Five things stealing the most time in scheduling

Most operations managers we talk to can list their time thieves without a second thought. The problem is rarely that they don't know what takes time. It's that the solution requires rebuilding a habit, not just a system.

1. Looking for someone who is available. An unmanned shift rarely resolves itself. Without a collective overview of who has expressed interest in open shifts, every gap in the schedule becomes one phone call at a time, often several, to the wrong person, before the right person answers. In Tidvis, expressions of interest are visible directly in the schedule, not in a separate list or a text thread. You see within minutes who wants to take the shift, instead of calling through the entire list.

2. Duplicate work between schedule and payroll. Wage types, double assistance, and waiting time are linked to the schedule, not independent tasks that are entered anew at the end of the month. This reduces the risk of the same information being corrected twice by two different people, though it is not yet entirely frictionless in every situation. Cases involving partial leave or dual employment grades can still require manual reconciliation, and this is something we are actively working on improving. The point remains that the core connection exists, so you don't have to build the payroll documentation from scratch every month.

3. Not seeing what is unmanned until someone calls. The dashboard shows an overview of unmanned shifts as soon as you open it. You don't have to wait for someone to get in touch to discover that a shift lacks staffing. This shifts the problem from "firefighting when the phone rings" to a "planned solution while you are keeping track anyway." If you want an updated view, you open the dashboard. It doesn't push warnings to you automatically, but it also never lies about the current situation.

4. Manual ATL checks. Calculating daily and weekly rest by hand is time-consuming and prone to error, especially when on-call duties and waiting time are involved and shift what is counted as the next permitted start time. Tidvis warns automatically both in the schedule proposal and in the active schedule, before the schedule is published. In other words, the error is visible before it becomes a problem for someone on the floor, not afterwards, when Kommunal or Vårdföretagarna have already questioned an individual schedule. (ATL: Swedish Working Hours Act, Arbetstidslagen).

5. Handover during absence. When someone becomes ill or is prevented from working at short notice, all the context often ends up in one person's head: who has already been asked, which shifts are sensitive, what was in the process of being solved. If that person is unreachable, the person covering is left guessing. A schedule where status, notes, and unmanned shifts are visible to all authorized personnel, not just the person who happens to be handling it right now, means that the handover is not dependent on the right person answering the phone. The same principle applies year-round, not just during illness, but also before vacations and other planned absences (including those related to LSS: Swedish law for support to people with disabilities).

Common to all five: they are not solved by working harder, but by having the information already in the right place when it is needed.

Would you like to see this in the system instead of in an article? We go through the core schedule, shift proposals, activation, and the dashboard in the webinar Schedule management for those who want to be in control, August 13 at 10:00.

Webinar August 13 on Schedule management for those who want to be in control →