Education budgets are decreasing, yet expectations are always rising. Navigating these demands is highly challenging and efficiency is vital for success. Scheduling support personnel, faculty and staffers at schools, colleges and universities is complicated and presents many challenges. All educational institutions have a variety of job positions to schedule and programs to be covered. Most schools support staffers and resources proportionally by classroom demand. Outside of the classroom comes the additional challenge of organising extra-curricular activities with supervisors. Meanwhile, staff availability and personal needs also have to be considered in what can be a complicated process.
For years, schools and education departments have tried to deal with these demands through a simple pen and paper planner or, at best, with a spreadsheet. This only increases confusion and decreases efficiency. Now, budget minded institutions and departments are seeking a better way by using shift management programs. Today, you can try employee scheduling software through a variety of free options. Not all shift management programs provide this opportunity but many do, offering trials that may be capped by number of staff, usable hours or instead run adverts.
Education Staffing Software
Here is a list of four Windows-based scheduling software for education with a brief description of each:
Notes: Not all are downloadable desktop programs for Windows/Mac OS and some may be browser-based applications that require high-speed Internet access. Be sure to read all systems and licensing agreements from the developer’s website to make sure you meet all requirements. At the time of publication, a free basic service (lite or cripple version) or a free trial version of all of these software packages is available from their manufacturer’s website. To take full advantage of a package’s features you may need to upgrade to a paid version of the software.
What Can Education Scheduling Software Do for You?
Employee scheduling software takes the hard work out of staffing, scheduling, and publishing work schedules, freeing you up to do more important things at your site.
- Spend less time creating and publishing work schedules. Employee scheduling software makes scheduling employees, editing information, analyzing data, and distributing employee work schedules easy and simple. Schedule any number of shifts. Assign work stations, breaks, and duties within each shift.
- Quickly fill a shift or find a substitute based on many criteria including job position, skills, availability, labor cost, work hour limits, and seniority.
- Prevent and alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
- Know instantly where employees are assigned. No need to flip through pages of paper to see absentee, on-call, training, or overtime situations.
- Reduce the time to track and assign employee training, vacation and time off requests. Staff scheduling software keeps you up to date on who will not be coming in to work and why. Its comprehensive reports provide details on planned vacation, training, and time off hours for any time period you select.
- Reduce labor costs and avoid unnecessary overtime. Education scheduling software lets you accurately track absences and forecast staffing needs to minimize over-staffing, which in turn reduces payroll costs. It automatically sums up employees’ work hours and costs; calculates overtime, on-call, time off, and incentive pays; and provides detailed cost reports so you know instantly if you are on budget.
- Keep scheduling and employee information in one place for easy access. Insert ID photos as well as employee contact information, authorized work stations, skills, available work hours for part-time and volunteers, and work hour constraints into employee records.
- Monitor attendance, work hours, and labor costs. Advanced education scheduling software with time clock features lets you see exactly who clocked in and how your scheduled hours compare to the hours your employees are actually working.