Online Scheduling and when to work. Like everything in our wired and wireless world today, we expect to be able to manage our searching, our travel, our writing -- in one online place. That's why Google has so rocked the world with Gmail and Gcal and GDocs and all the rest of the web-based tools we are now coming to depend on.

Why not scheduling? Why not staffing? I see very few company's taking flexible schedules seriously except where they hire only temps or freelancers. Here's the reason i see -- its simply too hard to try and manage all of it. Top down approaches seem to be the most logical. Contingent workforces are still stuck with the top down model only because there has not been an alternative.

Until you enter the web-based, bottom up, world we are now participating in.

Fast Company's David Robert's did a piece on All in a Day's Work which talked about how a shorter workweek is more environmentally friendly. Kudos. But i think it is more than this -- i think there's a need to help companies, particularly in this 2008 economic crisis -- to manage their own schedules for the sake of staff time, for the sake of the employee who might have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet.

First, it's far more cost-effective (read cheaper) to do it this way and engage the team. It is like the collaborative, crowd-sourcing, concepts that are taking hold in design. If you give people the ability to interact with something, they make it better. Usually. Human beings are quite creative and self-regulating when you give them a chance. Hence, customers are designing sneakers and t-shirts and gadgets. Also, You create a more loyal employee because you've invited them into the control room.  You make their life easier by letting them schedule their own shifts, schedule their own work time.

I started working on this project for a client, Shiftboard, and found myself drawn into the world of web-apps in a new way. I started to ask questions as a business owner and asking fellow business owners -- why don't we make some employee processes, like scheduling, much easier?? On ourselves.

Contract workers, flexible workers, freelancers, nurses, doctors, firefighters, police officers, nonprofit volunteers -- all of these and more have a scheduling problem and they need help to solve it. The employee wants them to make it easier on them.

If we treated our employees like we do our customers, we'd have far stronger companies. What do you think? Let me know what you think.  Is something new coming in the way we manage employees?

http://www.shiftboard.com/index.html?fc