Hey Everybody!
Today we released shift schedule filtering, making it much easier to view and print large employee schedules. You can easily filter the schedule to:
Now you can filter to see only the information that you need, as well print a filtered view of your calendar.
Please let us know what you think and Happy Scheduling!
In December we quietly launched the ability for you to schedule your employees automatically. We’ve been tweaking the feature over the last few weeks, and now we’re ready to share it with you.
Here’s a quick walkthrough video that will show you exactly how our auto-scheduling capability works. We think you’ll really like setting “favorite” employees on your shifts.
Hello Scheduling is a great tool for creating staff schedules. But whether you run a home healthcare business, or call center, scheduling your employees is only half the battle. Over the last two months, we have added a number of tools to make it really simple to communicate with your staff. Ironically, we haven’t done a great job communicating these updates to you — so I figured a blog post and video walkthrough was in order.
The ability to text message employees was a hugely requested feature — and fortunately it’s cake to use. While you’re on the dashboard, you’ll notice that you have the ability to either text or email any individual who’s scheduled for the day. Simply click the “text” button and fire off a message. This is a really great feature for communicating with staff about the day’s shift — maybe you need someone to come in 15 minutes early? Maybe you no longer need them for the day? Maybe you want to LOL with UR buddy?
Send text messages directly from dashboard
If you haven’t added your employee’s mobile number to Hello Scheduling yet, you won’t see the option. To add a mobile number, simply add it to the employee’s account in the “Employees” section.
Add a mobile number to an employee's account
Sometimes you need to send a quick email to your folks directly from Hello Scheduling.
While on the dashboard, simply click “Email Staff”. You’ll be able to enter in the name of employees that have email addresses in Hello Scheduling. In addition to emailing individuals, you can also email entire departments / locations.
Let’s say that your department or location is location in New York, so you’ve set up a location called “Hello NY”. To email everyone who works at the location, type “Everybody in Hello NY”. As you start to type “Everybody in” you’ll notice that the autocomplete drop down will help you pick the right location.
You can also email everybody, by simply typing… well… “Everybody”.
Send an email to your employees
Contact List
You asked for it, and we delivered. Every employee has access to a searchable, company-wide contact list.
A contact list for everyone
So that’s it. Over the last two months we’ve added a lot of features to make it easier to communicate with your staff. Thanks for reading, happy new year, and happy communicating!
Today we are sharing a guest post from Brandon Dennis, who works for buuteeq, a digital marketing system for hotels. Since a number of our customers operate hotels, we thought you would find this information interesting.
Every day, people use smartphones to browse the internet, use email and text messaging, and manage their daily lives with apps. The number of people who use smartphones has jumped more than 57% since 2009 to over 78 million, and this is expected to increase dramatically. Whether you need to browse a hotel directory to find a place to stay, watch streaming movies, conduct business or manage your employees, doing so without a rich, mobile optimized option is quickly becoming insufficient.
Hello Scheduling is a great tool to help hotel owners manage their employees’ schedules, skills and calls to save hoteliers time and make employees more productive and happy. buuteeq helps hotel owners create and manage their online marketing efforts, taking the pain out of having a powerful online presence. Mobile Hotel Website
buuteeq not only creates a richly detailed, high-tech website, but we also create a mobile optimized version of the website so the millions of smartphone Internet browsers can explore your hotel in a format native to their device. Our templates take all of the important information about your hotel and organizes it all so that it can be consumed better on smartphones and feature phones.
With over 700 million apps in the iTunes app directory, having an iPhone app is a great way to reach a new audience. buuteeq creates an iPhone app customized for your hotel, giving guests another unique experience on their smartphones to share with their friends.
Visit buuteeq to learn more about how you and your employees can create beautiful online marketing materials for your hotel.
Learn more about digital marketing for your hotel on buuteeq’s blog.
You asked for it, and we delivered. Now you can view and schedule your employees on a weekly shift calendar.
Schedule and view your employees on a weekly employee calendar
With the click of a button you can move between daily, weekly, or monthly views.
