Open shifts have been around forever, a manager decades ago would say I need three people at 7am tomorrow and the first three people who put up their hand or yelled out would get the shift.

Today now we have moved electronic we can do the same thing only software makes the process a lot more clever allowing any person without all of the knowledge of the skills of the employees to now create open shifts.

Open shifts – Why use them?

Open shifts give you the flexibility to not select any one person for a position but to give people the choice of which shift they take. In today’s hectic paced world that we all live in trying to manage home, work, kids and much more is challenging at best,  having the flexibility to choose when you work is gold. Open shifts would be ideal for mum’s who need to manage the family but also want to get some shifts in each week to get out of the house and socialise with more than the family dog or cat.

Before technology came along as we have today if you got a call saying a container was turning up at 2pm Tuesday and it was 4pm Monday you would get straight onto the phone calling one person after another to fill the 15 positions you had to fill so you could empty the container on arrival.

What if you could create 15 open shifts that were filled in minutes without making 1 phone call? Would this help you in your business – How much stress would this remove.

Start a 30 day trial and see how open shifts can help you in the business

How do electronic open shifts work?

Electronic open shifts allow the scheduler to easily send a message to a group of people who would be interested in a shift becoming available so these people can accept the shift without the scheduler having to make one phone call. Imagine filling 15 shifts in minutes with only a few clicks of your mouse button, how much stress would this take out of your day? Even better if you needed 8 people to pack and 7 people to unpack the container you can target the best packers and un packers by tagging the employees in the data set. Another example would be what if you need three MR drivers for your trucks with over 100 people in your database. You would not want to contact all 100 people to let them know about 3 MR drivers shifts.

Imagine you could laser target the message about the open shift only to the people who have the skill to complete the shift – Would this help you in your job?

Start a 30 day trial and see how open shifts can help you in the business

This year at Xerocon where all of the industry get together on the back of the accounting giant Xero the annual awards were handed out.

Add-on Partner of the Year The winning Add-on Partner will have demonstrated a high level of customer satisfaction and commercial success. We’ll also look for continuous improvement in areas like customer care, design, quality, functionality and technical innovation

Criteria • Be commercially available (no Beta versions) • Have verifiable users on both Xero and your product (orgs connected) • Technical: design, integration to the API & Xero products • Ease of doing business, customer feedback, customer advocacy. Rating on the Xero Community • Connections with Xero’s partner community • Evidence of customers using the product successfully to improve their operations and demonstrating that they would recommend the product to others.

Deputy have thousands of customers around the globe connected to Xero, well done Deputy on making such a hot product.

I received this question recently…

I have already evaluated Deputy. According to my staff I am unable to run two rosters (one for Kitchen and one for Floor) in my restaurants without having two ipad time clock kiosks at each site. The alternative was to have the kitchen and floor rostering combined so that I can have just the one ipad kiosk on site. It is a strange restriction that your competitors have managed to avoid.

After speaking with the customer and getting a full understanding of the issue we discovered….That this was simply a misunderstanding as the software is more than capable of handling unlimited departments on a single iPad kiosk.

The most popular way for employees to sign in & out globally with Deputy scheduling software is to use existing smart devices. Most employees today either have an iPhone or an android phone, each employee can use their own phone, download the Deputy app and start signing in and signing out. Employees can also see their own schedule, apply for leave, or simply build in future availability so that the person completing the schedule is automatically notified of the employee’s intentions.

Perfect for uni students, casual staff, employees who work in multiple locations. You can even post where you are when you are unavailable as seen below letting your boss know you are a hard worker….

What about the ability to pick up extra shifts when you are available? How easy is this? see an open shift, take an open shift

Imagine having the ability to build your schedule, notify your staff automatically of their scheduled times for the upcoming week and any shift not picked up by an employee and confirmed could automatically become an open shift for the next suitable qualified employee to fill.

This functionality has been a long time coming and only available to companies prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars on sophisticated complex scheduling systems.

You can now have access to this functionality in your business saving your schedule is hours and hours each week confirming who is going to be able to fill your shifts so that the work gets done

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The development team at Deputy have really outdone themselves this time. As if the Deputy platform was not already good enough the developers have now taken the product into the stratosphere.

It is no surprise hundreds of customers are signing up every week to start using the Deputy rostering system. You can now manage your entire operation from your mobile phone. Plenty of people said this could not be done, but it is here and it is here now. If you are an existing customer simply update your app. If you’ve heard about Deputy but you’ve not yet started to use Deputy start a 30 day trial here.

With these recent changes you can not only roster from your mobile phone you can also approve time sheets no longer needing to be tied down to a PC in the office.

Some of the recent improvements this release include:

• Full employee scheduling
• See rosters for today or any day in future
• See past timesheets
• Copy shifts from day to day
• Publish weekly shifts
• Change shifts
• Add open shifts
• Delete shifts
• Approve timesheets
• Bulk approve
• Discard timesheet
• See weather of the day
• Notification swipe will take you straight to the item
• Fully responsive design for iPad and iPhone 6 plus.

Start your 30 day trial or book in a demonstration