Shiftboard users don’t fall into one neat little category; there are 85-year-old women who have never had an email address to 30-year-old web developers and 17-year-old festival volunteers. Shiftboard has not been designed with just one type of end user in mind; instead we’ve aimed to make the system easy and accessible to all who want it.

One of the biggest problem that we see is that people go into using Shiftboard with the idea that all software must be complicated and require some savvy IT guy to help set it up. This is far from the truth with Shiftboard, contact us today to get set up and happily scheduling the very same day.

The beauty of the ingenious little system we have going here is that it’s truly a win-win situation. The customer gets the answers to their specific problems when they need it, and we get to hear the many different ways that very different organizations use Shiftboard to schedule a wide variety of needs. From film festivals to political campaigns to vet offices and everything in between, Shiftboard’s meeting people’s needs (and then some) now more than ever.

Knowing that our customer base is as diverse as it is, we’ve come up with customized pricing options for a few of our specialized packages. Looking to schedule volunteers at a church? We know that you need a solution without breaking the bank, and Shiftboard’s faith group pricing gives you the ability to do just that. How about those of you who need to recruit and staff an annual event or festival? You will have very different needs than those at the corner bakery, which is why we’ve created a very different pricing structure for you as well.

For more information feel free to give us a call at 1-800-746-7531.

Whether its public or private, high school or day care, planning is key to setting up a successful and efficient year of learning because really, no one wants a cranky stressed out faculty.  Hundreds of hours go into the preparation of a new year, quarter, or semester—whether from parent volunteers or the teachers and school staff themselves.  So I decided to take a closer look at how some schools are using Shiftboard and it’s now clear, they are using it to organize EVERYTHING. From who is working a school lunch to scheduling volunteers for their biggest, fanciest auction to making sure teacher’s are scheduled in the right rooms at the right times.

So to all the teachers and parent volunteers, I hope you are enjoying this school year!  You all have one of the hardest jobs out there, but with some good old-fashioned organizing hopefully you’ll never let them see you sweat.

-Nahid

Alison: “ . . . didn’t have time to get to that yesterday.  I had a bunch of trial followups, plus I skyped with that company in Japan and Vikram in India.”

Michael: “Did that Tokyo call center convert their trial to a paid account yet?”

Alison: “Not yet, but they’re a great fit.  I’m pretty sure it will happen by the end of this week.”

Michael:  “What about that school in Beijing?”

Alison:  “Haven’t heard from her in 2 days.  I gotta prep for this security demo in 15 minutes.  See ya.”

I started back to my desk like my normal drone self in the morning, taking a sip of coffee while thinking deep thoughts (ie should I check my email or voicemail), when I stopped in my tracks to mentally dissect that seemingly everyday conversation.

* I remember  a few years back when a couple of us spent four days wrestling with computers, testing amongst ourselves, and trying to get skype to work.  Now the Account Services team uses skype for overseas customers as seamlessly as me making a cell phone call.
* I remember our first call center customer, a small singer office facility with 20 employees.  Now we have customers like VoiceCurve, with multiple locations over the globe and Managers like Vikram in India providing call center scheduling coverage for hundreds of employees in multiple time zones.
* I remember high-fiving in the office when our first international client came abroad in the UK.  Now we’re working with organizations in 3 Asian cities in a single day, and I don’t even know 2 of them.

With that little revelation, I resolved to really savor my morning java . . . at my desk, just to be sure to stay out of the way of progress.

-Rob

Shiftboard does not operate on a one way street. Our clients provide us a wealth of intellectual power and perspective to improve our product. We provide schedulers with a service, they use it and respond, and we incorporate their feedback.  Recently we received enough input regarding a certain feature that we escalated it on the development list. When assigning a shift, you can now assign it to multiple individuals in the same step. Clicking ‘Pick Multiple’ will give you a list of workers who can take the shift. Simply toggle multiple members and click “assign”. Don’t worry, the options to individually assign, bulk assign, auto assign, check availability and enforce seniority still exist.

Our developers are sharp, but our clients’ insight is invaluable. Please keep us in the loop. Share your ideas and suggestions, we are all ears and your thoughts are heard.

- Alison

Recognizing that Shiftboard is not the only calendaring system our clients use, we have rolled out an iCal integration feature. Now with any iCal compatible calendaring, such as Google Calendar or Outlook, you can synchronize your Shiftboard schedule to your other calendars. By selecting to Publish iCal/Google Outlook, your Shiftboard schedule and any changes you make will syndicate with the other iCal compatible systems associated with your account’s email. When you make a change in your Shiftboard calendar, you will also see that change in your Google Calendar.

