How a Shared Calendar Helped My Work Scheduling Conflicts‏

If you work at a business where there is not a set schedule, then scheduling can be a burden.  Not every job is a nine to five job, Monday through Friday.  I work at a restaurant which is open seven days a week.  The schedule changes based on how busy it is expected to be and things of that sort.  The restaurant I work in is very flexible with your schedule as long as you let them know two weeks in advanced.  Even when you do that, there are times of miscommunication, because you wrote it down and someone lost your request.  That is why a shared calendar online showing every ones schedules is essential to creating a plan that help your business in this case my restaurant create a platform to enhance the scheduling duties of the restaurant manager and hopefully cut down scheduling conflicts.

The first thing you need to do is go to a shared calendar website and sign up.  In this case my manager created ABC Restaurant Calendar and emailed it to all the employees.  Once we got the emails, we all signed up and were ready to go.  The sign up was very easy and only took a couple of minutes.  First the schedule was divided by job position.  For instance, it was separated by managers, bar tenders, servers, dishwasher, hostesses, bus boys, and cooks.  So when the first schedule was posted online we could all see it.  In the past it would be a problem, because someone who was not working when the schedule came out would have to call or come in to check the schedule to see when they were working next.  So this saved the restaurant this inconvenience.

Also in the past there was a lot of conflict of people requesting days off and not getting them because of miscommunication.  It got to a place where there was not much accountability because there was not really any proof, even though sometimes there were, but as you know in a restaurant things like schedules can be easily forgotten, especially if you have a manager who is very busy and working sixty plus hours a week.

The coolest thing about this new shared calendar is that we could post messages on there to see if anyone wanted to change shifts and all you have to do is reschedule your spot and the other person do the same and it is verified by the website, so you there were no accountability issues because it was seen on there.  Plus you could schedule the days off well off in advanced on the calendar and there was a feature to let you know if the day you needed off was available to take off.  Because of days like Easter, if so many requested that day off, the calendar would not let you schedule that day off.  But you could put a request through the message post on the calendar to let the manager know you were interested in getting that day off.  Our shared calendar helped a lot of our scheduling conflicts and I am glad that our restaurant implemented it.