From planning to distribution to employee communication, Connecteam’s Job Schedule makes everything simple, quick, and intuitive, simplifying your scheduling. With the ability to allow your 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 the following:
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 allows you to let users 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 of 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 can allow users to set their 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 the prefer to work capability so users can add their preferences, follow these steps:
Navigate to the Job Schedule, and enter the relevant schedule.
Click Settings > General tab.
Make sure Enable Availability is checked off
Select the option Users mark unavailability and preferred working days
Save changes
Please note: If you set up the preferred to-work capability it includes enabling unavailability and users will 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 can see this both from your admin dashboard and 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 work and unavailability will be displayed on your schedule.
In the example below you can see the unavailability marked in red and the preferred work hours in green. Unavailability and prefer to work can be viewed in the daily, weekly, and monthly views. To learn more, check out the article on Viewing Options in the Job Schedule.
Please note: if a user adds a note with their work preferences, a small document icon will be displayed. Hovering over the icon will allow you to read the note, as shown in the example below:
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 can mark it as all day or 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 informing them that any days not marked as unavailable are considered available for work.
How to Delete an Unavailability or Prefer to Work
Deleting an unavailability or work preference that you previously added on behalf of a user or one, that a user added on their own can be done in a few quick steps.
Access the Job Schedule
Hover over to the relevant block where you have an unavailability or prefer to work that you wish to delete and click on the trash can icon that will appear.
All done - you successfully removed the prefer to work or unavailability!
Note that removing unavailability or prefer to work from the admins' side can only be done on the desktop.
Reminder: If it's a repeating unavailability or work preference, a pop-up will appear with the option to delete this occurrence only, all future occurrences in this series, or all occurrences in the series.
Have more questions about the Job Scheduler? Check out our most frequently asked Job Scheduler questions here.
Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question.