Boosting Scheduling Efficiency with Productivity Optimization

Optimizing productivity in scheduling is critical when the difference between making a sale and a customer walking away is razor-thin. It maximizes operational efficiency to ensure the right resources are available when they matter most. Productivity optimization, along with employee productivity measurement, can redefine workforce scheduling, ensuring businesses operate at their peak potential.

Understanding Productivity Optimization

Productivity optimization in scheduling focuses on assigning the right employee to the right task at the right time. By considering individual productivity metrics, managers can enhance overall performance without overstaffing or underutilizing resources. Let’s dive into why this is crucial:

Tailored Resource Allocation

For industries like luxury retail, employee skill levels and productivity rates can vary significantly. Leveraging productivity data ensures that the highest-performing employees are scheduled during critical periods based on projected demand.

Let’s consider two shifts that need to be filled. One is on a Tuesday afternoon when sales volume is expected to be fairly low, and the other is on a Saturday afternoon when the sales volume is expected to be much higher. Understanding employee-centric productivity lets us place the worker with the higher productivity capacity on that Saturday shift, ensuring that the customers who arrive during that time can be handled efficiently and effectively.

Balanced Workloads

By integrating employee productivity scores into scheduling, businesses can maintain a balanced workload, preventing burnout and inefficiencies.

In that same scenario we just described, imagine if a lower productivity worker were assigned the busy Saturday shift–not only does the service level to the customers decrease, but also the employee would likely feel overworked and frustrated that they weren’t capable of keeping up with the incoming demand.

Who Benefits from Productivity Optimization?

While not every organization needs productivity-driven scheduling, it’s a game-changer for businesses where individual performance directly impacts outcomes, such as:

• Commission-Based Retail: Scheduling top-performing employees during high-traffic periods to maximize sales.
• Specialty Retail: Any stores where individual productivity is important to their ability to serve customers.
• Logistics & Distribution: Ensuring the most efficient workers staff shifts to meet benchmarks for picking/packing.

How Productivity Optimization Works

This system evaluates various scheduling combinations during the assignment phase of schedule optimization, ensuring shifts are allocated based on productivity metrics while balancing other factors like employee availability and compliance rules.

Productivity-based scheduling adds a goal to the schedule optimization process: Select workers whose individual productivity meets/exceeds the demand for each hour of that shift when combined with other scheduled workers.

By looking at optimizing for productivity this way, we can prioritize more productive workers at times when volume may be getting higher but not quite reaching the point where another shift should be added.

Benefits of Productivity Optimization

• Increased Efficiency: Optimize labor costs by scheduling based on actual productivity rather than just headcount.
• Enhanced Performance: Schedule top-performing employees during peak periods for better outcomes.
• Performance Motivation: Employees can be motivated to increase their individual productivity when the shifts they are scheduled to are directly impacted by their own performance.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Gain insights into productivity trends, enabling smarter workforce planning.

Productivity optimization isn’t just about improving schedules—it’s about transforming how businesses operate. By leveraging tools like Legion’s Employee Performance and Rewards for productivity measurement and Legion’s Automated Scheduling modules for optimizing based on productivity, managers can unlock new levels of efficiency, ensuring every employee contributes their best to the organization’s success.

Start optimizing your schedules today to stay ahead in a competitive market. To see Legion Automated Scheduling and Legion’s Employee Performance and Rewards in action, schedule a free demo with us.