Introducing Our New Scheduling Functionality
It’s here! Our new schedule is bigger, better, and more intuitive, with enhanced functionality to make managing your team easier than ever before.
We’ve listened to your feedback and have incorporated several in-demand features, including managing unavailability straight from the schedule, allowing employees to see the full rota, and prompting users to acknowledge their shifts, as well as improving the general robustness of the system to streamline the management process.
With so much new stuff to get your head around we’ve decided to run the new schedule in parallel with the old one for a while. This gives you a chance to get to grips with the new flow and to give us any feedback on what you like and anything you think could still be improved. Once we’re confident that the new schedule is the best that it can be then we’ll retire the old version and let you ride off into the sunset with the new one!
Calendar focus
Previously, the schedule was really just the domain of the scheduling manager. It had shifts galore and lots of different filters, making it easy to create and manage your rota. That was about all it did, though; if you wanted data on anything other than shifts you were better off looking elsewhere. It also wasn’t accessible for anyone who didn’t have management level permissions; if employees wanted to look at their shifts they needed to check their shift calendar. If they wanted unavailability they had a separate unavailability calendar. Leave? You’ve guessed it; different calendar. This made it overly time-consuming for employees to check what they had upcoming in any week, as well as preventing them from seeing what everyone else was doing, which didn’t exactly make it easy for them to book leave or swap shifts.
With the new schedule employees are able to view their shifts, leave, and unavailability all in the same place and you can choose to let them view other employees’ shifts, too! This makes it much easier for them to plan leave and to arrange shift swaps, reducing the amount of admin time you’ll spend rejecting impractical requests. They’ll be able to log leave and unavailability directly from the rota, too. You can also manage your employees’ leave and unavailability directly from the schedule, making it easier to make changes on the fly and to make sure that your rota is always up to date.
Improved shift management
The new rota also makes shift management much easier; you’re now able to copy, reassign, and delete shifts directly from the schedule rather than having to go into individual shifts first. The display has also been improved, with simplified layout and colours as well as improved display of public holidays and scheduled events to make it easier to see what’s going on at a glance. We’re also very pleased with the new Shift Acknowledgements feature, which allows you to ask employees to confirm once they’ve seen their shifts. Say goodbye to the days of wondering whether employees are aware of shifts and instead focus on following up with those who haven’t seen them.
Enhanced grouping and searching
The new schedule also introduces Groups, the ability to, you’ve guessed it, group employees together by your chosen criteria. You can create as many groups as you want and then order the schedule accordingly, allowing you to view departments or teams rather than relying on individual Job Roles. Job Role filtering is still in place though, as is the ability to filter by employment type, shift tag, or employee attribute, so you’ve got lots of ways to make the schedule work for you.
In addition to that, we’ve also incorporated a powerful search facility, allowing you to quickly find individual employees rather than having to trawl through the schedule, as well as letting you choose whether to view all employees or just those with assigned shifts. You can also opt to have your own shifts pinned at the top of the screen or mixed in with the rest of the team, making it easier to manage shift distribution and to keep track of when you’re working.
Clearer availability management
Finally, we’ve also enhanced the ability to see why an employee isn’t available by displaying when an they already have a shift on another schedule. Previously, users could see why an employee wasn’t available but weren’t always sure why; the new functionality makes it easier to schedule employees who work across multiple rotas or locations, allowing you to manage your workforce more efficiently.
Overall, the new schedule is designed to improve responsiveness and usability while simplifying the code, making it easier and faster to create your rota and reducing the likelihood of unforeseen issues, as well as paving the way for new features. We’d love to hear what you think and would really appreciate any feedback so that we can keep making the system better; you can get in touch via our support portal. We look forward to hearing from you!
