Laurentian Ski Hill - Recreation Employee Scheduling - Case Study

Case Study: Laurentian Ski Hill in North Bay, Ontario, Canada

Business Overview

There has been a ski hill Club since 1925 with the current business in existence since September 2004.

Scheduling Overview

Laurentian Ski Hill has about 100 seasonal employees and we went from 5 employees to 100 employees almost over night. Scheduling is a challenge trying to schedule mainly new employees around their varied other commitments. We have a very young staff so we are scheduling around University and College schedules. We have had employees calling in to see when they work. We have employees who miss shifts and claim they didn’t know they were scheduled. Managers find little pieces of paper on their desk saying that an employee can’t work their shift the next day. These are likely common issues with anyone who hires young workers but our staff is almost entirely this demographic.

Previous Scheduling Method

In the past individual departments did their own schedule using excel and would post it in the staff room.

Since ShiftPlanning

Although we are just getting started we have over 100 staff and volunteers registered. The employees seem to be embracing Shiftplanning. Being able to enter their availability and vacation requests it will make the entire scheduling process easier. Then once they are working they can trade shifts instead of leaving little pieces of paper on a manager’s desk. Also the excuse that they didn’t know they worked won’t be valid anymore.

I will recommend Shiftplanning to other businesses. - Trish Pecore - Laurentian Ski Hill

We also found the trade request feature to be very useful, that also decreased management involved in trades to just one click to approve. We use the data overview to load the schedule back into our internal software program. Other functions we commonly use are the message wall, the various reports and the shift pickup feature; in case we have some extra work lying around.