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Excel Staff Schedule
A staff schedule is a timetable that the employer or HR manager is required to create in advance for all employees each month. This schedule includes the planned working hours for each employee, along with the positions assigned to them. Specifically, the work schedule document must include the times at which work begins and ends, as well as the hours and duration of rest periods.
The goal is to have a clear view of the forecast schedule so that the organization runs smoothly and the level of information is the same between employer and employees.
Why make your plans?
Making your schedules is neither fun nor easy. But it is above all a legal obligation! However, it can take different forms: work diary, Excel schedule, paper or digital, work organization table... Whatever its form, this document must be posted in the company or communicated to employees, without exception.
Are there rules regarding the deadline for communicating these schedules?
No specific deadline is imposed by law. Of course, the schedule does not have to be communicated to employees on the same day as their scheduled shifts. It also goes without saying that if you want to have a healthy relationship with your employees, the earlier you give them their schedules, the better.
It is still possible that your collective, branch, or company agreement, or an agreement, provides for specific deadlines for your sector of the company.
However, there is a rule for employees under a work schedule arrangement. In the event of changes to the schedule and therefore to working hours, a minimum notice period of 7 days (in the absence of an agreement) must be respected.
💡 On-call employees
What does on-call correspond to? This refers to an employee who is not regularly scheduled in the work schedule but must be able to make themselves available to perform work for the company from time to time. He is neither at the workplace nor at the employer's permanent disposal, but must be able to carry out temporary assignments.
It goes without saying, in the interests of smoother organization, that this type of employee must always be given reasonable notice of his presence in a work schedule. If there is no collective agreement, this notice period will be extended to a minimum of 15 days in advance. In exceptional circumstances, 1 day is the minimum accepted to communicate their schedules.
🚨 Sanctions
If you do not comply with the legal obligation to create and publish work schedules, several sanctions are possible:
👉 A fine of €750 if you do not display or communicate employees' working hours
👉 A fine of €37,500 in the event of refusal to communicate schedules to the labor inspector in the event of an inspection (the law will consider this as an obstruction offense punishable by this fine and one year in prison)
Guide to making your schedules
Human resources management is important in any company: it This involves tracking working hours, leave, absences, etc. By optimizing your schedules, you will save time and make your business more efficient! Follow our instructions to create an optimal staff schedule.
📌 Excel scheduling templates
Excel provides you with various scheduling templates that you can use/get inspiration from to track your employees' schedules or create your own scheduling templates.
We have selected a few for you:
To manage your staff with individual annual, half-yearly, quarterly, and monthly summaries and/or weekly.
🔗 Work, leave and absence schedule
To create your staff work schedule by planning leave and absences, displaying a summary of hours per week and printing this schedule directly on paper for your staff.
🔗 Leave taken and balance schedule
To track leave acquired, taken, and owed to your employees. This Excel file contains a “Calendar” tab and a “Balances” tab. You will find the balance of each employee's leave and the number of leaves remaining.
To manage the hourly and weekly attendance of your teams (up to 20 employees). You can record attendance, leave, and sick leave, and save your timesheets to save time.
To manage your employees' night shifts based on a start time and an end time.
Excel has no shortage of scheduling templates. But multiple scheduling tabs mean a messy schedule. If you have more than 6 employees, your Excel files can quickly become unreadable and you'll get lost.
Excel, the number 1 tool for managing staff schedules?
Excel is a free and world-renowned tool. It is therefore very often used by companies to manage their schedules. While Excel can be very useful and can be suitable for an SME with between 2 and 8 employees, beyond this number, several usage constraints may appear.
In summary, the main weak points of Excel in creating your team schedules will be:
👉 Time-consuming entry
👉 Non-collaborative documents
👉 Inaccessibility on mobile
👉 Long-term readability problems
👉 Complexity in formulas
👉 Lack of support
Annualization on Excel
What is annualization of working time?
It is the distribution of working hours over a total period of 12 months for employees. This annualization is mainly done in companies where activity varies greatly depending on the period or season. Concretely, in specialized distribution for example, employees will be required to work more intense hours during sales periods. Their schedule will then be reduced for the following, quieter period.
Please note that this annualization of working time is therefore regulated and will only apply under certain conditions, following a collective agreement or convention. It can apply to all types of contracts, including employees on minimum wage or without a management contract.
If there is no agreement or convention specifying annualization of working time, you can, as an employer, adjust schedules in accordance with the rules of Articles D.3122-7-1 to 3122-7-3 of the French Labor Code.
