Times are tough right now across all sectors. Yet, an exclusive international new report has revealed businesses who rely on the deskless workforce could be missing out on much-needed income due to poor scheduling.
Quinyx’s latest report - The Cost of Poor Scheduling - polled global operation executives across the logistics, healthcare, retail, and restaurant sectors and found inefficient scheduling could be costing businesses up to 40% of income.
Scheduling has always been notoriously difficult to get right. A good schedule will consider the needs of the business and customers, alongside balancing costs, and employee needs.
It’s been made a whole lot harder by the pandemic.
The art of good scheduling means having the right people in the right place at the right time. Effective forecasting is key to achieving this but, thanks to fluctuating demand, changing consumer behaviour, local restrictions, and a whole host of health factors to add to the equation, forecasting and scheduling are now tougher than ever.
Often schedules also fail to do the job they are meant for. Quinyx analysed 450,000 schedules of deskless workforce employers and found many failed to fulfil basic functions. Many also violated labour laws on a daily basis.
Here’s how poor scheduling could be harming your business:
1. Lost revenue
Quinyx’s research found companies who aren’t using AI-driven workforce management software lost up to 15% of revenue because of ineffective schedules. Typically, this happens when there aren’t enough staff scheduled for a particular shift and customer demand goes unmet. For example, a takeaway restaurant could make more money if an extra member of staff were added to the rota to work in the kitchen. This way, orders wouldn’t get backed up, and wait times would be reduced, resulting in the restaurant being able to process more orders in a shorter time and increase their revenue. Effectively, this would also lead to happier customers.
2. Overspending on wages
A mix of overtime and poor scheduling practices sees, on average, companies overspend on salary by 25%. It’s a huge burden for cash-strapped businesses to carry. The major influencers, when it comes to spiralling labour costs, include the inability to manage staffing levels, too much time taken up by administration and, as a result of these, an inefficient business with low levels of productivity.
3. Unhappy customers & employees
Bad scheduling makes life miserable for your customers and your employees. It leads to your customers not receiving the experience they expect - which can easily happen if you’re understaffed. As for your employees, their morale and happiness can quickly be eroded if they don’t feel like they are in control of when they work and don’t experience any scheduling flexibility. These two factors combined can quickly escalate and become a recipe for disaster.
So, what’s the solution?
25% of the polled executives said they were crying out for software that simplified their scheduling process, 30% wanted scheduling that automatically optimised according to business needs, and 40% said outdated technology was their main constraint.
Manual workarounds and legacy scheduling software only deliver 70% scheduling accuracy versus the near-perfect accuracy AI-driven software offers.
For any company serious about improving their scheduling and business performance, AI-driven workforce management software should be the first place to look.
