Blog

December 23, 2020

5 Workforce Scheduling Features Set TCP Software Apart

In today’s ever-changing business environment, workforce scheduling is much more complicated than posting a schedule on a wall or sending an email. Instead, you need a solution that gives you transparency in scheduling and tools to help you manage employee time and attendance for every location, department, and job type in your organization. TCP’s scheduling solution, powered by TimeClock Plus software, allows you to do that and more. You can build and manage schedules, create recurring schedules, set up exceptions, and download reports to optimize your workforce.

Here are five important ways TCP sets itself apart from other providers:

Flexible Scheduling Options to Meet Your Unique Needs
The rapid pace of change requires flexibility in workforce scheduling, so you can have more employees at work during peak times and fewer during down times or holidays. Having flexibility in scheduling not only allows you to have better control over labor costs, but it also helps you vary schedules across different work environments.

TCP’s workforce scheduling software helps you go beyond setting a static weekly or monthly schedule and gives you the tools to perform a range of scheduling actions, for example:

Setting up ad hoc or recurring schedules using our schedule builder or extensive template library
Establishing different schedules by location, job type, or department
Dragging and dropping employee shift assignments for quick schedule creation
Making schedule changes on a one-off basis or making multiple changes using our Global Scheduler tool

Tools for Employee Accessibility and Empowerment
Employees can reliably work their shifts when they know their schedule and get timely updates about changes. TCP’s workforce scheduling software gives employees access to their schedules, allowing them to view their hours and manage their schedules from any device. With TCP scheduling software, you can also give employees the accessibility to trade shifts with co-workers, request days off, and change their schedules within the parameters you set.

Empowering employees to actively manage their schedules not only allows them to play a role in managing their time and work-life balance, but research suggests it can also help improve their performance. Gartner research found that when employees have more control over when and how they work, they’re more likely to be high performers.

Exception Tracking to Help You Manage Overtime and Labor Costs
Sometimes scheduling anomalies happen. Employees can be late, miss a shift, call in sick or go over their overtime limit. Without effective tools for managing scheduling exceptions, you can risk having insufficient employee coverage or experience higher labor costs due to excessive overtime. In either scenario, you need the ability to track scheduling exceptions and fix them quickly.

Our TimeClock Plus software lets you define exceptions and set up notifications for both missed work and overages so you can see the real-time impact of scheduling anomalies. For example, you can configure the software to send you a notification when employees are more than 15 minutes late for a shift.

Built-In Tools to Boost Regulatory Compliance
Like other areas of workforce management (WFM), workforce scheduling is governed by a range of federal, state, and local labor laws. Examples include the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which requires overtime pay for employee hours worked over 40 hours per week, and predictive scheduling laws, which aim to provide employees with more advance notice of schedule changes. The TCP scheduling system allows you to create rules within the software so you can apply overtime appropriately, provide ample notice of schedule changes, and keep employees within preset working-hour limits.

Integrated WFM to Drive Uninterrupted Business Operations
Employee scheduling impacts many different areas of the employee experience, including time and attendance and leave management. Given the interconnectedness of those areas, it makes sense for them to work together under the umbrella of one integrated system.

TCP’s seamless configuration capability allows you to sync your workforce scheduling activities with tools for time collection, absences and leaves, and tracking labor costs across departments and projects. And, because employee hours and overtime translate directly to pay, we also cover payroll integrations with nearly every major payroll provider. As a result, you can take advantage of end-to-end WFM solutions to meet all of your scheduling needs.

Manage Your Workforce with Unrivaled Scheduling Solutions
In today’s busy and sometimes unpredictable business environment, you need flexible solutions and actionable insights to manage your workforce more effectively. TCP’s workforce scheduling solutions provide tools for setting schedules, making and communicating changes, and keeping track of exceptions that impact your bottom line. To learn more about how TCP can boost your WFM capabilities, read our e-book, Everything You Need to Know About Workforce Management.