How Workforce Scheduling Helps Achieve 4 Key Business Goals

December 30, 2024

Meeting business goals is a thorn in the side of many organizations. In fact, a classic survey states that 90% of businesses fail to meet their goals, while other research finds that 48% of leaders fail to implement strategic initiatives to reach their goals.

These trends extend to industries that rely on a deskless workforce, too, where scheduling operations can have a critical impact on a business’s ability to scale successfully. Business goals like optimizing worker productivity, improving customer service, reducing employee turnover and increasing revenue are all supported by sophisticated, efficient scheduling.

In this article, we’ll discuss why and how smart scheduling benefits a business and its employees, the primary KPIs that scheduling processes can improve, and how an intelligent field service management (FSM) platform can help.

How effective workforce scheduling benefits employees

Schedules can make or break an employee’s experience at a company — particularly for field workers who already deal with unpredictable and sometimes hazardous situations in their work. However, there are many ways that smart scheduling practices can benefit a mobile workforce and counterbalance some of the challenges of mobile work.

Here are some of the most common benefits field service employees get from effective scheduling.

Improves employee engagement

Every business leader knows that it’s critical both to appropriately challenge their employees and to provide as much stability as possible. Otherwise, employee engagement levels may suffer and team members might quit. This is true in field service, too. In fact, many industries that rely on deskless workers—trade jobs, utilities, and construction—tend to have relatively high turnover.

Part of that engagement stems from what type of work a field technician is assigned. For instance, a seasoned field worker might become bored if they’re always sent out to basic jobs that don’t challenge them. Alternatively, an inexperienced employee might feel unsupported if they’re consistently scheduled to complex, technical jobs they don’t have the training to handle. In both cases, these team members are likely to disengage.

And regardless of skills and training, any deskless worker will start to disengage if their schedule isn’t predictable or changes too frequently. Though schedule changes are inevitable—86% of field service workers deal with schedule changes at least occasionally—there are ways to minimize the disruption of these changes.

Good field service scheduling practices take advantage of smart tools that account for field staff’s professional experience when job matching. Additionally, these practices should incorporate technology like automations to quickly and effectively pivot when availability or conditions change.

Reduced stress and burnout

Another benefit of solid scheduling practices is the prevention of staff stress and burnout. According to a recent poll, 31% of hiring managers say they anticipate turnover because employees feel overworked. Further, one 2024 report found high levels of reported burnout in many field service industries.

Good scheduling practices can help reduce the stress mobile workers might experience. In addition to proper job matching based on skill and providing a predictable schedule—both of which are achievable with smart scheduling tools that utilize AI and automations—ensure your schedules distribute jobs fairly and evenly.

Again, the right field management software makes this easy with automations and flexible scheduling rules that can identify when employees are already scheduled to capacity.

How good employee scheduling benefits a business

Of course, there are upsides of strong field service scheduling practices for the organization, too. Here are some of the most impactful benefits of efficient scheduling on a business:

Better workforce utilization

Intelligent, flexible scheduling helps ensure each person in your mobile workforce has the right amount—and type—of work assigned to them.

Scheduling workflows that can automatically account and adjust for factors like employee skills and certifications and travel time between job sites are the workflows most likely to utilize workers’ availability most effectively. That means schedulers are freed up from handling the complexities of scheduling and can spend more time on high-priority tasks.

Provide an excellent customer experience

Smart scheduling also helps your company provide better customer service. Processes like automatic, accurate job matching and route optimization mean you can quickly schedule the right employee to address customers’ needs, and employees can get to job sites quickly so that customers aren’t left waiting.

Additionally, scheduling processes like self-serve booking and automated text message and email updates and reminders allow customers to handle their scheduling needs when it works for them.

Together, these practices make a significant impact on customer experience.

Close more business

Of course, all of these aforementioned benefits compound to help you close more business.

Happier employees assigned to the right jobs are more likely to perform their work at a higher standard.
More efficient worker utilization (by way of job matching and route optimization) means employees are able to fit more assignments into their day.
Excellent customer service (by way of self-serve scheduling, automatic updates and minimal to no wait time) means people are more likely to rebook or purchase additional or upsold services.

Maintain a healthy bottom line

Together, all of these benefits—both to the business and to employees—help your organization lower overhead costs and improve profits.

For instance, keeping employees engaged and preventing stress in their work days helps avoid the average $4,500 price tag of replacing an employee who leaves.

