The Metro subway ride from DC Public Schools to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (DCCC) was slick, excepting only that the fare system is a little too complex.  I ride the bus in 4 days a week at home, as does most of the Shiftboard crew.  So I take a critical look at other city’s public transit systems.  DC has nothing to be ashamed of (although our new Seattle light rail trains purr like kittens compared to the DC Metro trains).

At the convention center, I met up with a number of good folks who run the Centerplate food and beverage operation.  Centerplate DCCC has been a customer for just about a year now.  They put our system through its paces.  I love to see it.

–Managers complete their “schedule requests” right in Shiftboard templates.  This used to be a completely non-standard process via email in all different formats.

–Their scheduling team, led by Patrick Thelwell, loads all the schedule requests, and Shiftboard auto-assigns all their shifts based on union seniority.  No one is auto-assigned any overtime shifts or double-booked.  Additional shifts are assigned to temp agencies.

–Each person in the system has an assigned paycode or individual hourly rate, so the controller Curtis McDonald and his team can look out 2-3 weeks to see a very accurate labor cost forecast based on exactly how many folks are scheduled by department.

–Our system interfaces with their Attendance Enterprise (AE) time tracking system, so all schedules can be immediately compared to actuals.  Curtis calls Shiftboard and AE to key “controls” they employ to manage to the numbers.

Near the end of the day, I sat down with the GM Vince McPhail.  As with any good customer, he and Curtis always have a couple of requested enhancements, and we aim to please.  But it sure feels good to see an operation like his that not only produces a great finished product in terms of culinary delights for national and international events, but also uses systems like ours and AE to run the business by numbers and manage the P&L carefully.

Heck of a day.  By the time I made it through security at Reagan National, I was exhausted.  The only downer of my DC tour, not a bar stool open in the terminal.  I could have used one beer to wind it up, but still a very positive visit.  Some things are going right in DC.

From the Treasury meeting, I did a rushed cab ride over to the headquarters building of DC Public Schools (DCPS) in the northeast section of the city.  We have been working jointly with a survey and data collection partner, WorldAPP, to facilitate the enhanced process DCPS is implementing to evaluate nearly 8,000 new teacher and principal applicants. Shiftboard is happy to be a part of the effort, facilitating all the applicants self-scheduling along with the associated scheduling of nearly 200 interviewers.  As usual, our API and open platform is saving everyone time by allowing WorldAPP to populate applicants directly into Shiftboard from the survey portal.

DCPS is breaking new ground here nationwide.  Among other things, all teacher applicants that reach the 2^nd round are required to do an “audition”, providing a 30 minute lesson in their area of expertise to a live classroom of kids.  Doesn’t that sound like the type of rigorous evaluation process you would want your local school system’s teachers put through?

Here was my main takeaway from DCPS: This ain’t your standard big city public school system. These folks are on a mission to make a step change improvement in the outcomes of a lot of kids’ lives and opportunities through public education. I got a sense in three hours there that they were the real deal.  Let me provide just a few indicators:

–The HR recruiting team is led by Sheila Sarem, a bundle of positive energy and urgency who is about as far from a pencil-pushing bureaucrat as I could imagine.  She worked in sales for Cisco Systems in Europe for 6 years before coming to DC to work for the Obama campaign.  She said she then decided to stick around because the city needed help.  Amen.

–Lizzie, their main Shiftboard system administrator, just happens to have a masters in public health from the University of Texas.  I tried not to act surprised.  She was instructing me on the system after the first few minutes of our meeting.

–Sheila’s team is out to find the most talented teachers in the country, including every Teach for America veteran they can get their hands on.  The email signature of the entire 10 person group is the same: “Be a part of public education’s greatest turnaround story.  Apply now.”

Focused.  Aligned.  Motivated.  As I left after 3 hours to catch a metro train, I was thinking “BRING IT, DCPS.  Make it happen!”  Not only that, but as a parent of 3 Seattle Public School elementary students, I want it to happen . . . and soon.

-Rob

How many of you out there read the paper and shake your head at what is going on in Washington, DC?  Evidently a small victory (very small) may be scored this week as it appears that both parties will agree to an extension of 2 weeks so the federal government doesn’t shut down.  So it goes.  I’m not celebrating.

But as I sit here on a return flight to Seattle crunched in a middle seat with my elbows pinned to my rib cage, I’m pretty jazzed.  I had a whirlwind day in DC meeting with Shiftboard customers who are pushing to make a difference.  And the news was good, so it’s worth recapping in a little three part series.

I arrived yesterday evening after a drive in from Richmond.  I was pleasantly surprised that my sister had chosen an excellent beer bar, the Meridian Pint, for dinner on the north side.  How can you go wrong with 30 beers on tap including a number of Belgian ales?  We caught up over a number of excellent pints courtesy of Stoudt’s Brewing Company in Lancaster, PA.  Give their beer a try.  You won’t be disappointed.