What must the annualization agreement or convention provide for in order to correctly use this practice?
👉 A reference period, generally 1 year. Sometimes, 3 years if the branch agreement allows it
👉 Mandatory conditions and notice periods if changes to working hours are made
👉 How to count absences, arrivals and departures during the reference period for annualization
👉 Methods for communicating working hours in annualization for part-time employees and rules for changing the distribution of working hours and times
👉 The weekly limit, beyond 35 years, from which hours worked during a single week are counted as overtime, the remuneration of which is paid with the salary for the month in question.
If there is no agreement or convention but you wish to plan for a distribution of working hours over several weeks, there are a few rules to know :
👉 9 weeks are authorized for companies with fewer than 50 employees
👉 4 weeks for companies with 50 or more employees
👉 The indicative program for variation in working hours prepared by the employer must be submitted to the company's CSE. Any changes must also be communicated to this Social and Economic Committee and then forwarded to the labor inspectorate.
The advantages of annualizing working time:
- Reduce the use of overtime
- Reduce the use of partial unemployment
- Reduce the recruitment of temporary workers
- Find a balance between legal working hours and the real evolution of the company's needs
In short, by opting for annualization, you organize your employees' schedules not by the week, but over another reference period: the year.
Payroll on Excel
Optimized HR management necessarily involves good management of your employees' payroll! Indeed, payroll is what your employees look forward to at the end of the month (often impatiently 😉). Therefore, to have satisfied employees, it is essential to have fair payroll: fast, simple, and error-free. And this fair payroll will necessarily involve optimized schedules. Indeed, it is all the variables that you find in your schedules (hours worked, hours not worked, overtime, break time, lateness, leave, etc.) that will determine the amount entered on your payslips.
Submitting your payslip at the end or beginning of the month is a legal obligation and must include several mandatory pieces of information. (article L. 3243-1 of the Labor Code) Also note that the annual salary summary is also mandatory, in addition to regular pay slips. It can be entered on the last pay slip of the year or on a separate document (Article R. 3243-3 of the French Labor Code).
What must a pay slip contain?
the name and address of the employer and, where applicable, the name of the establishment to which the employee belongs;
the reference of the Urssaf to which the employer pays social security contributions, its Siret number and its Naf/APE code number;
the title of the applicable collective agreement (failing this, the references in the French Labor Code concerning the duration of paid leave and notice periods in the event of termination of the contract);
the name and job of the employee, as well as their position in the applicable collective agreement classification and their coefficient;
- Period and number of hours to which the salary corresponds (with details concerning the hours paid at the normal rate and the hours paid in addition)
- Nature and volume of fixed-rate work for employees under a fixed-rate agreement
- If the basis for calculating remuneration is not working hours, specify the nature of this calculation basis
- Nature and amount of bonuses, advances, benefits subject to employee and employer contributions
- Amount of gross remuneration with all additions and deductions made from it (employee contributions, CRDS, CSG, etc.)
- Amount of net salary paid to the employee with the payment date
- Dates of paid leave and amount of the corresponding compensation when a period of annual leave is included in the pay period in question;
- Amount of transport costs covered by the company
- Statement specifying that the employee must keep this payslip without limitation
Planning and personnel management tool: an alternative to Excel
Although Excel is often the go-to planning tool for SME entrepreneurs, there are many other, simpler and more intuitive methods on the market. In addition to offering you more efficient planning, this software will often be very well received by the company's staff:
👉 Teams, increasingly younger, are looking for digital technology to gain autonomy and have smooth interaction with their employers
👉 Work organization is simplified and optimized, which allows for a better work-life balance for employees
Furthermore, the appearance of Covid in our lives, which goes hand in hand with the evolution of business organization methods, will gradually make this use of planning software essential!
These planning software programs are mostly flexible and allow you to obtain "the" representation of the schedule you want. They will often be accompanied by experts who can also guide you on real HR questions and help you get started.
There are three advantages to purchasing such software:
- Access to schedules updated in real time
- Multi-media communication: SMS, computer, mobile application
- A way to create schedules collaboratively
SaaS-type scheduling and personnel management software requires no prerequisites for installation. There is nothing to install: you just need to be a subscriber to be able to log in with a username and password. Nothing could be simpler!
Comparison of existing software
Not sure which tool to choose? How does your organization operate? Do you have features that are essential to you? Do you value regular support? The answers to these questions will help you determine the best software for your business.
