Rostering has come a long way, the days of spreadsheets and pen and paper should be long gone. Today you can now communicate with your staff electronically giving your employees the power to communicate back electronically saving you the business owner or manager or supervisor hours every week.

What is an open shift?

An open shift allows a manager to offer the shift to any available and appropriately trained employee who works in the location. Creating an open shift will send an invitation via email or SMS to all recommended staff members, offering them the shift. The first employee to accept their invitation will be rostered to the shift, and any attempt by another staff member to accept a shift will be denied. This can be advantageous for a manager looking to rapidly fill a number of shifts, or to fill a particular shift as quickly as possible if an employee calls in sick with no warning.

Introducing Open Shifts/Schedules

Open shifts or schedules allow you the supervisor, manager or business owner to create schedules with start and finish times leaving it up to employees to grab the available schedules. No more chasing people to fill positions.

Once you create the open schedule any employee or casual or contractor that is suitably qualified to take the open shift can claim the shift right from their own smart phone. Perfect for businesses that use a lot of casuals, uni students and the like. Simply create the shifts you want employees to fill and they will be filled.

Employees simply claim the open shifts they want that they are qualified to take as soon as the email arrives

Try staff rosters for free and start working smarter in your business

Rostering systems over the past 3-4 years have really evolved with access to the internet now in the hands of nearly every working employee. Smart phone sales have rocketed over the past 7 years around the world.

Inline with smart phone sales has been the massive growth of apps. You can find an app for just about anything you can think of. The cleverest of apps for employee scheduling includes the ability not only for the employee to start and stop a shift. Employee scheduling apps have come a long way now giving the ability to put the employee roster directly onto the employee phone weeks in advance. Employees can now sync their smart device calendar to receive their schedule automatically populating the employee calendar with the shifts they need to work over the coming period.

This type of clever technology would have really helped Starbucks recently where it became clear over 130,000 employees were mostly kept in the dark about upcoming schedules. Starbucks have this week made an announcement that they will post the employee schedule at least one week in advance…….wow would you be happy with this, so for ever Starbucks have been making it very difficult for employees to know what they are doing next week.

With the busy lives we all lead today, millions of casual workers who in many cases may have more than 1 casual job need visibility about the workload they have. Being casual is tough, you don’t even know if you are working tomorrow sometimes and in many cases have no idea if you are working next week.

Don’t let your company become main news across websites around the world.

Show your staff you care, book in a demonstration or start a 30 day trial

As cloud software has burst onto the scene over the past couple of years we have seen some spectacular products and we have seen some dismal failures. I am not going to name products here, I will more talk about what to look for when selecting your cloud rostering or time and attendance solution.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud rostering and cloud time and attendance?

The 2 biggest advantages of going to cloud really do outweigh the disadvantage

No hardware/software infrastructure required – you can go completely without any hardware and have no software installed on your computers in the business, this for me is the largest advantage for small business as you need no IT expertise to get your system up and running. Some of the excellent cloud based rostering solutions will allow you to start setting up your account as soon as you sign up for a 30 day trail, within a couple of hours your account can be set up and you will be rostering for next week from your computer, iPad, Tablet or mobile phone, it really does not get any easier.

Communication – When you move to a cloud rostering or cloud time and attendance solution one of the biggest advantages you get is better communication, with nearly every person carrying a smart phone today you can push information to your employees and they can communicate back through the same channel on the smart phone or a computer. I have seen some of the employee time clocks over the years come out with all sorts of features that allow employees when they clock in at the time clock to look up information like how many hours they have worked, what time they clocked in and out over the past seven days and more. These features while sounding clever only congest the employee time clock at a time when people just want to clock in and out.

The only way today to share information with employees is give them an app they can load onto their smartphone giving the employee their own personal self serve kiosk experience that they can access anywhere and anytime.

When thinking about disadvantages there are not many, having the ability to manage your system where ever you are by phone, iPad, Tablet or computer works well for most in the busy life we all lead every day.

Some systems could drop out when no internet is available and this would be the biggest disadvantage of the day, when was the last time you lost internet on your mobile phone? Smart apps will hold data when the internet is not available automatically pushing the information to and from the smart phone as soon as the internet connects again.

