The agritourism industry is growing fast. By allowing tourists to enjoy the great outdoors, farmers and other agriculturalists are beefing up their incomes. The University of California has a great article for those who are unfamiliar with the agritourism industry, which includes attractions like on-farm classes, fairs, festivals, winery weddings, orchard dinners, youth camps, barn dances, hunting, fishing, and guest ranches. Actually, this market is growing fast enough that many states are scrambling to create (or have already created) agritainment and agritourism offices to assist the owners of the many businesses that are popping up around the country. To learn more, TimeForge recently visited the Agritourism Networking Association’s conference in North Carolina and found that many agritourism businesses are in desperate need of efficient labor management software!
Experienced agritourism businesses, like TimeForge customer The Maize, know that efficient labor management is absolutely necessary. An efficient schedule is absolutely imperative, so customers are happy with their experiences and employees aren’t over- or under-scheduled.
But scheduling is a headache!
Employee Scheduling is tedious, time-consuming, complex, and mind-numbingly dull. You have to juggle staff availability, certifications, and particular skill sets of every single employee, not to mention their time-off requests and training schedules. You also need to remember a myriad of details like employee meetings, meal breaks, and applicable labor laws; find employees with the appropriate expertise to accommodate shift swaps or cover for time-off requests; configure the staff schedule to find the most efficient use of staff; and consider alternative schedules without wasting any time in the process. Then, you need to monitor employee attendance to make sure all of your hard work isn’t negated by an employee buddy punching or riding the clock.
After finally building a proper schedule, you have to make sure that all of your staff know when to be where, then face endless inquiries about the next week’s schedule (or worse, scramble to fill a missed shift), and occasionally rework the schedule to accommodate illness or unexpected time off requests (and then communicate those updates to the entire staff again).
TimeForge makes labor management simple. With TimeForge, agritourism managers can cut office time from hours to minutes, monitor labor costs and overtime (in real-time) and more accurately forecast potential staffing shortages, payroll costs, and overtime.
Your staff is going to love it. With TimeForge, you can notify employees about schedules, meetings, trainings, and any updates by text message or email, and TimeForge can even automatically do this for you. Employees can log into the employee portal 24/7 to review work schedules, view time cards, request time off, change upcoming availabilities, swap shifts with other employees, and set up daily schedule alerts via text message or email.
You are going to love it. You can build a staff schedule (even a complicated one) in just minutes, quickly test “what-if” scheduling scenarios (and return to your saved schedule without redoing it), and monitor attendance. All of this can be done either on site or remotely using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook. TimeForge is affordable for any agritourism spot, and it’s billed monthly so if your agritourism business is seasonal, you don’t have to subscribe to a full year of TimeForge’s services.
The time you save every week can be much more profitably – and enjoyably – spent. TimeForge is powerful, but extremely easy-to-use.
TimeForge is a complete solution for agritourism labor management, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.
Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, TimeForge Human Resources, and TimeForge Daily Log.
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