In retail, every minute counts, and customer satisfaction is key. This makes it especially crucial for businesses to manage complex shift patterns seamlessly. Schedules can be too much to track manually, from irregular hours and rotating shifts to split shifts and variable start/end times.

If these shift challenges aren’t handled appropriately, managers will likely encounter scheduling conflicts, employee dissatisfaction, compliance issues, and operational inefficiencies.
Even with fixed shifts, meeting the required demand at any given time is often challenging.

Legion Workforce Management Software is the solution enterprise organizations need. Our software is equipped with the tools you need to manage complicated work shifts and schedules so you can spend more time increasing your bottom line.

Key Points

• Legion WFM software makes it easier to manage diverse shift patterns, from irregular hours to rotating shifts. Legion’s intelligent automation and automatic recommendations empower managers to optimize schedules effortlessly, ensuring adequate staffing levels and reducing operational inefficiencies.
• Businesses can prioritize employee preferences, fostering a healthy work-life balance. Through self-service capabilities and automated scheduling, employees have more autonomy over their schedules, leading to increased job satisfaction and productivity.
• Legion WFM’s proactive compliance management alerts managers to potential violations and automates enforcement of scheduling rules. It can properly allocate resources by leveraging demand forecasting algorithms. This ability enables businesses to reduce labor costs and enhance customer service, ultimately driving organizational growth and success.

The Role of Workforce Management Software in Managing Work Schedules

Workforce management software is a powerful tool for addressing the multifaceted challenges of managing diverse shift patterns.

Legion WFM Software maximizes labor efficiencies and employee engagement, simultaneously.

For example, using intelligent automation, Automated Scheduling provides a “Recommendations” tab for managers. They can instantly see which employees are best suited to work open shifts.

Additionally, it recognizes PTO time and terminations. The system automatically marks these shifts as “open” for other employees to claim.

With WFM software, managers don’t have to shoulder all the burden of keeping up with frequently shifting schedules.

Workforce Preferences

Employee preferences play a crucial role in fostering a healthy work-life balance, and Legion’s WFM Software is designed with this in mind.

With Automated Scheduling, businesses can easily cater to employee needs regarding shift timings, days off, and even preferred work locations. This flexibility empowers employees to maintain a better work-life balance and enhances their overall job satisfaction.

Managers can assign patterns using a smart template. They can see how the hours within the pattern align with the employee’s skills, preferences, and availability. If additional hours need to be scheduled, the system will auto-schedule the rest of the hours around the previously assigned pattern to ensure coverage for the correct number of hours.

Another key feature of Automated Scheduling is its self-service capabilities, which gives employees direct control over their schedules.

Through a user-friendly interface, employees can request schedule changes, swap shifts with colleagues, and manage their time off without extensive managerial intervention. This level of autonomy helps foster a sense of ownership and control over schedules among employees (and makes life easier for managers).

Compliance Notifications

Legion takes a proactive approach to compliance management. When managers create shift patterns that could potentially violate compliance regulations, they are promptly alerted to the type of violation.

With Smart Templates, managers can create intelligently automated schedules that match business needs with employee skills and preferences and combine manager decision-making with stable scheduling practices. When generating schedules, it is easy to view staffing rules and compliance and set up and update recurring shifts. When managers create patterns or recurring shifts in mart Templates, Legion calls out all of the compliance issues that may arise.

This real-time feedback empowers managers to make informed decisions and fix potential compliance issues before they become problems.

Additionally, Legion WFM automates compliance management by enforcing scheduling rules, tracking working hours, and managing overtime. Whether ensuring proper rest breaks or adhering to maximum work hour limits, Legion WFM monitors and enforces compliance standards.

The software will also validate manually created shift patterns to ensure compliance, again letting managers know if there are any potential problems.

By integrating compliance checks into every step of the scheduling process, Legion WFM minimizes the risk of errors and helps businesses maintain compliance with confidence.

Resource Allocation

Legion WFM’s software optimizes resource allocation by matching staffing levels with demand.

Demand forecasting algorithms and real-time data analytics significantly optimize your workforce and minimize under/overstaffing. These tools enable businesses to make informed decisions based on insights into workforce needs and customer demand patterns.

The software can also adjust staffing levels to align with changing demand scenarios, allowing businesses to optimize workforce utilization, reduce labor costs, and improve customer service.

Legion’s AI-based forecasting tools can predict demand months in advance, and intelligent automation within Smart Templates can determine what portion of that demand is likely to remain stable. A Smart Template is then suggested to give employees some of their schedule information a month or more before they start working.

Managers can create a recurring shift or shift pattern so that the hours in that pattern will account for the entire workload. This eliminates overscheduling based on the projected workload/demand for that week.

Whether adjusting staffing levels during peak hours or reallocating resources to address unexpected surges in demand, Legion’s Workforce Management Software empowers businesses to stay agile in the face of shifting operational requirements.

Conclusion

WFM software isn’t just a nice to have. It’s a must in today’s dynamic business landscape. From irregular hours to rotating shifts and variable start/end times, the complexities of workforce scheduling require a comprehensive solution. Failure to address these challenges can ultimately hinder an organization’s success.

You can drive operational efficiency and support organizational growth by leveraging intelligent, automated, and employee-centric technology to optimize workforce management.

If you’re still creating and managing schedules manually or with outdated systems, it’s time to upgrade to Legion WFM. Request a demo to see Automated Scheduling in action.