid open shifts and streamline your scheduling process. If you want solutions to common challenges in opening shifts, read this article till the end.

Solutions for Common Challenges:

1. Managing availability and distributing shifts

One of the most difficult tasks encountered while setting the schedule is managing the employee’s availability.  But this is depending on the size of your team, in this; you may need to coordinate different types of employees. Both large and small companies face their own challenges in this scheduling.

Small companies often need to work around the limited availability of a few employees. In comparison, larger companies need to offer enough shifts for a wide variety of employees while juggling multiple availability schedules. The solution to managing your employees’ availability is to let home-based shifts handle it for you. When you have a lot of employees, any shift can be considered a “required” shift. The challenge is not only to create a fair schedule; you also need to deal with employees getting frustrated with their shifts. For example, a restaurant may have open shifts on Saturday nights rather than staffing on Tuesday nights.

The best way to deal with this problem is to reward positive behavior with favorable changes. Assign your desired shifts to employees who help fill in unwanted shifts when needed, or provide excellent customer service.

2. Hard-to-fill shifts and budgeting challenges

Some changes are more desirable than others. For example, no one wants to handle the night shift schedule. Also, employees rarely want to do early morning or late night shifts. And open shifts are late night and morning shifts. . The challenge is not just to shift top employees. You also need to schedule employees that fit into your budget and create lower hourly rates. And you can create an app for scheduling in which you can easily schedule open shifts. You can also use this app to manage your budget and track expenses.

This app lets you see estimated costs when creating your schedule so that your staff is on track to schedule employees for either early morning shifts or night shifts. Keep in mind that this will not make the employees busy for both shifts. You can also reward employees with more desirable shifts. This app can help you manage your budget by allowing you to schedule employees who make different hourly rates. With this app, targeting labor cost-to-sales ratio to match creating a schedule is really easy.

3. Avoiding manager and employees burnout

One of the biggest problems managers face is burnout. Managers spend most of their time making schedules when they shouldn’t. Employees also feel irritated with each other when you are not using effective scheduling techniques. And keeping shift workers busy has become another big challenge in recent years. Without knowing it, you create a work schedule in which some employees always want to work nights and others only on the day shift.

The solution is to use a combination of techniques to avoid burnout and fill open shifts. And to help you solve most of your scheduling problems, a set of scheduling techniques can be used in conjunction with a specific app. You can also cross-train your best employees. This process will provide career growth and diversification. And will also make sure you’re not understaffed. Plus, you can use our free team communication app to make sure your employees are engaged and ready to work.

Fortunately, you don’t have to go over the budget to buy scheduling software. You can use a scheduling app that helps you manage your employees’ availability, manage your budget, and reduce burnout.

Conclusion

An open shift is a shift that is approved but not assigned to an employee. Employees will see the open shifts they are eligible for and available to work on their shift tab. Through the app, employees can claim open shifts directly from the Shifts tab. Through this process, managers are automatically notified of claimed shifts and the E-schedule is updated.

Additionally, employees can enable a shift alarm that sends an automatic notification when they are ready to claim open shifts. Employees can use the edit feature on their profile page to set this alarm.