Meanwhile, some businesses that provided more flexible customer scheduling options by implementing an online booking system saw a 37% increase in revenue.

Specifically in healthcare, one hospital system saw an $8.6 million increase in revenue in part by improving its patient scheduling processes. And one pediatric home healthcare service provider utilized an intelligent field service management platform to see an 84% decrease in patient no-shows, improving their earnings.

How these benefits support key business goals

All of the benefits we’ve discussed above have corresponding KPIs that most organizations track. Here are some of the primary KPIs affected by smart scheduling:

Improve employee utilization, reduce downtime

Implementing shrewd scheduling practices to support employee engagement and reduce stress and burnout can help improve metrics like employee utilization and downtime.

By incorporating tools with intelligent job matching and route optimization via flexible, customizable scheduling rules, field service organizations keep staff happy and streamline operations. Customer appointments are only assigned to the technicians or employees who:

Are qualified
Are available
Are within a reasonable geographical distance relative to other job sites they’re visiting that day

Managers can easily review scheduling data to ensure work is distributed evenly across the team. (And AI-enhanced systems can send proactive notifications of over-utilized or under-utilized teams and individuals.) This empowers managers to identify and address issues fast, before it leads to burnout or disengagement among staff.

Additionally, smart scheduling tools are configurable for each unique setting. Rather than using predefined scheduling parameters and steps, companies can define job dependencies, workflows, and scheduling priorities that fit the work and the workforce. As conditions change, they can adjust the scheduling engine accordingly. This ensures the system is applicable and useful for daily work, while being adaptable enough to respond to workers’ feedback.

Improve employee satisfaction and retention

Conveniently, the same scheduling practices that help improve utilization and downtime metrics (smart job matching, route optimization, etc.) also help improve employee satisfaction and retention metrics.

Additionally, introducing mobile-friendly functions to your scheduling solution makes for a better employee experience. Mobile interfaces can give field workers an on-the-go calendar view of appointments, with critical information about the job accessible with the touch of a button. Mobile interfaces can also clearly show communications both from customers and the back office about any schedule changes. Having these features built into your scheduling solution and workflows makes it much easier for mobile workers to stay updated on what to expect during their workday.

The more frictionless these sorts of day-to-day experiences are for employees, the higher your employee satisfaction and employee retention scores will be.

Improve customer service and customer retention scores

By extension, many of the same benefits of smart scheduling that improve employee- and utilization-related KPIs can also bolster customer-related metrics.

More strategic utilization of deskless employees through practices like intelligent job matching and route optimization, providing field workers with critical appointment info via a mobile interface, and mobile-friendly appointment updates all work together to improve customer service. And better customer service scores go hand-in-hand with better customer retention scores.

Increase profitability and revenue

And of course, all of the above benefits and KPIs feed directly into performance on the critical KPIs of profitability and revenue.

Together, benefits of smart scheduling lead to a suite of financial gains:

Lower turnover and thus lower spend on hiring (via smart job matching, route optimization, and improved, mobile-first communications and data access)
Lower fuel costs and less fleet wear and tear (via route optimization)
More availability for employees to take on more work (via job matching and route optimization)
More repeat business and upsells (via easy self-serve appointment booking, automated scheduling, better service due to job matching, and convenient updates with automatic, mobile-friendly appointment updates)

These effects directly impact an organization’s profits and revenue.

How the right FSM and scheduling tool can help achieve business objectives

By now, it’s clear how significant of an impact scheduling can make on successfully reaching your business goals and KPIs. The right scheduling and field service management tool is critical to this success.

Skedulo’s intelligent field service and scheduling platform offers a robust set of features and functions to help you reach your business goals. AI-powered automations optimize everything from communications with field service employees and customers to assigning the right person to the right job.

Flexible, customizable scheduling rules let you create schedules that align with your business needs—now and in the future. Create custom forms, workflows, and process steps to support workers in the field, and use custom dashboards to empower managers, schedulers, and dispatchers to handle the unexpected.

Plus, Skedulo’s simple, mobile-first interface makes it easy for your team to see all the scheduling and job-specific information they need to do their jobs well.

Want to learn more about how Skedulo’s powerful, automated scheduling solution helps business? See how Skedulo makes sophisticated scheduling easy.

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How Workforce Scheduling Helps Achieve 4 Key Business Goals