Three Reasons to Sync Work and Personal Calendars During the Holidays

Whether you love the holidays or not, the season has a way of creating havoc on just about everyone’s calendar.

There are trips back home and relatives coming to visit. Parents run around between after-school functions, holiday performances, and events in town. Meanwhile, work doesn’t stop. For plenty of people, especially in retail and restaurant jobs, things are busier than they’ve been all year.

And we haven’t even talked about vacations, illnesses, or work events!

Sync work and personal calendars during the holidays

As a manager, it can be difficult to accommodate everyone and everything. As much as you might want to have tight control over schedules, issues are simply going to pop up.

• Workers may need to swap shifts because of an event.
• Others might not be able to work certain hours or days all month long.
• Temporary workers may be in and out, trying to figure out the system.
• Some staff members might wind up working overtime a few weeks in a row.

Syncing personal and work calendars can help you and employees keep track of shifting schedules.

stratustime’s Calendar Sync makes it easy for you and your team to track and align personal and professional schedules. With so much going on this time of year, the feature automatically syncs schedules and key dates for work and life in one convenient place.

We’ll explore three reasons why Calendar Sync might be a good idea for you and your team.

Calendar syncing features

Calendar Sync is a secure, convenient way to sync work schedules and approved time off with your personal device’s calendar (iOS, Android, or Outlook). When life and work both get busy, Calendar Sync can be a boost to your efficiency in a number of ways:

1. See overtime hours coming before they happen.

Overtime happens. We all know it. Depending on your industry, it can be especially hard to avoid overtime hours late in the calendar year.

• When employees have a difficult time tracking their personal and work calendars, they can miss where personal events and work requirements overlap. This can cause them to have to swap shifts at the last moment.
• Meanwhile, the person who picks up their shift might be about to work overtime hours. While they might be taking the shift to help out a coworker, they may inadvertently be costing the business money in overtime pay.

With Calendar Sync, workers have an easier way to track their schedules, swap shifts proactively, and make sure they’re not overbooking between personal and professional responsibilities.

• Using the feature, workers merge work and personal calendars. This saves them from having to toggle back and forth between multiple calendar apps.
• With Calendar Sync, they avoid manual key entry errors, or needing to enter their scheduling information into different apps, or on different devices.

2. Gain a new view into schedules and shifts.

For workers, Calendar Sync automatically synchronizes shifts and rotations with their personal calendar.

• Employees can enter shifts on the calendar weeks and months in advance, as soon as the schedule comes out.
• They can view their data from anywhere, anytime, and easily navigate to future dates to see what they’re schedule looks like.
• They can also view shift patterns, and see when someone else is working. This can be helpful when they need to swap a shift, or even pick up an extra shift.
• In addition, they can create shift titles, and use icons or color-coding to make things even easier to read.

3. Enhance the way people communicate and plan.

Calendar Sync also lets users create custom events, and set personalized notes for any date on the calendar.

• Export your calendar’s text list and screenshots using an SD card.
• Set reminders for important dates and upcoming shifts.

Workers can also sync up their approved PTO, which is something most will want to keep an eye on, any time of year.

On the management side, Calendar Sync gives you a view of key statistics related to:

• Vacation and sick time
• Comp and holiday time
• Trades and shift swap patterns,
• Leave and training time
• Overtime
• Custom events
• Paydays

When life gets busy, Calendar Sync can help your team stay on top of their schedules. 

Today’s workers may appreciate being part of the planning process, and having new ways to track their schedules. Even if you’re already releasing schedules earlier, setting deadlines for time-off requests, and honoring shift preferences, Calendar Sync is a simple, effective way to help employees stay ahead of their calendars.