A schedule, often called a rota or roster, is a list of employees, and associated information e.g. location, department, working times, responsibilities for a given time period e.g. week, month or sports season. A schedule is necessary for the day-to-day operation of many businesses e.g.

retail store Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a r ...

facility and some

offices An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific dut ...

. The process of creating a schedule is called scheduling. An effective workplace schedule balances the needs of stakeholders such as

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...

, employees and customers. A ''daily'' schedule is usually ordered chronologically, which means the first employees working that day are listed at the top, followed by the employee who comes in next, etc. A ''weekly'' or ''monthly'' schedule is usually ordered

alphabetically Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is t ...

, employees being listed on the left hand side of a grid, with the days of the week on the top of the grid. In

shift work Shift work is an employment practice designed to make use of, or provide service across, all 24 hours of the clock each day of the week (often abbreviated as '' 24/7''). The practice typically sees the day divided into shifts, set periods of ...

, a schedule usually employs a recurring

shift plan The shift plan, rota or roster (esp. British) is the central component of a shift schedule in shift work. The schedule includes considerations of shift overlap, shift change times and alignment with the clock, vacation, training, shift differenti ...

. A schedule is most often created by a

manager Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities ...

. In larger operations, a

human resources Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include ...

manager or scheduling specialist may be solely dedicated to creating and maintaining the schedule. A schedule by this definition is sometimes referred to as

workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence o ...

. Software is often used to enable organizations to better manage staff scheduling. Organizations commonly use

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

software or

employee scheduling software Employee scheduling software automates the process of creating and maintaining a schedule. Automating the scheduling of employees increases productivity and allows organizations with hourly workforces to re-allocate resources to non-scheduling acti ...

to create and manage shifts, assignments, and employee preferences. For large organisations employee scheduling can be complex, and optimising this is framed as the

nurse scheduling problem The nurse scheduling problem (NSP), also called the nurse rostering problem (NRP), is the operations research problem of finding an optimal way to assign nurses to shifts, typically with a set of hard constraints which all valid solutions must fol ...

operations Research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

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"Nurse scheduling problem"
/ref> Advanced employee scheduling software also provides ways to connect with the staff, ask for their preferences and communicate the schedule to them.

On-call scheduling

On call shift On-call scheduling, sometimes referred to as on-call shifts, are processes used in business where employee work schedules are intentionally unpredictable. Employees who work on-call are expected to be available at any time during their shift, usu ...

or On-call scheduling is a practice which requires employees to be available to be called onto last-minute shifts without pre-scheduling. In the United States, the practice has been opposed by labor rights groups as "unfair and detrimental to employees."

Self-scheduling

Flexible self-scheduling is a practice used when a manager defines scheduling needs based on demand, but allows employees to select, trade, and fill shifts themselves. Allowing schedules to be created faster, with less effort, and gives hourly employees more control over their work life.

References

Employment Business process management Time management {{Business-stub

On-call scheduling

Self-scheduling

See also

References