Recreational centres play an important role in the community. Offering many activities under one roof; families, children, teens, and adults come together at recreational facilities and community centres to relax, get healthy, and spend quality time with those they love.
Rec centres are also a great place to work — but what they aren’t is an easy place to manage. Because they’re made up of so many different services, programs, and departments, scheduling and managing staff at these facilities can often be extremely challenging.
Rec centres tend to have very large workforces, and staff scheduling is made complicated by many factors including part-time staff, staff holding multiple jobs, different union and seniority designations, special certifications (such as for swimming instructors), and much more.
For too long, the headache of manual scheduling has consumed hours of rec centre managers’ time every single week. From creating a schedule that works for everyone, to scrambling to fill dropped shifts at the last minute, these hassles take valuable time away from managers, time better spent working on programming, engaging with their staff and with the community their facility serves.
Today, new technology is available to make rec centre staff scheduling effortless, streamlined, and automatic. Here’s why scheduling is so difficult at rec centres, how new software options can help, and how your facility can learn more and try it out for yourself.
Recreation managers’ greatest challenge
Scheduling is the bane of most rec centre staff’s existence. Booking different team members in for shifts might not sound like a challenge, but it’s actually a complex task with a lot of variables — and it only gets harder the more employees you have.
Staff scheduling struggles don’t just affect the employee in charge of making the schedule. In fact, they make life harder for everyone from upper management right down to the employees the schedules are created for.
How can scheduling possibly be such a hassle? Well, here’s a small sampling of what the scheduler needs to know:
- all staff members’ regular availability
- if staff are working on another schedule, or double booked on your own
- which staff are on vacation
- everyone’s seniority levels
- if their credentials are current and updated for their duties on shift
- if a shift will run them into overtime
- if a shift will be in violation of their union rules, government regulations or company policies
- if their age will influence when they can work
- if they’re qualified for the actual duties required on that shift
And scheduling isn’t the only headache for recreation managers. Creating timesheets to process everyone’s paychecks is another major hassle. In most industries, payroll isn’t terribly complicated. But at rec centres, it’s a whole other story.
To create timesheets for staff, managers must take into consideration:
- unionized & non unionized pay rates
- multiple pay rates during a shift
- paid & unpaid breaks
- shift premiums
- shift differentials
- statutory pay rates
And that’s not all — we haven’t even touched on other tasks, like getting timesheet information into the payroll system, forecasting early labour costs, or trying to create a positive, cooperative team mentality, which is a challenge when your scheduling and staff communication systems leave something to be desired. Rec centres are complex workplaces, and to run them smoothly, managers and schedulers need help. It’s not sustainable to process this amount of information manually to create, maintain and update schedules that work for everyone. The good news is that there is a better way. Let’s talk about how software can make life easier for rec centre staff, schedulers, and managers.
Scheduling — a job fit for a software program
Software is the solution to your scheduling woes. Today, there’s dedicated scheduling software available for rec centres that will eliminate headaches and cut the time you spend scheduling in half — all while keeping shifts filled, staff happy, and your facility operating at its best. As a manager, you’re at your best when you’re working with people. Scheduling, on the other hand, is tedious, repetitive work that’s determined by inputs and outputs. That’s why you should let a computer handle it! The right software will account for all those annoying little variables and dependencies that make scheduling such a struggle.
For example, rec centre scheduling software can:
- offer availability modules that are flexible enough to meet all your staff’s needs
- allow the scheduler to share staff with other departments and eliminate worries over double booking
- track staff credentials and alert you when they’re coming up for renewal
- track staff seniority so you can schedule based on seniority
- track when staff are on vacation
- account for business rules like union rules and government regulations
- alert you when a shift sends a staff member into overtime
The right software won’t just make scheduling quick, painless, and accurate — it also makes communicating with your staff much easier. Here’s what the right software can offer you:
- a shift board that allows staff to post, split and pick up shifts, while retaining manager oversight and control
- direct staff communication through text and email
- seamless, automatic notifications from within the system
- robust timesheet and payroll integration, to save you hundreds of hours by automatically calculating your complex pay rate structures
Finally, the right software will support you. You already have a day job, and you don’t have dozens of extra hours to spend onboarding, troubleshooting, and getting to know a new system. That’s why you should choose a software tool created by domain experts who know recreation management inside and out — so they know your business well enough to support you when you need help.
Getting Started
How do you get the right software? It’s easy, we do the heavy lifting for you. You simply fill out our data collection form and we create your account, filling it with all your data so you begin by creating your first schedule. We also train you so you know how to create that first schedule. We try to make the learning curve more of a speed bump than a hill.
Want to rescue your schedulers with the right software?
Book A Demo of RecStaff and try it out today.