Every business dreams of operating flawlessly, getting to that point however is well, difficult to say the least. A great place to start is with a proper job or shift schedule. This is a plan that outlines the working hours, tasks, and responsibilities of your employees. A well-designed job or shift schedule is an essential component of any business as it helps to ensure that tasks are completed on time and that employees are available when they are needed. It also helps to improve employee morale and job satisfaction by providing a clear predictable work schedule.

In this webinar and article, we will go over the stages of scheduling and their pain points. At each stage, we will show you how to use different capabilities inside our job schedule that help minimize these pain points and improve your scheduling processes.

Stage 1: Planning

Stage 2: Distribution

Stage 3: Day to Day

Stage 4: Post Analysis

During the planning stage, the scheduler will begin to connect demand with supply in usually what is a manual and detailed process. It requires going over each required job/shift and understanding the number of hours you need employees to work and then filling those hours according to which employees can work when and their skill sets.

Whilst Connecteam can not do your scheduling for you (yet), its unavailability capability can help you ease the planning stage of the scheduling process and minimize the pain points mentioned above.

With unavailability/preferred working hours, employees mark when they are unable to work and when they prefer to work.

As the manager or dispatcher doing the scheduling, you will be able to see this directly on the schedule. There is no need to call or text your employees and juggle trying to remember or find where you wrote down their availability, with us, it’s right there on the schedule where and when you need it.

To activate this capability, simply head to your schedule settings, to the mobile app tab, and make sure the enable availability is checked. Then choose if you want your users to be able to mark just unavailability or also preferred working hours.

After you’ve planned your schedule the next step is to distribute it to all your employees so they know when and where they are working. Before connecteam, you probably distributed the scheadule by phone calls, text messages, emails, or even physically printing out your schedule and posting it. Once you did distribute the shift or job scheadule - you must make sure that all employees read, saw, acknowledged, and understood the shifts, jobs, and tasks. Finally, Feedback and back and forth communication between management and employees probably occurs. This means that we might spend a few more days making changes to shifts/jobs that up to the point we managed to complete the schedule.

First and foremost Connecteam solves all your pains of distribution by enabling you to publish the schedule directly to your employees via the app. With our confirm/reject capability you can ensure employees approved their schedule and minimize the back-and-forth communication between managers and employees.

For employees, when viewing their shifts, they just press confirm/reject.

When looking at the schedule, managers will see that each shift will have a green dot meaning it was excepted, or a red dot meaning it was rejected.

To activate the confirm and reject capabilities head to your job schedule settings, to the mobile app tab, scroll down, and make sure the confirm and reject buttons are checked. Be sure to save your changes.

If you are using open shifts and allowing your employees to claim shifts, then by default once it is claimed it’s added to their schedule. If you would like to have more control over who gets which shifts and make sure your shift/job schedule is distributed evenly and fairly you can use open shift approval.

With this capability employee claim shifts and the manager go over these requests in the requests modal and decide which employee ultimately receives the job or shift.

Activating open shift approval is done when creating the shift itself after you have checked the box “Enable users to claim this shift,” you can also check the box which says “Require admin approval for claimed shifts”.

You planned your schedule, you finished distributing it and this work week has arrived, now an employee called out sick, a client requested a specific worker (who you didn’t originally give the job to), and so on. Maybe additional details were added to the job and you need to update the employee. There are last-minute changes, which require the urgency of instant communication and problem-solving.

Ok, let's tackle the two pain points of this stage using connecteam one by one.

For last-minute changes such as an employee calling out sick, or needing to replace one employee with another you can use our replacement capability. As a manager, you take the burden of finding a replacement off yourself and place it upon your employees. They can swap with each other and only with those who are also qualified to do the job assigned to them.

If as a manager you want to have full control over who is swapping with whom you can enable the replacements requires admin approval capability and once both employees want to swap shifts the request will be sent to you for approval

To enable the shift replacements and admin approval for replacements capabilities head to the settings to the mobile app tab, scroll down, and check off the “Enable Shift replacement requests” and the “Replacements requires admin approval” options.

For Communication - you can use the notes and task section inside the shift itself. This can be useful for example, if you already dispatched an employee to the job, but the job details come in later on. You can easily add them as a note and the employee will have everything they need to do the job. If there is a special request from the client you can add it as a shift task, and make sure it was completed.

You made it, the week is over! Now you need to see how you can optimize the next schedule or find ways to allocate your resources more efficiently. Perhaps you need to invoice clients. Even though the week is over - your job is not. If you didn’t document things correctly throughout the week, and you dont have simple ways to access this information then conducting a post-analysis can become a painstakingly tedious task.

With connecteam and a few of our advanced capabilities, you won't need to worry much about documentation and post-analysis. First of all, it is important to say that every change you made in the platform is documented. If you have planned your schedule well, then accessing data, exporting it, and ultimately invoicing clients should be a piece of cake.

In Conencteam there are views and advanced filters that help you find the information you need. For example, you can switch the view from user to jobs, and get a better understanding of where you allocated your resources this month. You can use the advanced filters - to filter for any existing user profile field, job, and more.

With the List View, You can use the list view to get a better drill down of your schedule. Here you can also switch between the view from user, to job, to shift title, and so on. You can also use the filter to get more specific data. This can help with invoicing clients. For example, if I filter for a job is, and select the relevant client I will get a list of all the jobs for the week at that job. I can easily export this and send it to the client with their relevant invoice.

To access these views and filters simply click on the view options in the top left-hand corner.

To access the advanced filters click on the filter button - it can be found in every view and looks like this:

Ultimately Connecteam offers a comprehensive solution to address the pain points associated with job or shift scheduling through capabilities such as employee availability, confirmation and rejection, shift replacements, shift tasks and notes, robust views, and documentation. Connecteam streamlines the scheduling process, improves employee satisfaction, and enhances operational efficiency. By leveraging these capabilities, businesses can effectively plan, distribute, manage last-minute changes, and conduct post-analysis, ultimately leading to smoother operations and improved productivity.

Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question.