I was just reading an article this morning about Goolgle working on replacing computer screens altogether in the coming years with voice activation and instructions moving to a new phase of ease of use. In the coming years you will not even have to manually build your rosters or write emails to communicate with employees, you will simply be able to say what you want and google will look after the rest……the technology has been around for decades but the changes coming in the near future will simply blow you mind.

Book in your own demonstration here

Employee time clocks have been around for many decades, today I will explore not only the most common employee time clocks used today and over the past few decades but I will also cover the single most used employee time clock that you may not even know about today that will be the most used employee time clock over the next 10 years

Most people today are more interested in today’s products and not products that may be dated and possibly been around for more than 20 years like bundy clocks with bundy cards. Today I will start the list in reverse order starting with the what will become the most used employee time clock over the next 10 years globally, and it is happening right now every day.

Number 1 most used solution for employee time and attendance over the next 10 years will be…..
Smart Phones including iPhone and Android, Tablets and iPads. These types of items will be the most used items for employees to clock in and out over the next decade. Smart phones are so prolific now that it has never been easier for employees to clock in and out from their own mobile phone. Supervisors and Managers can also see company specific information, replace staff and manage rosters all from their own mobile phone. You can create your own time sheet, set up time sheet approval and more.

While writing this blog I hear advertising from our largest national electronics retailer promoting spend $500 in store and get a free Tablet, it is no wonder they are so prolific with promotions like these. Read More

Number 2 most used solution for employee time and attendance over the next 10 years will be…..
Simple electronic employee time clocks. Over the past decade hundreds of types of electronic employee time clocks have been released, some are still around and many have come and gone. This electronic employee time clock is our favourite as a stand alone employee time clock. This time clock also integrates directly with the fasted growing rostering program on the planet. We have provided thousands of employee time clocks over the years and every day see the decline while smart phones and tablets with iPads are increasing exponentially. Read More

Number 3 most used solution for employee time and attendance over the next 10 years will be…..
Portable employee time clocks designed for the most remote conditions, no power, only generators. No internet, no network and no computers. What type of device can you use when you have no power and no internet.

Call 1300 800 077 to find out more.

Rostering programs with SMS capability mostly consists of create the roster and publish all the rosters out to employees via SMS. This is where most rostering programs stop today, very clever programs will allow the employee or contractor to reply back and accept the shift via SMS or e-mail giving visibility to the person rostering who is accepting and not accepting shifts.

With live visibility of employees accepting and not accepting scheduled shifts sent out by email or SMS operators can see how quickly shifts are being filled, but what happens when an employee or contractor changes their mind after accepting a shift, how does this get communicated back to the company scheduler. What is required in this situation is the ability for the employee or contractor to change their mind and communicate this change of mind back to the database.

The cleverest of rostering systems today now include apps that can be downloaded to employees smart phone. Employees from their own smart phone can view their roster, see approved time sheets, apply for time off or leave.

The best rostering apps now include management tools for managers in the palm of your hand. Anyone who rosters will know how much work is involved when staff call in sick and you must replace them to ensure the production line continues or to keep the patrons at the hotel happy with short lines when ordering drinks. I had my turn at rostering when working for Weston Bakes Foods many years ago, we always needed an exact amount of people to get all the orders out each morning, we were dealing with fresh cakes that just had to go out on the day they were made to preserve shelf life.

I would have 1 or 2 every night not show up out of a group of about 40 employees, some nights I would be out on the factory floor, get the message of a person calling in sick, then going back to my office to start calling phone numbers of casuals to find a replacement, this could take 5 minutes it could take 35 minutes.

Move forward to today, technology has changed, back then iPhones did not even exist. Today a manager can have all the employee information including schedules in the palm of their hand, you can get the message anywhere that a staff member needs replacing and from your smart phone in minutes you can organise the replacement and then get on with your work.

Wouldn’t it be nice if when an employee or contractor changed their mind after accepting a shift that they could communicate this electronically back to the dataset and in turn the dataset automatically went through the next best available employee or contractor with the correct criteria to fill the vacant shifts, sending out a fresh e-mail or SMS to the next best available employee or contractor…….. wouldn’t this save you some time

The future has all sorts of nice tools coming our way, if you are rostering from a spreadsheet, you should look at this. Rostering for the future