Whether you’re in the field of manufacturing, distribution or fulfillment, you probably find that you often need to keep your headcount high to meet spikes in demand. In order to keep your administrative burden low while you support the needs of so many workers, it’s easy to fall back on a simple scheduling system. Whether you’re booking shifts for permanent or contingent staff, you find workers with open availability during established shift times, and you pencil them in to work full time on a regular schedule.
But leaning too heavily on this approach to scheduling can limit your capabilities. If your workers already have full schedules, the quickest way to meet an increase in demand is by giving them additional hours, which means you’ll have to pay extra for overtime. Working too many hours could also cause your workforce to burn out, leading to higher turnover.
Additionally, when you insist that all workers adhere to a regular full-time schedule, you can limit the potential of your workforce in two ways. First, workers who experience life changes that result in new scheduling conflicts could have to leave their jobs. Second, you’ll have a smaller pool of talent from which to draw, because potentially high-quality hires like college students, who typically seek part-time gigs, won’t be able to work for you, nor will people who have family obligations that prevent them from working certain hours
The risk with inflexible scheduling is particularly evident when you consider how workers of different generations view their jobs. 77 percent of Millennials in the U.S. are willing to change jobs in order to better balance their commitments at work with their personal and familial obligations. Since Millennials comprise an ever-growing percentage of the global workforce, can you afford to lose out on this talent?
Fortunately, there’s another way to schedule.
For instance, at Staff Management | SMX, we offer an innovative scheduling option for your contingent workforce. Our flexible job-sharing program can increase your access to quality hires while reducing your turnover rate and limiting the amount you spend on overtime. All the while, you won’t have to take on excessive administrative burden.
What is this scheduling option? It’s called FLEX, and here’s how it works.
Job-Sharing Software for Sophisticated Schedule Matching
The core principal of FLEX is that smart scheduling and supportive management makes it possible, and even beneficial, to distribute the workload of one full-time worker among several part-time workers.
Potential associates who are attracted to the flexible scheduling options we provide are recruited, screened, interviewed and brought on board. Most of these associates sign on to work between 16 and 24 hours each week. Whether they have to attend classes, work another job or care for family members, we find out when they’re available and when they’re not.
We then take their availability and plug it into our proprietary workforce management and analytics system Stafftrack. Stafftrack automatically matches the pooled schedules of part-time contingent workers with your facility’s projected labor requirements. This process maximizes your daily fill rate.
With a large reserve of part-time contingent workers available, you’ll be able to scale up to meet demand quickly. That means greater agility without the added cost of overtime wages. In the long term, flexible scheduling should also help you reduce turnover rates because you’ll be able to accommodate changing schedules for workers, and you’ll have the added support of workers who appreciate the ability to balance their outside obligations with their work life.
Supervision by an Onsite Management Team
Of course scheduling is only part of the challenge. In addition to receiving the benefits of Stafftrack’s advanced workforce scheduling capabilities, you’ll also have the support of a dedicated onsite team that manages your contingent workforce from recruitment through day-to-day management. We believe that onsite support is crucial for success.
Onsite management ensures a consistent commitment to workers throughout the hiring, scheduling and training processes as well as accountability for maintaining conflict-free schedules for workers.
Our management teams are also responsible for meeting the promises made to our clients. Onsite supervisors ensure that the turnover and overtime targets established in service level agreements (SLAs) are met throughout the duration of our partnerships. These onsite supervisors are our leaders in the field, and they ensure that we follow through by meeting our targets each day.
Another benefit of having an onsite management team that watches metrics closely is that workers have a consistent set of expectations for their job performance, and you have supportive workforce leaders at your facility who are ready to make the adjustments necessary to meet your SLAs.
A Job-Sharing Framework That Benefits Both Workers & Businesses
As a valued mechanism in our onsite staffing solution toolbelt, FLEX has the potential to increase the agility of your labor force and the satisfaction of your workers. When you have to quickly scale your workforce to meet a change in demand, you don’t need to increase overtime pay or risk worker burnout. With FLEX scheduling, you can tap into a larger pool of qualified talent and limit your turnover rate by accommodating associates’ outside obligations.
When you partner with Staff Management | SMX, you get to leverage both the sophisticated scheduling power of Stafftrack and the dedicated support of an onsite management team who will become experts in your operation in order to maximize results.
Are you ready to learn more about how FLEX scheduling and our onsite staffing model can help you reduce turnover rates and overtime pay while increasing fill rates?
