More and more, planners are letting go of the schedule creation process and leaving it up directly to employees to schedule themselves. The planner will establish the required workload and let the employees sign-up for different shifts.
Of course, this mode of operation requires strict rules and strict practice guidelines. You need to determine in which order employees will select. You also need to decide if you will let the employees schedule the whole schedule or just part of it.
If you have shifts that your current staff does not like to work (like night shifts or weekend shifts), you may elect to schedule these yourself and then let the employees complete the schedule without changing what you have already planned.
There are many different aspects of self-scheduling that will be discussed in later entries. But what you need to know here is that it is a good way to retain your staff by empowering them with some sort of control.