Time bar scheduling (sometimes referred to as “Timebar Scheduling”) is a method of staff scheduling that may be adopted by organizations with highly variable staff scheduling requirements such as libraries, call centers, and help desks. The need to ensure a consistent level of employee coverage is what drives a business to adopt the time bar scheduling method. Employees may work fixed-length shifts (e.g. 8 hours), but have staggered start times along with offset break times — all of which is to maintain a constant employee level.
Without the proper toolset, implementing time bar scheduling can be quite difficult. The best tools will provide the manager with a visual representation of the schedule and breaks. Snap Schedule is such a tool and allows for timebar scheduling within its Task View as shown below. For a given day, the employees who are scheduled to work are listed vertically along the left side of the screen and the time slots are listed horizontally across the top. Each shift that an employee is working is shaded by the shift color (“time-bars”) and any specific tasks, including breaks, are displayed inline. Note that shifts, tasks, and breaks can start and stop at anytime and are not required to adhere to timeslot boundaries. From this Task View, a scheduler can easily see the staggered start, end, and break times for each employee and thus follow standard time bar scheduling protocols.
Further, Snap Schedule offers an aggregate view of employee coverage by graphic the total number of employees scheduled to work for every minute of the day. This graph, at the bottom of the Task View, is configurable so the scheduler can remove non-working tasks such as lunch breaks, and see a picture of the remaining coverage throughout the day.
With features such as these, Snap Schedule takes Timebar Scheduling to a new level.