Hello Scheduling is Officially Released
Hey Readers!
We’re excited to announce that Hello Scheduling is now officially released.
The last eight months of our beta program have been an amazing experience, with demand exceeding even our most optimistic projections — and it’s largely because of you. Since our launch, we’ve had over 900 organizations sign up to use Hello Scheduling, with over 15,000 account log-ins.
New Features Since Our Launch in January
We’ve certainly added a number of new features since launch; many, because of your excellent feedback:
…And so many usability enhancements, including a complete redesign of our interface.
And we’re not done yet. As many of you have already experienced, we take customer feedback incredibly seriously. We’ll continue to add the new features and enhancements you’ve come to expect from us.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve quietly released the ability for you to schedule your staff’s breaks. This feature has been highly requested, so we thought we’d walk you through exactly how it works. Like most Hello Scheduling features, you have the flexibility to let the software automatically handle break scheduling, or you can manually schedule employee breaks (i.e., breaks have a specific start and end time).
How a break will appear on the dashboard
Most organizations aren’t looking to schedule every single employee break — it’s simply too tedious. Rather, they would prefer to have Hello Scheduling calculate the number of break minutes that each employee should take, based on the number of hours the employee has worked.
Rules take literally seconds to set up and they’ll help organizations like yours stay compliant with labor laws. For example, we can create a break rule that says, “For every 4 hours that an employee is scheduled on a day, give them 1 15-minute paid break.”
To do this, simple visit the Settings area, and select “Breaks”. Here you can fill out break rules.
Use break rules to have Hello Scheduling automatically calculate the number of break minutes your employees should take
That’s all there is to it.
Some organizations need more control over staff breaks and need to schedule specific break times.
If you are using scheduling templates, we suggest that you add break slots to the shifts in your templates — this way you’ll be able to use the same slots over and over again. Simply click the shift that you want to edit…
Click template shifts to edit them
…and start adding break slots.
Add reusable breaks slot to your shifts
After you’ve created your break slots, you can now schedule employee breaks. Click the “Breaks” tab at the bottom of the application, and start scheduling! You’ll notice that the rules will help tell you exactly how many break minutes need to be scheduled.
Select the "Breaks" tab and start scheduling
As you schedule your employees’ breaks, you’ll see them automatically get added to your schedule (if you’re in people view).
The breaks will automatically show in the schedule
Now, your employees will know exactly when they should take their break. They’ll see this information on their dashboard, as well as in their printed schedule.
When designing your employee schedule it’s important to maximize shift coverage most efficiently, providing the right staffing level for the day’s needs while also ensuring that employees’ have the right skills for their shifts. It can be daunting to set up your schedule for the first time but with the proper start and a flexible employee scheduling system you’ll be up and running in no time.
In order to create an efficient schedule, begin by asking yourself the following questions:
One important goal of creating an efficient schedule is to match the number of employees with the amount of work as it varies throughout the day. This can be particularly challenging for business with variable schedules and workflow. If the workday is slow, you’re wasting money by being overstaffed. However, if you are understaffed during a busy spell, you may lose sales, hurt your customer service, or overwork your employees.
So how do we calculate our staffing level? Let’s assume you schedule your staff at 40 hours per week per employee. In this example, we’ll assume 3 employees need to be in the store at all times — 10 hours a day — for a total of 70 hours a week. Let’s also assume we have 6 employees in our staff.
To calculate if you’re staffed fully, take the minimum number of people needed (3) times the total hours open per week (70) and divide by the number of employees you have (6).
In our case we get (3*70) / 6 = 35 hours a week each. In this case we’re averaging a 35 hour work week for our staff. However, you’ll need to account for time off, sick days and part-time staff.
With Hello Scheduling:
But the best part is, we provide all of this information when you are scheduling , so you end up with the right staffing level, with the fewest clicks — and headaches — possible.
Another element that goes into a highly efficient schedule is matching skills to shift needs. Let’s say, as in the case of many retail stores, you have an opening shift that requires a combination of staff trained in the stockroom, floor design and one manager that has a store key and can work the alarm system. This means you may have three different shifts with the same start and end times but with very different requirements. Tracking this kind of complexity can rapidly get out of hand.
