Your Customers Aren’t Cookie Cutter, and Neither Are Your Employees – Unless You Manage a Bakery
Uniqueness of your Customers
Running a successful business entails an incredible number of moving parts. This applies to small businesses as well as large multinationals. In the end, it all comes down to providing a specific service that someone is looking for. While the service offering itself may stay consistent across all customers, each customer has unique needs to be met and you as a business owner are expected to satisfy those needs with your products and services.
Individuality of your Employees
Have you ever applied this same mentality to your employees? They too are individuals with their own individual needs. As a business owner or manager, have you considered that each employee’s contributions could be optimized through improved shift scheduling? Their talents and energy could be used to greater potential if you truly understood their unique needs and had the right scheduling tools available.
Understanding who team members work best with, when they work best, and the intervals at which they may need breaks leads to improved employee-employer relations because your staff will feel respected and valued. This, in turn, will lead to improved employee-customer relations because your team will be happier overall, and this mindset will propel them to go the extra mile for customers. And all of this will, ultimately, result in growth of the business. Some employees work best in the morning hours. Some work best alone, or during different periods of customer flow. And some don’t have a lot of flexibility when it comes to time off requests due to necessary coordination of family schedules.
Improving communication with your staff members and creating a work schedule that fits their specific preferences also prevents sudden shift swapping requests, which saves you from having to make last minute changes in shift scheduling. For example, an employee who lives farther away and therefore prefers to work later in the day, could be accommodated by optimizing their schedule to assign them to shifts later in the day – this will suit their preferences and, in addition, prevent them from losing personal time during rush hours.
Unparalleled Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
With recent advancements in artificial intelligence, the latest scheduling software can be tailored to your business needs, putting incredible forecasting tools at your fingertips to reliably predict your customer flow and which employee skill set is needed at any given time. The software will literally do the heavy lifting for you by improving the scheduling process. This is one of the major differences between simple scheduling apps and powerful AI algorithms, which offer staff scheduling insights tailored to your specific business circumstances. Those insights and more will aid you in making your employees feel valued and in maximizing your overall business success. Because, after all, the better the needs of your employees are met, the better the needs of your customers will be met.
Author: Jakob Lex
Originally from Chicago, Jakob is a Junior at BYU studying Genetics, Genomics, and Biotechnology with minors in both Business and Scandinavian Studies. Since January 2021, Jakob has been a marketing intern at Weave Workforce, a labor optimization company, providing AI-based forecasting and scheduling to match the fluctuating demand of service-oriented businesses.
