Hello Scheduling Blog

On Friday we released a new report based on feedback from retailers.  Retail scheduling is no easy task, and every outfit does it differently.  Some retail organizations instruct their managers to try and keep labor costs under a predetermined labor budget.

Others, however, ask their managers to keep the # of scheduled hours for specific employee pay types under certain hour amounts / week.  For example, a retail store manager might check to ensure that that total full time employee hours are under a certain number of hours for a week.

With Hello Scheduling, you can now create a report of scheduled employee hours by employee type (i.e., whether they’re full time, part time, salaried, or volunteer).

This new report will calculate scheduled hours by employee type

This is just another example of how your feedback can help shape Hello Scheduling!

As a manager of a large organization, you may have multiple locations or departments.  Sometimes you need to be see how your schedule is shaping up across all of your locations.  Now, with our new shift coverage report, you can see how filled your schedule is in one click.

Shift coverage report shows how filled your schedule is across locations

We love talking with our customers.  There is no substitute for walking in the shoes of those folks running or managing their businesses.  So, a while back I asked a simple question; “What’s the best part about using our work scheduling software instead of paper scheduling or Excel?”

As you might expect we get a lot of answers like saving time scheduling employees, easily communicating work schedule changes, saving money, always knowing who’s up when, etc.  But one of the best parts of using an online work scheduler is quite simple: No more, “What time do I work” calls!

It sounds so simple but ask yourself how many minutes a day do I waste dealing with emails and phone calls from employees?  That time adds up fast… and it means less time for you to sell, service and manage.

Whatever your reasons are for wanting to greatly simplify your employee scheduling we’re here to listen and ensure your needs are met.

Happy Scheduling!

So you’re finally ready to stop using Excel as your schedule maker.  Great move!  But… how do you know what to look for?   We here at Hello Scheduling have spent countless hours listening to business owners and managers while building a well reviewed employee schedule maker and are happy to share what we’ve learned.

Here are a few fast questions to ask right off the bat:

1. Does the scheduling software encourage employees to actively manage their own schedule and remove burden from you?  After all, every minute you spend answering, “when do I work” calls and change requests is a minute less you have to sell, manage or take a well deserved break.
2. Can employees request time off easily without bugging you?
3. Can your scheduled workers quickly see when they work?
4. What if you need to change the work schedule after you’ve already shared it?  Can you communicate the updates quickly to all those effective by the schedule change?
5. How easy is it to get started?  Will you be endlessly answering questions and filling in data or can you start building your online schedule right away?
6. Once you’re set up, can the online schedule maker automatically schedule for you thereafter?
7. Can employees handle their own shift-swaps without bothering you?
8. What type of reporting capabilities does the schedule maker have?
9. Will the scheduler let you set up breaks and calculate how many automatically?

You’re too busy to try out a bunch of different scheduling systems so hopefully these tips will help you decide which staff scheduling software is right for your business. To see how Hello Scheduling let’s you deal with these needs have a look at this:

• Getting Started
• Automatically Scheduling Your Employees
• Employee Break Scheduling
• How Employees Swap and Trade Shifts
• Creating Time-Off Reports
• Creating Payroll Reports

As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a demo or with a question.  Happy Scheduling!

Today we’re excited to announce the mobile version of Hello Scheduling is now available. 
Simply point your iPhone, Android, or other smartphone to www.helloscheduling.com to log in.  We’ve done our best to mirror much of the same functionality from the Dashboard on your mobile device.  With our mobile site, you’ll be able to:

• Check your work schedule from anywhere, including breaks and shift notes
• Check the full organization’s schedule
• Call / text employees directly
• Take open shifts
• Approve and reject swap and time off requests

Over the next few months we will be adding a lot of new functionality, such as the ability to give up shifts, as well as swap.  So stay tuned, even more great features are coming!

And because there are no apps to install or update, you’ll always have the latest version of our mobile site.

Most customers who are looking for an employee scheduling maker are looking for it to generate work schedules in seconds.  In this post, we’ll walk you through some of our features for easily creating schedules, while also showing you how you can communicate with your team.

Creating a Schedule Manually

With Hello Scheduling, you can quickly create an employee schedule.  Here’s a video that walks you through the basics of creating recurring shifts and scheduling them manually.

Creating a Schedule Automatically

You can also create employee schedules automatically.  In this blog post, we walk you through how our work schedule generator works.

Communicating with Your Team

Now that you’ve created a schedule, you can publish the schedule to the team.  When you publish a schedule all of your employees will receive an email letting them know exactly when they work.  As you make changes to the schedule, even after it is published, you can always republish the schedule to send a new email to employees.

In addition to letting team members know about their schedule, we also make it really easy to stay in touch with team members from our dashboard.  Learn more about our communication tools.

With Hello Scheduling we allow you to generate work schedules with one click.  Our autoscheduling capability is a very advanced employee schedule generator which checks against a number of different dimensions to ensure you only have the right employees on your shifts.  For example, our auto scheduler takes the following information into account:

1. Can the employee work at this location?
2. Is this employee available to work?
3. Will scheduling the employee for this shift exceed the maximum # of hours / week that they should work?
4. And much more… (our secret sauce)

Setting Preferred Employees

A key differentiator of Hello Scheduling is our ability for you to set “favorites” on any recurring shift, which are represented as hearts.  For example, if you have a shift from 8am to 6pm, you can tell our autoscheduler that you want to give preference to a specific employee:

Set favorites on shifts to tell our autoscheduler which employee you would prefer

So try out our work schedule maker with free employee texting today!

