The Job Scheduler enables you to create shifts and assign jobs to your team, complete with all the necessary details to ensure successful task completion. Scheduling employees, however, is often more complex than it appears. Your company or country may have specific regulations regarding the number of hours or shifts employees can work. Additionally, individual employees may have unique requirements—for instance, a student who is limited to no more than three shifts per week. Without accurate information, managers may inadvertently violate company policies or even legal requirements, leading to costly mistakes.
Scheduling Rules help address this challenge by allowing you to define company-wide scheduling policies or set custom rules for individual employees. These rules ensure managers stay compliant with work hours and shift limitations when creating schedules.
In this article, we will cover:
How to Enable Scheduling Rules
Scheduling rules can be set up and customized in each employee's user profile.
To access a user's profile, head over to the users tab found on the left sidebar and click on the relevant employee.
In the Employment tab, under Scheduling rules, select Set rules.
Next, set up a policy or create a new company policy.
Under Custom rules, you can add additional scheduling rules such as max hours per week/day, max shifts per week/day and gap between shifts.
What is the Difference Between Custom Rules & Scheduling Policies?
Custom Rules: These rules are specific to individual employees and can be applied independently or with a scheduling policy. These allow you to track unique agreements or exceptions for individual employees. For example, if an employee has an agreement to work 45 hours per week, but they’re assigned to a Full-Time Scheduling Policy that limits them to 40 hours, a Custom Rule can be used to ensure their actual work hours reflect the terms of their agreement.
To learn more about setting custom scheduling rules click here.
Scheduling Policies: These are broader rules that apply to groups of employees to manage their work limitations based on factors like employee status or region. For example, you might have a Full-Time Employee Scheduling Policy for those working 40 hours a week, or a Part-Time Scheduling Policy for those working 20 hours a week. Additionally, you can implement country or state-specific policies, such as a Canada Policy or USA Policy. These ensure that schedules comply with local labor laws.
How to Create a New Policy
To create a new policy, follow these steps:
Access the user's page from the left sidebar and enter the Company Policies tab. From there, click on Create Policy and name your new policy
You can select the option to Set as default. Once a policy is set as default, any new users added to Connecteam will automatically be assigned to that policy.
Next, select the relevant rule for this policy. After setting a rule, you can also select the option to Prevent users from exceeding this rule when claiming shifts. When enabled, this will prevent users from claiming shifts that exceed the specified limit, even if admin approval is required.
You also have the option to apply this policy to a specific schedule only.
Click Next, and choose the users that will be assigned to this policy. In this case, the policy applies to USA Employees only so I will assign it only to the USA employees. Under this tab, you will also be able to view your users' current Scheduling Policies.
In the Overlaps tab in the next stage, in case you have users which are already assigned to a policy, you will have the option to either add to existing policies or override them.
Click Next, go over the summary in the Summary page and if everything looks good, click Save!
To learn more about scheduling policies click here.
How to Edit & Manage Scheduling Rules
To manage your Scheduling Policies, access the Company Policies tab on the Users page. From here you can Create a new policy or edit, duplicate, edit assignments, deactivate, or delete an existing policy by clicking on the three dots next to the specific policy.
Edit: this allows you to edit your policy and make changes to the name or policy rules.
Duplicate: allows you to duplicate the policy to assign it to different users and make any changes.
Edit Assignments: allows you to edit the assignment of the policy in case you need to add or remove any users from it.
Deactivate: allows you to deactivate the policy in case it's outdated or if regulations have changed. You will be able to easily reactivate the policy by clicking on the three dots and selecting Activate
Delete: allows you to delete the policy altogether.
How Rules Apply in the Schedule on Desktop
When working on the schedule, admins will receive an alert any time they publish or save as drafts and shifts that violate the rules or policies set. This allows them to adjust the schedule accordingly to stay compliant with company policy or local labor laws.
Next to each employee, admins will see a summary of the week. If the employee schedule exceeds the employee-assigned policies or set rules the admin will be able to see a summary of the rules broken and pull up the employee rules for reference.
Admins will also be able to access and edit user rules directly from the weekly statistics, by hovering over the weekly statistics and clicking on View User's Rules. From there, you can edit the rules by clicking on the gear icon on the right hand side.
Finally, when scheduling rules are activated you can use the conflicts feature to identify any shifts directly on the schedule that violate the rules set. You can also view the conflicts by entering the Conflicts icon next to Jobs at the top of the page.
How Rules Apply in the Schedule on Mobile
When assigning a shift via mobile you will receive an indication that publishing the shift will exceed a Scheduling Rule for the user (indicated in red).
Additional Resources
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