From planning to distribution to employee communication, Connecteam’s Job schedule makes everything simple, quick, and intuitive, simplify your scheduling. With the ability to ally you users to set their preferred working hours and unavailabilities there is no more trying to figure out who can or can not take a shift! Letting your users set their preferred days and unavailabilities will save you this hassle and allow you and your company to build a schedule with ease and organization.
In this article we will go over:
What is Prefer to Work?
Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly which shift or hours your users prefer to work? Connecteam’s Job Scheduler feature gives you the capability to allow users to set their preferred working hours. This generates a visual indication in the scheduler letting you know who prefers to work and when! Using the prefer to work capability enables you to foresee problems by knowing which shifts are constantly undesired or at risk for being understaffed. You can also keep your staff happy and minimize the need for shift replacements by scheduling users when they prefer to work!
What is the Unavailability?
One of the most important parts of running a business is understanding which of your employees are able/unable to work at any given time. Connecteam’s Job Scheduler feature has the capability to set users’ unavailability. This generates a visual indication in your schedule, giving you an easy way of understanding who can be scheduled and who cannot.
If you want to learn more about unavailability including how to set it on behalf of users check out our Starting Guide to Unavailability
Setting up the preferred to work capability step by step:
To set up preferred to work follow these steps:
Navigate to the Job Schedule, and enter the relevant schedule.
Click Options > Settings > Mobile app settings.
Make sure “Enable Availability” is checked off
Select the “Users mark unavailability and preferred working days”
Save Changes
Please note that if you set up the preferred to work capability it includes enabling unavailability and users we be able to mark both their unavailability and their preferred working hours.
How Does This Look in the Schedule When Users Mark their Preferred Working Hours?
After users have marked their preferred hours you are able to see this both from your admin dashboard and from the admin’s tab in the mobile app.
Let’s go over both views!
Admin Dashboard
When entering the job schedule, a visual indication of both preferred to work and unavailability will be displayed on your schedule.
In the example below you are able to see the unavailability marked in red and the preferred work hours in green.
Pro tip: If you don’t want to see the preferred working hours on the schedule, you can easily shut off this view. To learn more, check out the article on Viewing Options in the Job Schedule.
Admin Tab
When entering the admin tab and going to the job schedule you will be able to assign shifts. When assigning shifts, users who marked themselves as preferred to work will appear at the top of the list of users.
In the video below you can see an example of how this looks
How do Unavailability and Preferred working hours look for Users?
When entering the schedule and selecting my availability tab users are presented with the option to mark each day as being unavailable or as preferring to work. When marking either option they have the ability to mark it as all day or to toggle off this tab and specify the hours.
Take a look at the video below which shows how to mark preferred working hours
Users also receive a message saying that any days which not marked mean they are available to work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I mark preferred working hours on behalf of my users?
No, only users are able to mark their preferred working how
My users didn’t mark their preferred work hours or their unavailability what does this mean?
This means that your users are available to work the whole day
Can I let users mark their unavailability but not their preferred work hours?
Yes, you can! To set this up enter the job schedule and go to option>settings>mobile app, then make sure the enable unavailability is checked and that the unavailability option is selected.
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