Using a good employ scheduling software solution will greatly reduce the things you need to track in your head or with notes. For example, Hello Scheduling allows the addition of shift requirement tags and employee skill tags. With Hello Scheduling it’s easy to see if the employee is a good skill match — we automatically match shift needs with employee skills.
These are some of the basic building blocks of an efficient and productive schedule design. In the coming weeks we’ll be blogging more about setting up the optimum schedule.
Stay tuned and Happy Scheduling!
In an earlier post on Setting Up Employee Shifts, I mentioned that how you set your schedule can have a real impact on your staff’s health. Shift workers generally don’t sleep as well as other types of employees. Lack of, or poor quality, sleep can lead to accidents, absenteeism, and lower productivity.
Each business schedules their employees differently; it’s important to focus on the scheduling cadence of your employees by keeping a few rules of thumb in mind.
First, allow for a full 8 hours of sleep plus travel time, as well as eating time, between shifts. This is because a disrupted sleep schedule is one of the most common causes of health issues among shift workers. Problems such as fatigue, headaches, and loss of concentration as well as increased stress levels can arise.
Second, when able, allow for your employees to work the same schedule for at least a week at a time. This allows their bodies to adjust to the cadence and helps with getting to sleep faster as well as waking up more refreshed since they’ll likely be waking up around the same time each day.
Once you’ve established your shift schedule, or rota, it’s a good idea to use shift scheduling software to maintain consistency and deal with the inevitable and burdensome time off and shift swap requests. This ensures your ability to maintain a healthful and considerate shift schedule.
Good employee scheduling software allows you to see at a glance how shift changes will impact the schedule cadence, so you can make adjustments on the fly. Of course, the more employees you have the greater the complexity. If that complexity becomes too great, it can impact your well-being and consequently that of your employees.
Here at Hello Scheduling we’ve put a lot of time into creating a product that takes scheduling cadence into consideration. Healthy employees are good employees. Whichever scheduling software you choose hopefully these tips will help.
Happy Scheduling!
It’s been a while since we’ve posted on the blog (we’ve been hard at work on new features), so we wanted to share some of our favorite employee scheduling tips & tricks in Hello Scheduling — a few things you might not know, but could save you some time in the future.
If you’re on the dashboard, you can click on any one of your upcoming shifts, and you’ll automatically be taken to the scheduled day in one click.
Click a day to go straight to that day in the schedule
If you’re an organization that uses templates, you can copy scheduled employees from previous shifts by selecting the “Copy scheduled employees from previous day” link at the bottom of the scheduling dialog.
Here you’ll see a list of previous days that you’ve scheduled using this same template, and with one click, Hello Scheduling copies over your scheduled employees.
Copy employees from previously scheduled shifts
Click Shift Tags to Select Employees with Tags
Many organizations use shift tags to define what types of employees they need for a shift (for example you might tag a shift with “Cash register” to ensure you always schedule an employee who knows how to use one).
To select employees that also have that same tag, simply click the tag in the “Shift tags” area and the appropriate number of employees will be selected.
Click shift tags to select employees with appropriate tags
Although you may have set up recurring schedule templates — for example you use the same schedule every Monday — you can always override those templates and use whatever schedule you wish. Under the “Edit Day” button in the schedule, you can select to apply any of your templates to a day, set a day to “closed”, or start from a fresh schedule.
Apply any template to any day
So you’ve set up your templates for one of your locations or departments, and now you’ve added a new location but it has no templates. Rather than creating new templates for each department, you can actually copy them from one location/department to another.
To do this, simply select “+ New Template” in the template editor. Under the “Copy Existing” drop down box you’ll see a list of all of your templates regardless of their department or location. Simply select a template to copy, name it, and now you never have to start from scratch.
Copy templates from one location/department to another
We hope you enjoyed these tips and please comment if you have any more to share.
Happy Scheduling!