This morning started with an interesting discussion with a human resources and IT manager Steve at the Treasury Department. A massive cup of dark French Roast coffee from Au Bon Pain helped significantly.    Treasury has implemented a standard 360 review process for nearly a thousand top officials.  Shiftboard provided the self-scheduling of all those sessions.  Most importantly, the new review process appears to be very well planned and sounded to me like one of those feedback loops that should improve performance of officials and generally improve the return on our collective tax dollars.

-Rob

Staffing a venue is tough.  There are so many different jobs that need to be filled, qualifications that need to be met, union rules (deep breath), seasonality, and not to mention a less-than-regularly repeating scheduling.  Getting organized and staying connected are two huge challenges that a venue manager faces.

PPL Park in Philadelphia

I recently read a Venue Insider blog post about the 10 Best Ways to Improve Your Event Staff and based on our experience with venues I would say that all ten of those things are on point.  But I also believe that having a superior, organized system to get your staff scheduled on the back end will make for a happier, more productive staff output.  Curtis McDonald, CFO for Centerplate at the Washington DC Convention Center put it: “We used to receive staffing requests via email, or spreadsheet, or handwritten on a napkin for that matter.”

Having a scheduling software that allows your employees to always know what the schedule looks like and while also having a consistent means of communication with the scheduler will be greatly appreciated by not only management, but the staff members as well.  Employees can login and check their schedule every night if they’d like.  If you allow employees to sign up for their own shifts, you can also very quickly weed out who wants to show up to work and add to the value of your team and who doesn’t.  Managers have access to powerful reporting tools that pull data directly from the calendar.  Which means that when managers make those last minute changes they can have peace of mind knowing that all changes will be reflected on the calendar in real time – crucial for accurate reporting purposes.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with many different venues, some large and some small, and we have come to learn a thing or two about what a venue manager needs to keep things simple, organized, and effective to make sure that come game day/event/concert, their employees are ready to go.

A few weeks ago, good ‘ol Punxsutawny Phil predicted an early spring in 2011.  The Shiftboard offices are in Seattle, where we are skeptical about the weather (still hopeful) however thrilled about the thought of spring only a few weeks away.  Why? Because spring is when many events, large and small start to rev up their Shiftboard engines and get back into the swing of things for the busy event season between spring and early fall.  Every year we listen to our customers and have tailored many of our scheduling software’s features and functionality towards those in the event management industry.

Whether scheduling employees at a state of the art stadium or volunteers at one of the most popular bluegrass/Americana music festivals in the country we’ve listened to feedback from all of our diverse clients in the event management space and worked to create a scheduling software that will make their lives easier.

Here are just a few of the features that have been enhanced specifically with event managers in mind:

1.  Schedule for multiple venues/stages/locations from the same Shiftboard site

2.  24/7 access and visibility of the calendar

3.  Let your volunteers/staff do some of the work: have them pick up shifts (you can still assign them yourself, if you want)

4.  Run reports to see coverage, hour totals, labor costs, and just about anything else you would need

5.  Pre-formatted sign in sheets

…and the list goes on and on.  The great thing about working with so many events is that while they may love Shiftboard, we love working with them.  It’s amazing how many DIFFERENT types of people are involved in the event industry.  Our friends at the DC Convention center know a thing or two about organizing and staffing formal national events where the guests often include presidents and international dignitaries.  Here on the West Coast, the fabulous volunteers at the AFI FEST 2010 worked to make the stars shine with some of the biggest names in Hollywood with films like The Black Swan, Abel, and The King’s Speech.  We also work with many amazing parent volunteers who use Shiftboard to organize and schedule school events in the very rare and precious spare time that they have.

So stay tuned to the Shiftboard Give a Shift blog, as Spring gets underway we will be sure to keep you posted with a lineup of great events as well as new features and tools that will make event scheduling even easier.

–Nahid

We’ve spent the month of January blogging about how the workforce is changing.  You can read about it anywhere but the fact is nearly every American has either experienced first hand or knows people whose lives and careers have significantly changed in the past few years due to the poor economy.

My generation grew up with high hopes and promises form our parents that getting a college education would guarantee a great, high paying and long term job after graduation.  Well, here we are, it’s 2011 and even the “safe” degrees in education and nursing are scarce.

In his State Of The Union Speech on January 25, 2011 President Obama said “Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful.” None of us can deny that the rules have changed; however our President suggests that this “shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us.”

Right now recent graduates need to remain flexible and innovative in their search for employment.  The Monday – Friday 40-hour workweek is hard to come by. Understand that companies are favoring temporary and contract employees. Working a few or these assignments is not failure.  Use this time to discover what you actually want to do for the rest of your life and learn from the jobs you hate. Lastly, be thankful that you’re young because out of pocket health insurance is still somewhat affordable. Good luck!

Alison

As the end of the first month of 2011 winds down I can’t help but wonder how many of those New Years resolutions have really kept up.  I know that my resolution to workout everyday, no excuses, went out the door oh…around January 5th.  But here’s the problem with resolutions like that, they may make your life “better”: healthier, skinnier, more energy, etc., but they also inherently make your life a little more difficult.  One more thing to pencil in everyday and one less hour of work, play or sleep. I’m not trying to justify my 12th failed attempt at the same resolution, but I have noticed that there are 2 different types of resolutions.  One’s that make your life harder (like mine) and ones that make your life easier.

