How to provide work-life balance with Open Shifts

With the premise of aiming for constant improvement of services and constant concern for customer satisfaction, empowering teams with the means to control their own schedules and provide a work-life balance is crucial to efficient human resource management.

This point is more easily attainable when the employees feel they participate in the decision-making process of matters that impact their daily life at the company, and a sense of commitment to the company can be strengthened. Here arises the importance of providing means for individual decision making, such as open shifts.

What is Open Shifts?

Open Shifts allows employees to bid on the shifts they would like to work wherever they are, thus having a more direct influence on their own schedules. Team planning, especially when done manually, can be a laborious and time-consuming task, and in the end, employees can often still be unhappy with the shifts they have been assigned. Advances in human resource management software technology now allow that, instead of the team leader searching for employees’ availability, employees have the opportunity to see all available shifts and select the one most appropriate to their lifestyle by creating their own schedule.

Benefits for the employee: work-life balance

A few months ago, we introduced the subject of work-life balance in our blog, which basically reinforces the importance of a healthy balance between the employees’ personal and professional life. In other words, the employee reaches an ideal point where he/she has time and disposition to dedicate to other areas of his/her daily life, which can be health, family, personal relationships, and leisure. With open shifts, employees can organize their personal life and work schedule whenever it is convenient for them, allowing them to create schedules adjusted to their personal needs and priorities.

Benefits for the company

By providing greater power over your own schedule, a better work-life balance is created, leading to greater employee engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, resulting in decreased absenteeism due to illness and employee turnover, while increasing productivity. There is also a reduction in paperwork and time savings, and if you don’t have enough people to fulfill shift requirements, you can simply generate a shift bid and find out who is interested in an extra shift, meaning you are never short-staffed. Additionally, you can minimize the cost of attendance incentives while creating consistency in service level for the customer.

Automating the Open Shifts process

By automating the process with a dedicated employee portal, such as the SISQUAL® Quality of Life Portal, it becomes easy and fast! As soon as a shift bid is generated, it is then posted on the mobile APP so that the team can see and choose the selected shift. The team leader will have the information and approve/deny those requests. Additionally, the shifts worked can be automatically integrated into payroll.

The Quality-of-Life Portal goes far beyond the open shifts process, and the benefits are extensive, providing the ability to manage schedules, exchange shifts, request vacations, days off, and justify absences.

In conclusion…

Team planning may be a complex job, but it can be simplified through a open shifts approach, creating a modern and streamlined approach to human resource management. Its benefits mentioned above are just the beginning, there is a huge possibility, and by working in this way, you can support your organization in fulfilling its workforce strategy, while focusing on internal communication.