Shift swapping is a common practice in various industries such as nursing and healthcare, hospitality, and construction, but also common in other fields where work hours are based on shifts. However, employees swapping shifts poses a set of challenges for employers and managers. Let’s take a look at why shift swapping is beneficial and sometimes necessary for running your business and how to handle the challenges that arise when you allow your employees to swap shifts.
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What is shift swapping?
Shift swapping is when one hourly employee trades their scheduled shift for another hourly employee’s scheduled shift.
Employee’s may need to be allowed the opportunity to swap shifts in order to accommodate occasional friction that arises between their personal life and work life. For instance, a single parent may need to suddenly take some time to attend the needs of their child or a working student may have an unforeseen obligation to be at school when they already have a shift scheduled at work.
Difficulty creating schedules
Managers in charge of creating employee schedules face many challenges. You need to make sure that all shifts are covered while also staying compliant with laws and regulations related to employee shift scheduling. This means you need to be certain that employees work the right amount of time based on their contract type and employee classification, while also making sure they work the least amount of overtime. All of this takes a lot of time, but it’s very important to get it right in order to run a business smoothly.
Unexpected employee shift changes
The biggest headache comes when you’ve taken the time to create the perfect schedule. The perfect schedule that accommodates all employee shift requests and (hopefully) takes into consideration all US labor laws regarding how many hours employees can work and how many hours they need to have off between shifts. Then, out of the blue, one of your employees realizes that they actually can’t work on a certain day at a certain time and they want to swap that shift with another employee.
What do you do when employees want to swap shifts with each other?
If you have the patience and you are willing to invest more time, you revise the schedule. You do all of the calculations again and you make sure everything is balanced and compliant with regulations. By the time you’re done, you’ve likely invested countless hours into creating that schedule. There hast to be a faster way of making schedules out there though. Employers and managers like you need something to save them time while also giving employees a bit of freedom when they need last-minute changes.
Time is money, and when you own a business, you need to make sure you use your time wisely. Besides using a free shift schedule template, if you have a bit of money to invest, you can use software like Factorial to schedule your employee shifts. It will save you dozens of hours a month, depending on how many employees you have. It will especially come in handy when you have to reschedule shifts last minute due to employees needing to swap their shifts and make changes.
Shift swapping challenges
You probably have dozens of examples from your own business, but let’s take a look at the most common situations where shifts need to be traded. Regardless of your industry and the type of shifts your employees work, you are going to come across challenges in creating schedules.
Trading nurse shifts in healthcare
The typical nurse schedule consists of a full time schedule of 5 days, with 8 hours worked each day. However, there are other types of nurse schedules that can be a better fit for the specific needs people working in healthcare often have. With such a demanding job and frequent night shifts, nurses may have days when they need to swap shifts with others to ensure they can accommodate an unexpected incident in their personal lives.
Shift trades in hospitality
Line cooks, hosts, and servers, like all workers, also have unexpected personal life incidents that may need attending to. Schedules in restaurants are very important to get right. Also, working with such a high volume of people on a daily basis, as waiters do can lead to fatigue and sudden illness. In these situations, a properly functioning system for swapping shifts can be a lifesaver.
Workers exchanging shifts in construction
Again, employers can allow workers to swap shifts to accommodate unforeseen circumstances. However, in an industry like construction, you want to make sure that only employees with the same skills can swap shifts, to make sure that the project deadlines are not compromised.
Employees covering each other’s shifts in retail
Allowing your employees to swap shifts to accommodate obligations in their personal lives can be a competitive advantage in many industries, including retail. Retail is an industry where the rate of employees quitting is 70% higher than other US industries, a McKinsey study found.
Create a company culture that sees workers as people with lives outside of the workplace as well. Give them the benefit of shift swapping and save yourself the headache of having to fill in empty shifts. Your employee satisfaction is bound to go up and, as a result, so is your employee retention rate.
Shift swapping benefits
Besides the satisfaction and retention of your employees, the ability to swap shifts has many benefits and advantages. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
- A quick solution to problems: Allowing employees to trade shifts helps you fill absences. If you are short of staff, but have a system in place for facilitating shift swaps, you can quickly resolve the issue by having someone else to cover that shift.
- A cost-effective solution to problems: Allowing other employees to grab an empty shift is a cheaper alternative to hiring temporary workers to fill the shifts.
- A better experience for employees: Besides the fact that employees can swap shifts in emergencies to accommodate personal obligations, they can also plan shifts around regular personal obligations. Also, if there are family emergencies for instance, they do not have to use vacation days or sick leave in order to get out of a shift – they can swap with a colleague instead.
Once you’ve decided you want to allow your employees to trade shifts, you are faced with the challenge of how to go about creating a system that facilitates and allows this. Let’s take a look at our options!
How to accommodate shift swaps
One way to schedule shifts is by using a free shift schedule template. However, read on for an even easier alternative.
The easiest way to allow employees to swap shifts is to use scheduling software like Factorial. No need for emailing swap requests back and forth and making sure everyone is in the loop when you can have a system that does all of that for you. No need for an excel sheet filled with the hours worked by your employees and who is working and when and what shifts were taken by whom. With Factorial, you get an overview of the entire process in a single dashboard. Consult your Factorial calendar and see who is working, from where, and how many hours. Request shift swaps and have a manager approve or reject the request. With Factorial, the entire process is streamlined, automated, and takes only a few clicks from everyone involved.
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