The ones that make your life easier usually have something to do with getting more organized.  Things like keeping your desk clean, not procrastinating, systematizing certain processes that usually make your life a living nightmare.  For all you managers, schedulers, and volunteer coordinators this may seem obvious, but why not tackle your scheduling system? Whether you already use Shiftboard or have been thinking about it, there are a few key things that every scheduler should aim for.  Here are Shiftboard’s top 3 simple ways to get organized in 2011:

1.  Make sure all of your employee or volunteer contacts are up to date.  Doing this now will ensure that once you are back in the thick of things, be it a festival, sale, or a particularly busy Monday, you won’t get stuck on trying to figure out which of Steve’s phone numbers actually work (if any).  Whether you remind your people to update their contact info themselves or you do it for them, it will certainly be worth everyone’s time.

2.  Run your reports early.  Figure out who needs license/certification renewals before they expire.  See if coverage gaps are filled.  Make sure everyone is meeting your minimum work requirements.

3.  Get rid of those millions of spreadsheets.  In today’s day and age you have plenty of options to streamline your scheduling process.  Shiftboard makes it easy to get all your information into one place without passing around  that pesky, long, confusing spreadsheet.

So simple, yet so effective.  Here’s to a more organized, efficient 2011!

Nahid

I am certain that all of you out there have experienced first-hand some aspect of enabling flexibility to hire or retain key team members in your organization.  More employees are telecommuting at least 1-2 days to avoid additional hours each week wasted in traffic.  Parents are bending work hours around after-school schedules.  Many folks are working two jobs, or balancing working with taking classes for additional degrees.

These types of issues affect the daily management of a restaurant (many student workers), the longer term plans of a security staffing company (law enforcement professionals by day, event security at night or on weekends), and Fortune 1,000 companies aligning virtual project teams (full-time management, specific expertise contractors).

Companies are wrestling with the challenges associated with these requirements.  In all of the real-world scenarios I just listed, our online employee scheduling software is being used for real-time staff scheduling, email and SMS/text confirmations, online reporting, and other details.

Here at Shiftboard, we are gearing up for a big 2011.  We have been creating a system for nearly a decade now that enables what our customers and the business market generally are asking for as part of a big shift in the labor market away from strictly W2 employees towards more flexible workers and blended labor pools.  Give us a call to ask us about your specific challenge or opportunity with this shift in the labor force.  It won’t be a surprise to hear from you.

– Rob

I just read a fascinating New York Times article, “Working (Part-Time) In The 21^st Century”, about how part-time workers are becoming a standard part of the economy in the Netherlands.  All of those Dutch trends are also happening here in the States.  Our economy is just a much bigger ship that takes longer to turn, but turning it is.  And as all of you who have spent time on the water know (let me indulge a bit here with my Navy background), while the bigger ship takes longer to turn, the momentum once the bow starts to swing is much larger and harder to stop.

So any of us that want to hire the very best folks may want to look at what is going on in a northern European country with a well-educated labor force.   Since my own lineage is primarily Dutch, although five generations removed, I was doubly interested.  Hold on, because what is below will be coming soon as business requirements near you.

Women are huge sources of highly skilled labor but require flexibility. “Seventy-five percent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 percent in other European Union countries and 23 percent in the United States, according to Saskia Keuzenkamp at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Twenty-three percent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 percent across the European Union and in the United States.”

Flexibility will be key in the fight for the best workers. “Wouter Bos, a former finance minister and now four-day-a-week partner at the accounting firm KPMG, concurs: ‘More men want time with the family, but without giving up their careers. And more women want careers, but without giving up too much time with the family.’ He predicts ‘a huge fight’ for the best workers, with flexibility the key.”

Microsoft, with a bell-weather global labor force, is going flexible and virtual. “Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a ‘physical minimum’; some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.  Aspects of this “new world of work” concept have been exported to other Microsoft offices, including Norway, France and Australia – though not yet to U.S. headquarters.”

– Rob

In mid-December the Wall Street Journal published a section on “2011 – Trends That Will Shape Next Year” (print edition only, sorry I can’t offer a link), one of the seven topics was “Workforce: contingent workforce poses new challenges.”

“As the non-employee workforce jumps from an estimated 20 percent of the labor force to 25 percent next year, companies will see greater flexibility to deal with unpredictable demand . . . A hot growth area for service providers will be to implement programs that help managers cope with transient and flex workers, and deliver deeper analysis of work patterns to improve staffing efficiency.”

Here at Shiftboard, we understand that one of the key business requirements for managing this trend is having a lightweight, flexible system for scheduling, communication, and workforce management that is as flexible as the team you are deploying.  A typical human resource management system (HRMS) and/or payroll database for W2 employees (SAP, Oracle Apps, etc) at large corporations or hospitals often require weeks of steps and calendar flow time to enroll employees, provide security badges, provide payroll ID numbers, etc.

Our customers use our system to coordinate their flexible labor, feathering a new worker into the operational training and scheduling processes in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.  And our system can work along side a legacy HRMS system, or link to it using our very robust Application Programming Interface (API).

– Rob