With the mobile workforce landscape continuing to evolve, businesses in all types of industries are hiring employees for specific tasks during specific times. People who work shifts are called shift workers, and they are an important part of organizations with a deskless workforce. Shift work gives employees’ consistency throughout the day while serving the needs of your customers, but managing shift workers poses unique challenges.

A deskless and fixed-location workforce can complicate the process. Intelligent tools are needed to manage a blended workforce effectively.

Employee shift management CRM Software can help here. By building and maintaining the right shift workforce, you can meet—and perhaps surpass—your business goals.

Shift Management: The Challenges

It is a time-consuming and expensive process to plan complex schedules for deskless workers. Staff schedulers face even more challenges when they have to use manual tools and processes to deal with such a huge process. Some of these challenges include:

Limited ability to handle exceptions

If everything were perfect, you wouldn’t have sick days for your shift workers. But shift workers are just like everyone else prone to unforeseen circumstances. Trying to find a qualified replacement for a worker who is unavailable unexpectedly can be difficult.

Poor visibility of the workforce

With a team of deskless and fixed-location shift workers, keeping track of everyone around the clock can be challenging. Your shift workers may not know how long they’ve been on the job, where they’re located, or which customers, clients, or patients they’re serving.

Forecasting errors 

Shift scheduling and rostering are both successful if forecasting is done correctly. When you schedule too many or too few workers for different shifts, you can seriously affect your bottom line. In the absence of reliable historical data, it’s difficult to predict how many employees you’ll need at each shift.

Using manual or traditional methods makes it nearly impossible to accurately plan ahead because they don’t provide in-depth data collection and analysis. Overscheduling results in excessive spending on staff without corresponding revenue, and under-scheduling leads to delays, burnout, and frustration among staff that can bleed into the customer experience.

Using Employee Shift Management CRM Software to Optimize Scheduling and Rostering

It is fortunately possible to address common challenges and take some of the guesswork out of managing your deskless workers with the use of shift and rostering management tools.

Scheduling and dispatching are made easier

Schedules and dispatches are handled manually, which results in inefficiencies and burnout. It is crucial that schedulers stay on top of the ever-changing schedules of multiple shift workers and keep track of updates, delays, requests for time off, and other changes.

Errors in scheduling are reduced

If a schedule is compiled from multiple sources, such as calendars, emails, and spreadsheets, errors are more likely to occur. If a schedule is compiled from multiple sources, such as calendars, emails, and spreadsheets, errors are more likely to occur. This risk is reduced by employee shift management CRM Software since it stores all the information you need securely and integrates it into a single interface.

Accessibility and communication are improved

By having a shift management system, you can ensure that both deskless and fixed-location shift workers have access to the latest schedules, updates, and optimized routes.

With the ability to view and share updates from anywhere via desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, workers can reduce time spent calling or emailing staff schedulers about issues or changes. So that no one misses a beat, workers can use cloud-based employee shift management CRM Software with internet connectivity.

Businesses tend to face proper scheduling and rostering challenges, and many other day-to-day activities. CRM Runner is your one-stop solution for field service and office management, with a built-in robust employee shift management feature.