Automated Rostering Can Improve Working Environments and Minimize Employee Costs

Automated rostering is an effort at reducing the complexity and cost of the rostering exercise. In areas such as national healthcare, it is highly important that people with the right skills be scheduled to each shift and ward, while at the same time reducing the cost. A typical solution is to engage temporary staff provided by specialist agencies to meet any foreseen shortages.

A computer-based system that can consider all the variables and develop rosters that meet both the right staff availability and minimal cost becomes critical in such a complex scenario. Automated rostering is an attempt to eliminate the laborious and error-prone manual processes in such situations.

Automated and Self Rostering Solutions

Once the requirements are known, these can be fed to the automated rostering software. The software would also have access to a database of available staff and their skills. Additionally, the software will be able to look at the work history of each staff member.

Based on the above data, the system will be able to generate rosters automatically. The rosters would ensure:

• Availability of right staff at the right locations as needed


• Maximum utilization of available staff before taking recourse to agency staff and overtime working


• Compliance with working time regulations for all staff so that no staff member is worked beyond allowable numbers of hours

The system can also incorporate self-rostering facilities, enabling staff members put in individual requests for any changes and preferences. These requests can then be accommodated to the extent possible. Because this would be done automatically based on pre-determined criteria, staff would typically have better confidence in these systems.

Impact on Staff Morale

Staff grievances often arise because of unfair and unequal treatment, or an impression of such treatment. When humans do complicated rostering exercises in the short time available, errors are likely to be made, and shortcuts are likely to be taken, leading to genuine grievances. Additionally, it would be extremely difficult to accommodate sudden requests for changes, or cope with unexpected absenteeism.

An automated rostering system can work extremely fast compared to humans, and can accommodate "last-minute" change requests. Even absenteeism tend to get reduced in an environment where staff members feel that they are being treated fairly, and their genuine needs are being accommodated to the maximum extent possible.

Impact on Costs

Automated rostering system can consider availability of staff and skills, and can generate rosters that maximizes the use of these. Consequently, there would be less need to resort to overtime working or getting short-term staff through agencies. Both overtime working and getting agency staff are expensive propositions compared to using in-house staff. The impact on costs can be very significant indeed as a result.

In an environment where staff scheduling is done fairly and where staff requests and preferences are accommodated to the extent possible, staff attrition rates are likely to come down. This too would have an impact on costs because recruiting and training new staff is quite expensive.

Impact on Quality of Customer Service

Staff attrition will also affect quality of service provided because new staff has to adapt to the specific requirements through familiarity. Thus, in addition to reducing costs, automated rostering systems can even improve the quality of service.

About the author:
Lucy Caudle, Marketing Manager at SMART, writes about the benefits of flexible
working and Automated Rostering Can Improve Working Environments and Minimize Employee Costs

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