More importantly, you don’t want your team members to get overworked because they’ll become burned out. Over the long run, burned-out employees tend to become former employees. With a balanced work schedule, you can maximize productivity, improve team morale, and maintain employee retention levels.

What is Your Team’s Work Schedule?

Whether your schedule is a complete mess or just needs some fine-tuning, there are a few changes you can make to improve your team’s work schedule. Your work schedule is a roster with your company’s future work periods. Individual workers and teams are given expected work hours, locations, work times, job descriptions, and responsibilities.

Effective scheduling practices have been found to improve time management, increase transparency, boost morale, improve reporting, and enhance a team’s work-life balance. A schedule directs the way your organization uses its labor hours, so it can determine whether your company is a success or failure.

Why Work Schedules Are Important

Your schedule determines your team’s resource allocation, and you need more than a spreadsheet to balance your team’s workload. When you schedule appropriately, you can avoid having any downtime and maximize your team’s productivity.

Achieve Your Goals

You must use your team’s time effectively if you want to reach your goals. A schedule is like your battle plan, and it is an integral way to determine how your battle resources are used. If you don’t plan ahead, you can end up wasting your team’s time and energy on unnecessary tasks.

Allocate Your Resources Properly

Another reason why work schedules are important is that they allow you to allocate your resources properly. When your team members can complete tasks without feeling overwhelmed, your team can enjoy better morale, lower turnover, and decreased absenteeism.

As a company, you spend less on labor when your labor hours are used efficiently. Plus, employees can complete more per hour when they don’t have to do overtime hours.

Improve Reporting

Creating an effective schedule allows you to understand which employees are perpetually late, who finishes projects early, and how everyone is progressing on each task. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your team, so you can make adjustments as you go instead of after someone misses a deadline.

Avoid Wasted Time

How often should teams meet? In most cases, teams should meet a lot less often than they do.

In fact, studies show about half of all meetings are considered a waste of time. This is a problem because the average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings. Meanwhile, one survey found that 83% of typical professionals spent 4 to 12 hours in meetings per week.

How to Organize Your Team’s Work Schedule

Businesses can improve their operations by improving their scheduling practices. A team’s work schedule determines how your employees use their time, so you need to learn how to schedule as effectively as possible.

1. Know Your Team

Before making a good team work schedule template, you must get to know your team members. For example, you may need to challenge an experienced employee and train a new team member. Meanwhile, another team member needs a chance to practice a recently learned skill.

Beyond growing and developing your team, you also need to understand their skills and weaknesses when you delegate tasks. You should understand each person’s personality type, full-time status, overtime abilities, and experience.

2. Communicate With Your Employees

Your team is your greatest asset, so communicate with them. Tell them about schedule changes, why you chose them for different roles, and what you expect them to achieve.

Think of your schedule as a living document. Talk to your employees during the week, and be ready to make changes as needed. Your employees may have suggestions and preferences, so you can accommodate these needs whenever it is possible to do so.

3. Use Time Tracking Software

You don’t want to simply write down a roster for the week and call it a day. With a world-class time tracker, you can divide up tasks among your various team members. You can track where employees are at on different projects, avoid overtime abuse, and redeploy team members as they complete different projects.

4. Check Team Availability

If one of your team members is on vacation, they’ll have a difficult time completing any tasks this week. Before you release a new schedule, check on your team’s availability. Other than asking about vacation time and upcoming sick days, you should also talk to team members about what they are working on and any other things they need to accomplish at work.

Ideally, you want to avoid double-booking or overscheduling your team members. Overworked employees are more likely to quit, so make your team’s work schedule as balanced as possible.

5. Release the Schedule in Advance

If there’s a problem with your schedule, you need to know about it before the workweek starts. Otherwise, you can’t plan around it.

More importantly, good organizations value their employees. Communicating a schedule in advance allows your employees to plan for childcare, dates, doctor appointments, and everything else in their lives. If you want happy employees and a finished to-do list, you should release your schedule in advance and get employee feedback about it.

Learn How Time Trackers Can Help Your Work Schedule

If you are struggling to create your team’s work schedule, a time tracker can help. With Time Tracker by eBillity, you can enjoy using a leading time-tracking program with your team. To learn more, check out Time Tracker’s free 14-day trial today.

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