The Job Scheduler allows you to create shifts and dispatch jobs for your team with all the information needed to complete the job. Anyone who has scheduled employees though knows it is never as easy as it looks. Without accurate information, managers can unknowingly make costly mistakes that break company policies, or worse the law. Even if they do build the perfect schedule changes happen, and when not managed properly these can leave managers empty-handed without staff to cover for a job.
The Schedule's Limitations capabilities empower managers, indicating that they are exceeding the allowed work hours/shifts while scheduling. It also helps limit actions your employees can take after receiving their schedule. for example, dropping shifts they previously claimed.
In this article, we will go over specifically the User Limitations inside of the Schedule Limitations. To learn about the Scheduler Limitations for Admins click here.
Why Set Up User Limitations in the Schedule
If you are using capabilities such as Open Shifts that allow employees to claim shifts, or the Accept & Reject so employees can confirm their schedules, then you should be using limitations. Otherwise, they can't be held accountable for actually working the shifts they are assigned.
Setting user limitations in the schedule ensures that:
Users can't reject or un-claim a shift too close to the start of a shift
User can't check into a shift too early - preventing overtime
Users can't claim shifts if you already assigned them a shift, preventing conflicts and overbooking.
How to Set Up Limitations
Before setting up the user limitations, you will need to ensure that you have the necessary admin permissions. To set up the limitations, you will need admin permissions to the Job Scheduling feature and to the specific Job Schedule you are setting the limitations for. In addition, they will need permission to manage user details in the Users tab:
To Set Up Limitations, enter the Schedule, click on settings, and enter the Limitations tab. Then simply check off the limitations you'd like to set and save changes.
In the example below you can see I set up the limitation that Users can't unclaim a shift less than 2 days before it starts.
What User Limitations Can Be Set?
The limitations that can be set for users are:
Users can't reject a shift less than X minutes, hours, or days before it starts
Users can't un-claim a shift less than X minutes, hours, or days before it starts
Users can only check in to a shift up to X minutes, hours, or days before it starts
Block users from claiming shifts if they overlap with a scheduled shift
Users can claim/check in to shifts past their end time
How Do These Limitations Look For Employees
With regards to employees, they only meet the limitations if they try to take an action that violates a set of limitations. In this case, they will receive an indication letting them know they can't take that action and why.
In the example below you can see I tried to unclaim a shift less than 2 days before it began. Not only does the system not allow me to unclaim the shift it informs me of the reason why.
Please note that at the moment the ability to set limitations on the Job Schedule will apply to the entire schedule and any assigned users or smart groups. You are not able to set different limitations for users under the same Job Schedule. With that being said, this is a feature request on our roadmap. You are welcome to vote for this feature and leave your feedback for our product team.
*Limitations are available from the Operations Hub Expert Plan*
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