Three reasons your Museum needs smarter staff scheduling and volunteer management

Keeping track of hours worked, overtime and general timesheet changes can be a repetitive, time-consuming task when left to manage by hand. Today’s best staff scheduling systems ease the process by enabling departmental managers and HR leaders to keep tabs on who’s working, the number of time entries they’ve logged, total hours scheduled and total pay due over a certain time period.

An intuitive staff scheduling system should also be able to underpin sickness absence and cover processes, whether that’s reporting an absence, pinging managers with instant alerts, logging sick days or reassigning shifts to other available employees or volunteers. This ensures any unexpected disruptions don’t derail your museum’s operational performance.

The same goes for annual leave. Digitising the request process makes for a better employee and volunteer experience and allows managers to quickly check any clashes with other confirmed leave requests. That cuts the risk of understaffing, especially during peak times of the year.

Top museums don't rely on guesswork when it comes to optimising staff and volunteer schedules. They use the wealth of visitor, booking and employee data at their disposal to keep managers in charge of admissions, food and beverage, retail and other key areas informed and able to adapt on the fly.

Being able to keep track of bookings and visitor number forecasts in real-time is a huge advantage. Sometimes it only takes a sudden downpour to change demand drastically, and managers need to respond and re-organise resources quickly if they’re to keep unnecessary staffing costs down. They also need to keep all other departments informed on those changes to avoid discrepancies in pay or benefits.

Once changes are reviewed and signed off on the system, data can be self-served by HR, payroll and other departments in one click, rather than needing to constantly update and export various versions of files and spreadsheets.

lthough scheduling software can be used effectively as a standalone system, the real power is only realised when it automatically links with your other systems and data sources, such as booking software.

HR data is another great example. Being able to tag training or qualification requirements on employee or volunteer profiles and then automatically share this information on the same system used by admissions managers saves a lot of time and potential issues when planning staff deployment. It also cuts the risk of human error when inputting data manually on separate systems and ensures you’re never assigning the wrong task to the wrong person. 

As a result, museums can become far more agile in their operational approach, saving significant time and money in the long run. 

The DigiTickets platform offers seamless integration with Shiftie, a staff scheduling software tailored to meet the needs of museums and other attractions.

This means all your visitor, booking and employee data is pooled together in one dashboard, helping you make more informed staffing decisions and quick changes whenever needed. It also helps to spot recurring trends and opportunities for greater optimisation.

Feel free to get in touch with our friendly team for a no-obligation chat to discuss your challenges, or simply pop in your details below to request a free demo!