How to Schedule Employees Across Different Locations (2024)

Your best practice guide to multi-location rotas

Employee scheduling isn’t always easy.

In fact, for some managers, it can be a real chore.

And adding several different locations into the mix only makes things trickier.

But with smart scheduling solutions like Findmyshift, rotas don’t need to cause stress.

Even with multiple different schedules for your business locations, rotas can be quick and simple.

Use a unified system

Managers need to take into account a lot of data when building a rota. On the employee side, they need to understand availability, skill sets, and preferences to ensure the shifts make sense for the staff involved as well as the business.

The demand coming from the business end is equally nuanced, taking into account customer trends, opening hours, workload, holidays, and required roles. All of this boils down to needing a certain number of employees with a mix of talents for any given shift.

That’s just for a single site! When managing multiple locations, the complexity increases exponentially. Now one site’s performance might have an impact on others, and some workers may be part of a shared talent pool or limited to a particular location.

Unsurprisingly, communication and organisation are vital. Using a central timesheet system allows proper storage of all this data so that managers have everything they need to make informed decisions when building rotas.

With Findmyshift, each location can be created as a separate location or ‘facility’ on the rota, allowing you to work on multiple schedules concurrently so that you can identify any issues early. This gives unified rota managers access to all the data they need.

Centralised communication will also make things easier, especially if you have a shared pool of employees expected to work shifts across a number of sites.

Having a single source of automated shift reminders and messages ensures employees stay updated even when their working location is subject to change.

Even if your locations have their own managers each individually responsible for their staffing, you can use Findmyshift as the shared system and create each location as its own team.

From a reporting perspective, you can still then generate reports which combine the data from all of your teams.

Plan in advance

The more notice you give employees of their shifts, the better. The benefits of these are made even clearer when you have a complex shift management environment like scheduling across multiple locations.

Publishing your rota a week or more in advance will give you plenty of time to identify and resolve conflicts, earmark good options for cover if short-notice absences do happen, and forecast your expenses.

Your employees will appreciate it too. Giving them sufficient notice allows them time to live their lives outside of work without the worry of being called in at the last minute. They can strike a better work-life balance this way and be happier for it.

And happy employees aren’t just going to make you feel good as a manager. Satisfied employees contribute to companies with 20% higher performance than their competitors.

Figures like that easily illustrate the return on investment that employee happiness can bring, and the one-time effort to get ahead on rota planning is a small price to pay for that.

Verify shifts with a smart time clock

If your business is split between several locations, keeping oversight of who’s where can be tricky. And while you’ve hopefully built a business where employees are honest and hard-working, it becomes harder to track everyone when they’re geographically spread.

That can mean a rise in time theft, where employees inaccurately report their hours, whether intentionally or not. One solution that avoids employees clocking in for their shifts early is to use a time clock with location tracking or geofencing.

This ensures staff locations are logged as they clock in for their shifts, or even limits them so that they can only start their shift once the system recognises that they are on site.

With such a system in place, you will ensure staff are paid for the actual hours they work, building fairness for all your employees and giving you more accurate data for your business.

Make use of these tips and managing rotas across multiple locations of your business will be easier than ever.