Yesterday I received a call from a prospective customer who was evaluating Hello Scheduling.  He asked me how we compared to a free employee scheduler that he was also considering.  Like most software, free alternatives are generally available, but usually lack in three main categories:

• New Feature Development
• Bug Fixes
• Support

Free Employee Scheduling Software Rarely Gets New Features

Software development is expensive and time consuming — adding new features to software takes hundreds of hours.  When creating a new feature, designers and developers walk through a number of steps, including:

• Understanding the problem that needs to be solved
• Creating a design / feature that will solve the problem
• Developing and testing the feature
• Ongoing maintenance of the feature

These features help save you time creating work schedules.  If you decide that you’re going to try creating online schedules with a free tool, recognize that there is little likelihood that the software will be updated in the future.

At Hello Scheduling we’re building a business that delivers value to our customers.  Because of that, we’re able to invest in our product.  Since our launch in January 2011, we’ve added hundreds of features based on customer requests.

In the last month alone, we’ve added the ability for our customers to upload files as well as copy and paste shifts.  Currently we have a mobile application in development.  These new features would simply not be possible if we couldn’t pay our staff.

There’s a Scheduling Bug.  Will You Fix It?

For the sake argument, let’s pretend that the only bugs in free employee scheduling software are related to scheduling.  Let’s say that because of a bug, you schedule an employee making $8 / hr for just 6 extra hours per month.  You didn’t really want to schedule the staff member, but because of a scheduling bug the employee shows up to work and you have to pay her.

This mistake cost you $48.  That’s a lot of money when you could subscribe to Hello Scheduling for $24.95 / mo and avoid scheduling issues entirely.

Can You Help Me?

We answer every customer email and phone call.  We regularly teach customers how Hello Scheduling works via live web demos.  No free “vendor” can do that.  ‘Nuff said.

Conclusion

The adage remains true: you get you pay for.  If you’re running a serious business, creating work schedules with free software is going end up costing you more than simply subscribing to software like Hello Scheduling.

Although many of our customers are smaller business (many in retail) we decided to ask Michael Koploy, an analyst at Software Advice, to provide some insight on what larger chains are doing in the retail space.  He focuses his research on the technologies and strategies impacting operations and the retail supply chain. He can be reached at @POSAdvice on Twitter.

Toys R Us, Macy’s and other merchants are working to implement in-store fulfillment for online orders in some of its major retail outlets. This means that when you order something from Macys.com, that order may be taken from a nearby store, packed onto a truck at the end of the day, and shipped from the store directly to your house. By circumventing the distribution center, retailers hope to decrease shipping time and costs, and better-utilize in-store inventory to reduce the number of markdowns.

Adding in-store fulfillment to retail outlets will mean an added workload for associates. As a result, store managers will have to make sure their stores are appropriately staffed and that employees are on time for shifts and take breaks only at appropriate times.

Over on SoftwareAdvice.com, I recently wrote an article discussing some best practices for retailers looking to make this shift. In Want to Master In-Store Fulfillment? Think Like a Warehouse, I pinpoint three overarching strategies that these retailers need to focus on:

1. Implement radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, readers and scanners to assist associates with locating items in the store and preparing them for shipment.

2. Deploy workforce management and scheduling systems to help management craft the ideal workforce of employees that have the right skill combinations to assist customers, process online orders and maintain a sense of order in these stores that will (inherently) be a bit more chaotic.

3. Provide management with the capabilities to evaluate performance and address issues, as well as help employees with shift-related issues such as shift-trading and asking off for vacation.

Employee scheduling software solutions like Hello Scheduling are essential to retailers successfully making this transition from outlet to pseudo-distribution center outlets.

Today we’re doing something a little different on the blog – we’re going to showcase one of our favorite customers, ZenSpot.  They have been a customer – and really more like a business partner — since February.  Over the months, both Kelli and Nooshi have provided excellent feedback about our software (you can thank them for a number of new improvements ).

About ZenSpot

Currently ZenSpot has locations in Eugene and Portland Oregon.  Their focus is on empowering people to be themselves via three primary paths: hot yoga, human empowerment, and Feng Shui. Their human empowerment path includes life coaching, nutritional counseling, stress management, and Reiki energy healing.  With the help of their experts, clients can realize their fitness and happiness goals.

How ZenSpot Created Work Schedules Before Hello Scheduling

From Kelli: “Believe it or not we did scheduling manually with EXCEL. Yuck! It was a nightmare to remember individual staff schedule needs, time off requests for holidays, and general employee availability. We are so glad we are not doing that anymore!”

What’s it Like Using Hello Scheduling?

From Kelli: “We love the easy web-based interface, the user-friendliness of it and the accessibility 24-7. We run a very dynamic business where changes on the fly are the norm. Hello Scheduling fits that need. Our staff are so much happier as they can access the schedule from their cell phones, iPads, computers wherever and whenever.  We are so happy to have found Hello Scheduling and feel that the company is a partner of ours in making what we do easier and more accessible! Thank you so much! Namaste!”

What’s Your Favorite Feature?

From Kelli: “The ability to make changes in a snap from anywhere I have access to the internet- HUGE!  AND, if I may, the EXCELLENT customer service (editor: you may Kelli)! We LOVE these guys!”