When it comes to keeping your employees happy and retaining them, flexible scheduling is quickly becoming a must for businesses. Just consider the turnover rate among UK workers, which has reached 34%; meanwhile, 16% of employees stay with their companies for less than a year.
With today’s competitive labour market, flexible scheduling isn’t a "nice-to-have" perk anymore, it’s essential for employee motivation and retention. When many employees leave companies due to the lack of flexible scheduling, your business needs to stay ahead of the curve with employee demands.
Let's look at how flexible scheduling will help you increase employee satisfaction and boost employee engagement in the workplace.
The real cost of employee turnover (and why flexible scheduling is a must)
Turnover happens fast, especially if you’re unprepared for changes in employee demand. It can also be costly to replace those employees:
The average cost of replacing an employee can reach £30,000.
UK employers invest roughly £42 billion every year on employee training.
Replacing workers in industries like healthcare can cost between 30% and 150% of their annual wage.
As Deputy’s found, those costs are even higher for industry-specific turnover. For example, Deputy analyzed over 271,000 workers and found turnover rates of 54% in retail, 51% in hospitality, and 43% in healthcare.
Flexible scheduling can help you not only improve employee retention and employee satisfaction, but also reduce turnover.
Meeting your employees’ demands today to retain them tomorrow
The link between flexible scheduling and employee retention is clear: 45% of workers would take a pay cut for more control over their schedule.
Making your employees’ working lives more predictable by giving them the option to manage their schedules, or swap shifts when they need to, is the key to retaining them. You’re not just fostering happier employees, but developing effective strategies for employee retention. For example, 87% of UK workers would prefer a more flexible work option (like hybrid work), while 90% of jobseekers are looking for more flexibility, which leads to higher employee satisfaction.
The good news is that you can meet these demands and retain happy employees with a few proactive scheduling changes.
5 ways you can transform your scheduling
Let’s walk through 5 ways you can make flexible scheduling a key advantage for your business.
Give your employees more predictability
If you’re drowning in constant shift changes or posting shifts at the last minute, your employees are feeling the strain, too. With 71% of employees feeling a reduction in burnout when work is more flexible, creating a more predictable scheduling environment can help reduce stress, while cutting down on time waste and frustration for everyone.
Make it easy for employees to swap shifts
Deputy's shift swapping feature lets your team trade shifts with just a few clicks, giving employees the chance to pick up extra shifts if they need to, or cover one another’s shifts when things come up. Your team gets peace of mind that shifts are covered, while Deputy helps ensure the shift swaps are both within budget and compliant with workplace rules.
Let AI do the heavy lifting
Not knowing how your team’s needs change makes it difficult to schedule shifts at all.
Deputy's auto-scheduling feature uses AI to create schedules that balance your business's needs with your employees’ preferences automatically. By looking at sales patterns, labour costs, and employee availability, auto-scheduling builds schedules that work for everyone, and intelligent scheduling will help you quickly adapt.
Master break planning and compliance
Missing breaks or overstaffing to cover them can quickly put you at risk of non-compliance, but it also negatively impacts employee satisfaction and retention.
Deputy's break planning features help ensure your employees all get proper breaks while maintaining coverage and staying compliant with labour laws. Messy break planning isn’t just a compliance concern, but can hurt employee morale and your efforts to find ways to improve employee retention in the workplace.
Use data to make more informed scheduling decisions
When you know what’s happening in your business, you can better schedule your teams based on demand, labour changes, and more. It’s why businesses use Deputy's analytics features to get real-time insights into labour costs and productivity patterns. For example, if you have insights into which shifts consistently run over budget, or which employees are frequently swapping or dropping shifts, you can spot patterns that lead to employee dissatisfaction or turnover.
How flexible scheduling benefits your whole business
Giving employees more control over their schedules has a ripple effect throughout your entire business.
Your company culture improves
When employees feel they have more control over their schedules, you’re nurturing a positive company culture that’s built on trust. The UK’s measures to make work more flexible for British workers also mean your business will continue having to adapt, and following guidelines, rules, and new ways of working can help boost employee motivation and morale.
Recruitment costs drop
It’s no secret that hiring, training, and retaining new employees can be costly. As more employees demand options to manage how and when they work, flexible scheduling becomes a must. Meeting the demands of your employees today means you can save on hiring replacement talent and juggling lengthy recruitment processes tomorrow.
Your bottom line improves
Research shows that stores with more tenured, experienced, skilled customer-facing employees generate more revenue. When your teams aren't constantly training new hires, covering extra shifts, and have control over predictable schedules, it makes a tangible difference across your business.
Getting on track with more flexible scheduling
It’s never too late to start putting strategies in place to boost employee retention by meeting the demands your teams have for more flexible scheduling. And to do that, you’ll need to start with a few key steps.
Look at your current scheduling and ask teams about their preferences
Implement high-impact changes (like shift swapping if you're handling last-minute coverage manually)
Scale what works across your business
Use data to help you determine which changes have the most impact
Say goodbye to turnover with flexible scheduling
Over 385,000 workplaces use Deputy's workforce management platform to help solve their scheduling challenges and keep their best people.
With Deputy, you give your team the scheduling flexibility they crave while keeping control of your business. It's not just about scheduling — it's about building a workplace and culture your employees stick by.
