Hello Scheduling Blog

On March 2nd we launched our employee time clock, and since then we’ve had thousands of employees clock in from our web application, as well as their mobile phones.  Inevitably, employees are going to miss a clock out — at the end of day it’s really easy to forget.  Yesterday we launched the ability for you to automatically clock out your employees at the end of the shift (if they forget to clock out themselves).

To turn on this functionality, go to “Settings” and then “Time Clock”.  Here you’ll see the option to “Automatically clock out employees”.  If your setting is currently disabled, change the “Employees can clock in” settings from “Anytime” to a different setting.

Hello Scheduling can automatically “clock out” your employees if they forget.

Much has been written about Obamacare and the big changes for health insurance that will affect businesses.   According to section 1513 of the law (section 4, paragraph A):

“The term ‘full-time employee’ means, with respect to any month, an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week.”

That section, known as the employer mandate, requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees. In other words, a business must provide insurance if it has 50 or more employees working an average of just 30 hours per week.

An obvious strategy to minimize the cost of Obamacare is to carefully track how many workers fall below the 30-hour threshold.  In fact, a recent Gallup survey found that the percentage of part-time workers as a share of the overall labor force surged to 20.6%, the highest level in data going back to the start of 2010.

Using Hello Scheduling to Track Employee Hours

Hello Scheduling allows your business to easily check employee hours.  In our settings area, you can set the maximum # of hours per week that your employee should work.  If your business wants to avoid having any employees work more than 29 hours per week, we can set the global settings for every type of worker:

While changing these settings will set the global maximum # of hours per week for employees, we can also set maximums on an employee-by-employee basis.  Here’s an example of changing an employee’s setting:

Now that we’ve set our maximum # of hours per week, Hello Scheduling will do much of the work for us.  Our autoscheduler will ensure that employees aren’t overscheduled.  Also, we can check employee hours at any time directly within the schedule:

So in this quick blog post, we’ve walked you through how Hello Scheduling can potentially save you thousands in health care costs.   Try it for free.

Last week we kept up our crazy pace of new feature releases, and made employee scheduling even better with our mobile app.  So what’s new?

• If your organization allows give up shifts, now your employees can give up their shifts directly from the mobile app
• You can now navigate to any future date in the “Everyone” schedule tab
• We’ve also made a number of improvements under the covers, improving your download speed when your phone has less than stellar cell service.

We promise this isn’t an April Fool’s joke!

We are very excited to announce that on March 2nd, we will be releasing a time clock for Hello Scheduling.  With an employee time clock, you’ll be able to track your employees’ exact clock in and clock out times, providing you with the most accurate labor cost data possible.   Most companies that use a time clock end up saving considerably in labor costs due to more accurate record keeping.

Our employee time clock will replace our existing time sheets feature, which will be retired on 3/31/2013.  This video will walk you through the new employee time clock feature, as well as show you how you can access your existing time sheet data:

As always, we’re adding new features to Hello Scheduling based on your needs.  If you would like your employees to be able to view the schedule of all locations / departments, regardless of whether or not they can work in the location, you can now make the full schedule available to anyone.

Administrators, click here to change the setting:

There is much employee scheduling software on the web, and most tools can create very
simple manual schedules.  At Hello Scheduling we talk with our customers extensively to understand why they chose us over the myriad of other tools on the web.  One of the main reasons they chose Hello Scheduling is because we offer a true auto scheduler.  By autoscheduler, we mean a feature allows you to literally click one button and fill in all of your employees’ shifts.

Many online employee scheduling tools offer the basics:

• Creating a schedule manually, or using templates to “copy” a schedule for one week to the next
• Time off management
• Labor cost calculations

But when you scratch the surface, you realize you’re still making your schedule manually.  

Why can’t other tools offer a 1-click work schedule maker?

At Hello Scheduling we designed our software to make creating an employee schedule as simple as 1 click.  From the day we started designing Hello Scheduling, we knew that customers wanted to reduce their time making the schedule as much as possible and we knew that an autoscheduler was how we would accomplish this.

So what are the benefits of using Hello Scheduling’s auto scheduling capability?

• You can create employee schedules in one click.
• You can tune the autoscheduler, to pick your favorite employees on shifts
• You can ensure that employees only work one shift per day
• You can ensure that employees never work back-to-back shifts
• You can ensure employees do not exceed the max number of hours per week they are supposed to work
• and so much more…

Our autoscheduling capability does all of the work for you.

Check out the video to learn more:

On December 3rd, we will be releasing a major update to Hello Scheduling, which will improve our weekly work schedule maker while also improving your experience when scheduling on your iPad.  Enjoy!

Creating an employee schedule template using recurring shifts is really simple with Hello Scheduling.   With recurring shifts, you’ll only have to create your shifts once!  When creating a shift, you’ll be able to specify different shift attributes,  such as:

1. The beginning and ending times of the shift
2. Which days of the week the shift should recur on
3. How many employees you need scheduled on a shift

You’ll also be able to create advanced rotas — for example you could have a shift recur every 3 weeks.  But the bottom line is: once you’ve created your employee schedule template, you’re done.  You then start scheduling by clicking on a shift on the calendar.

Create an employee schedule template by using recurring shifts

Create a Weekly Work Schedule Template in Seconds

This video from our website details how easy it is to set up a weekly work schedule template (using recurring shifts).

Hopefully this video has excited you enough to take a tour of our software. We really think spending just a few moments of your time, could literally save you thousands of dreary hours scheduling.

As an operations manager, scheduling your health care business can be an absolute nightmare.  You have a number of different important tasks that needs to be accomplished:

• You have to connect the right caregiver with the right patient
• You need to ensure that the caregiver has the right certifications and skills
• You need to be able to handle schedule changes quickly and easily when either a nurse is unavailable, or a client no longer needs care (or cancels their appointment)

These tasks can be very time consuming, but with health care scheduling software from Hello Scheduling, we can make creating a schedule and communicating changes with staff members easy.

Scheduling Nurses With Patients

One of your top tasks as an operations manager is scheduling nurses with patients.  As you probably know, most clients — especially in the home health business — like to see the same nurse.  With Hello Scheduling, in one click you’ll be able to set which nurse should be assigned to a client.

Caregiver Certifications and Skills

With Hello Scheduling, it’s very easy to store skill and certification information using tags.  As a manager, you can set skills for each employee, as well as the skills needed for each client.

Reference heath care employee skills and certifications

Communicating Schedule Changes with 1 Click

Without fail, once a schedule is created, something will quickly become out of date.  Maybe your nurse isn’t available to work, or a client cancels their appointment.   Because Hello Scheduling is online — and there’s no files to send back and forth — all of your caregivers can log into Hello Scheduling to see when they work.  Their schedule is always up to date.

Also, you can always email and text message a nurse right from Hello Scheduling to let them know of schedule changes.  This way the team is always in sync.

Send text messages to nurses directly from Hello Scheduling