The Cost of Poor SchedulingWhat is poor scheduling costing your business?

When it comes to running a successful team of shift workers, scheduling is often the most challenging aspect of the job. 

While some shift supervisors and schedule planners assume that scheduling changes and mistakes are bound to happen, poor scheduling can actually be pretty costly. 

In fact, if poor scheduling happens too often, the business can lose a significant amount of money.

Why is poor scheduling so expensive?

Poor scheduling can directly cost your business money—here are some of the main reasons why.

Poor scheduling can lead to overtime costs

A bad schedule tends to lead to one thing pretty quickly—overtime costs. 

When an employee is scheduled to work at a time when they are unavailable, or a shift is accidentally left unclaimed, another employee will need to fill in at the last minute. If this employee has already worked that day, this can quickly lead to overtime costs.

It goes without saying that the more you shell out in overtime pay, the more money you waste. It’s easy to see how poor scheduling can lead to unnecessary overtime costs for your business. 

With a properly organised employee schedule, you will quickly cut down on overtime costs simply because you won’t have to slot in additional hours for your employees at the end of their shifts — the schedule will have you fully covered.

Poor scheduling negatively affects employees

You may not be overly concerned with whether or not your employees actually like the schedule you’ve made, but according to statistics about employee satisfaction, you really should.

According to a study by the University of California, unpredictable schedules directly lead to unhappy employees. And employees who are asked to cover for others tend to be dissatisfied at work. 

Another study by Market Watch showed that uncertain work scheduling is actually one of the best indicators of low worker well-being.

So, it’s clear that good scheduling is directly linked to employee satisfaction. But why does that matter?

Well, employee satisfaction is a key part of employee retention. And as you probably know, employee turnover is extremely expensive. 

A startling study in 2017 revealed that every case of employee turnover can cost the business up to 33% of the employee’s annual salary. It’s clear why retaining employees is so important.

If you don’t want to lose unnecessary money on hiring and training new employees, invest in a good scheduling system to keep your current employees happy.

Poor scheduling is a time waster

In business, time really is money. In the UK, around 48% of employees waste up to 3 hours a day—which in turn, leads to a yearly loss of at least £28,000. 

If you want to save your business money, you should focus on making your systems and protocols as efficient as possible.

Poor scheduling can lead to wasted time. If you don’t have an efficient scheduling system in place, the employee making the schedule is likely wasting hours every week trying to track down employees’ availability and creating a viable schedule.

Even once the schedule is created, even more time can be wasted if mistakes are made. The supervisor will likely use several more hours trying to track down replacements for shifts, or even pick up the slack themselves.

What leads to poor scheduling?

If you want to stop losing money on poor scheduling, you’ll have to figure out the root of your problem. The main reason that businesses struggle with scheduling is the simple fact that they have a poor system in place.

What constitutes a poor system? Let’s put it this way—if you are using a basic Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your employees’ availability and upcoming shifts, you’ll need to spend extra time cross referencing emails, double-checking shift plans, and updating your documents. With this kind of basic system, mistakes are bound to happen.

Try an employee scheduling tool to improve your scheduling

Luckily, technology has advanced to the point where these rudimentary scheduling systems are no longer necessary. 

Findmyshift provides an intuitive, easy-to-use cloud-based scheduling tool so that you and your employees can quickly create schedules that really work.


Start scheduling your staff online.

No credit card required, nothing to download, no mailing lists and no surprises.