How flexible is your staff scheduling system? When franchisees implement a roster system, they need to take the needs of their workforce into account.

It’s easier to manage our personal and working lives when we have some degree of flexibility in how, when or where we work. But while many salaried workers long for more flexible hours, many hourly-paid workers want more flexibility in predictable schedules.

Flexibility allows employees to achieve a better work/life balance and have meaningful time away from work to take care of children and other dependents. But it’s now increasingly crucial to employee satisfaction and retention. Workers are much happier when they feel the employer is family-friendly and cares about them.

And let’s face it, when employees are happy, they work harder and smarter. They are also more creative and productive. In fact, they are far less likely to leave the company, they are less absent, and there are fewer conflicts at work.

Flexibility is good for employees, franchisees and franchisors alike.

Of course, as an employer, offering flexibility allows franchisees to run their businesses more efficiently, ramping up employees’ shifts during busy times and reducing them during quieter times. But it’s not just one sided, good rostering software also allows workers to easily swap shifts, or turn their availability on or off as they require.

It’s a win-win situation.

DAILY STRUGGLE

However, when the story of one employee’s daily struggle to plan her life around unpredictable flexibility in the form of an erratic work schedule made the headlines, Starbucks’ less than family friendly work scheduling practices were thrust into the media spotlight.

According to the piece in The New York Times, the employee, Jannette Navarro, a 22 year old single mother who’s raising her four yearold son, earns US$9 an hour as a Starbucks barista. Through Starbucks’ work scheduling system, she often didn’t know which hours she’d be working on a day-to-day basis, which made it difficult, if not impossible for Navarro to plan and arrange child care.

Yet for Navarro, as all working parents, this is is a critical part of being able to hold down a job. Because she desperately needed money, she was reluctant to ask for more stable hours, for fear that being less available would translate into smaller pay packet.

The New York Times’ story effectively highlights how Starbucks’ scheduling software was making its workers’ lives more difficult. It was not a win-win situation.

While the article prompted America’s leading coffee chain to address its scheduling policies immediately, this story also serves as a timely reminder for all employers to ensure they operate their work scheduling systems by keeping employees’ needs front and centre.

Indeed, when a scheduling system is implemented without taking the needs of the workforce into account, it can cause all sorts of problems for the business – not just your workers.

The day after the original story appeared, Cliff Burrows, Starbucks’ group president in charge of US stores, wrote in an e-mail to 130,000 employees, saying that the company would be revising its scheduling procedures to make them more humane. This would include giving employees at least a week’s notice about their schedules, and the company would eliminate the practice of “clopening”—making a worker shut down the store for the night and return just a few hours later to open for the next day.

As for Navarro, she has now been given a more predictable schedule, working 40 hours a week.

FRANCHISEE ALERT

Don’t wait for the business to make the headlines for all the wrong reasons. If your franchisees are receiving niggles and complaints from their workers about scheduling, it’s in everyone’s best interests to look into the employees’ concerns right away. Never underestimate the impact of a disgruntled employee.

Quite the polar opposite to happy employees, disgruntled employees can cause irreversible damage to your business or brand by alienating your customers, and causing upset and conflicts amongst other staff members. In general, they are less productive, less attentive and more absent.

For any business to be successful, you need to make sure you don’t lose good people and make the most of the people you have.

If a work schedule is causing issues with staff, then it’s really important for the franchisee to address it head on. This may be as simple as giving managers more freedom to set hours for individual employees.

Remember, technology is a tool to help your business eliminate manual and time consuming processes. But you still need the human touch.

The best kinds of scheduling systems provide unprecedented transparency to workers and managers alike. They create value for workers while providing efficiencies for the business.

Kristen Harris is general manager of Deputy,a web based time and attendance platform for small businesses