Employee Engagement and Scheduling: The Overlooked Connection

Businesses of all sizes are constantly looking for ways to increase employee engagement. For small businesses with mostly hourly workers, this matters even more because hiring is costly and disruptive. Keeping existing employees satisfied takes a multi-pronged approach, including reviewing how your company handles scheduling.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement describes an employee’s commitment to the company and its goals. More than just happiness or satisfaction, engagement encourages workers to see themselves as an integral part of the company’s success.

Engaged employees, says Forbes’ Kevin Kruse, contribute to:

• Higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to…
• Higher customer satisfaction, which leads to…
• Increased sales (repeat business and referrals), which leads to…
• Higher levels of profit

Trends in Employee Engagement

A recent Gallup poll found a second-year downturn in employee engagement. Most of that decrease has been at the manager level, raising concerns about managers setting the tone for engagement. This may be due to fewer management roles, larger teams for fewer managers, AI adoption, and general burnout from the tasks and responsibilities management must handle.

For businesses that rely on mostly hourly workers, scheduling adds extra pressure. “Managing a workforce means assigning tasks and filling shifts. Optimizing it goes further; balancing every labor hour for maximum impact while boosting employee engagement,” says marketing VP Malysa O’Connor. “At its core, optimization means aligning business needs with employee skills and preferences, creating a win-win that simultaneously maximizes both labor efficiency and employee engagement.”

Scheduling Optimization

Operating with goals of optimization and employee engagement may seem like a challenging fit. For managers responsible for scheduling, a number of problems can get in the way of an optimized schedule:

• Overstaffing: Too many employees compete for the same hours, preventing workers from earning expected wages and/or tips
• Understaffing: Shifts may not be fully covered, leading to overworked employees and unplanned overtime
• Time: Managers have many responsibilities and may not have enough time to optimize the schedule
• Unpredictability: Last-minute call-outs for illness or emergencies force managers to make quick adjustments that may leave the schedule with holes or mismatched competencies in employees working together. For employees, unpredictable schedules make operating in their personal lives a challenge
• Compliance: Federal, state, and local labor laws necessitate aligning shifts with required hours and breaks

To meet these competing demands, some businesses are turning to a model that includes employee self-scheduling.

What Is Self-Scheduling for Hourly Workers?

Self-scheduling lets workers choose some or all of the shifts they want to work, rather than managers assigning all shifts. A completely free and open self-scheduling model will rarely work; instead, managers can create a framework that allows some employee autonomy within a structure that ensures consistent shift coverage.

A 2023 study of  healthcare workers found that “burnout rates and dissatisfaction remain high due to long working hours. One possible solution to this problem is to let them choose their weekly working hours and starting times in order to achieve a work-life balance.” Employees with better work-life balance are more likely to be engaged and committed to the company’s goals and interests. Soliciting some input into scheduling shows employees you value their time both inside and outside of work. This effort leads to much better retention and helps avoid the “grass is greener” mentality. 

Tools for Self-Scheduling

Still, self-scheduling can’t be a free-for-all. Your industry will dictate the best ways to incorporate employee input into scheduling, but your best tool is WorkforceHub, which can put the complicated pieces together for an efficient schedule. 

When you program non-negotiables into scheduling on the back end, what employees see as options will be combinations without compliance or competency problems. Plus, the software can automatically populate self-scheduling choices when they meet the criteria, eliminating extra work for managers. When shifts open up for call-outs, it’s easy to offer them to remaining staff through the app so the schedule can be sent to everyone as it happens.

WorkforceHub Supports Improved Engagement Rates

Employee engagement is a valuable goal for longevity and employee satisfaction. In the study mentioned above, the authors concluded that using a powerful scheduling model “allow[s] for both working time and starting time requests and those individual requests can be taken on board in each planning period.” Embracing employee contributions to their own schedules can yield great rewards in work-life balance and retention.

WorkforceHub includes scheduling functionality built for today’s needs. With smart scheduling capabilities, shifts can be automatically populated with the right staff member, every time. Accruals tools also ensure that employees with approved time off aren’t put into the schedule, helping to boost engagement and satisfaction rates among your workforce. Explore how implementing WorkforceHub can transform the way you manage employee scheduling.