We live in a rapidly evolving and fickle world. With the help of Shiftboard, you can now diversify and weave together your calendaring, making you a more adaptable agent in a sea of change.

- Alison

Scheduling shouldn't be a stunt...

Plan ahead by utilizing Shiftboard’s Availability tool. Users (or their managers) can choose certain days of the week, at certain hours, and then specify busy or available. For random, spur of the moment events, you can select Specific Availability, and choose which days you will be available or unavailable. If you want to be really stringent, you can default your site so that members’ unaccounted availability times will be considered busy, thereby excluding them from being scheduled except for those times they have actually entered as available.

Constantly updating a calendar to accommodate ever changing priorities and schedules can be a real headache. So take a scheduler’s aspirin, use Availability, and give your workers an incentive to think more than a few days down the proverbial calendar road. Rest easy schedulers – those you see, are those available.

- Alison

When I get back to the Midwest each summer, I absolutely must do a few things.  If you happen to be headed to “The Middle” anytime soon, feel free to borrow my little checklist and save yourself the 40+ years it took me to create it:

•    Grab at least 12 bottles of Bell’s Oberon, a summer ale, and make darn sure to drink every one of them before you leave.  Bell’s is a small brewery in Kalamazoo that tops my list of the best micro-breweries in the nation in terms of top quality beer, although others like Deschutes Brewery out of Oregon are almost as good with stronger marketing and wider distribution.

•    Watch “High Fidelity”  or “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to get into the spirit of the Midwest’s capital city – Chicago.  John Hughes (“The Breakfast Club”, “Weird Science”, etc.), the recently passed screenwriter/director bard of a generation that “was born between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Bicentennial” in the words of a NY Times obituary, was also a Midwesterner – raised in Detroit.  He wrote the latter movie and helped discover the former’s star John Cusack in one of his earlier films – “Pretty in Pink”.

•    Finally and most importantly, listen to Gordon Lightftoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” at least 5 times on your trip.  This song, more than any other, is the anthem of the Midwest and Great Lakes region.  Many of you probably haven’t even heard of it, but ask anyone who grew up from Minnesota to upstate New York, from Ontario to southern Indiana about it.  It is such a hardwired piece of a Midwesterner’s soul that they will refuse to believe there is anyone in North America that doesn’t know the song or the shipwreck that inspired it.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.

With a load of iron ore – 26,000 tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

Many people I know are shocked when they first realize you can’t see across Lake Michigan, or any of the other Great Lakes. These are no inland lakes, but rather a group of inland seas that hold more than 20% of the earth’s fresh water.  The waves get big when the wind is piping.  If you ever really want to understand the power of water or waves, Sebastian Younger writes an enthralling summary near the beginning of “The Perfect Storm.”

The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the Captain did, too,
T’was the witch of November come stealing.

The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashing
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind

Take a quick guess at the waves that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald?  She sank in 30 foot waves.  In my five years in the Navy, I saw those kinds of seas only once on the Atlantic and Mediterranean.  The waves were so large on Superior that fateful November day in 1975 that she planed up on two of them and the bottom literally fell out of the ship.  She was gone in less than 2 minutes.

When supper time came the old cook came on deck
Saying fellows it’s too rough to feed ya
At 7PM a main hatchway caved in
He said fellas it’s been good to know ya.

The Captain wired in he had water coming in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

On this past summer’s trip, my kids were 7, 5 and 3 years old.  They love digging in the sand of the Lake Michigan shoreline.  And of course they want to swim every day.  We had big waves most days this year, and even my oldest son can get knocked flat on his back by a 3 foot wave.  So we stood within twenty feet of shore much of the time, lifejackets buttoned up, and yelped with glee as we jumped the incoming waves while holding hands.

In the next summer or two, my older ones will be out on the sandbar, battling the waves alone.  They won’t need me near by then.  In four or five years, they will be body surfing out there and wondering why I don’t have the gas to keep up with them.  But we started them slow and got their feet wet, so they could learn the power of the surf and gain confidence quickly while still near to shore.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the ruins of her ice water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams,
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.

And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered.

Getting your feet wet with online scheduling

I am reminded of that analogy as I sit here in the office.  The more we work with customers, the more calls we take, the more launches we provide, the more obvious it becomes that the customers who are most successful get started immediately but with some small steps initially.

You see, the flip side is that we have people call us to ask about literally every add-on product we have listed on our website.  And they are extremely useful products, don’t get me wrong.  But the reason people come to us is a scheduling problem, and somehow with all those questions they lose sight of the core problem.  Instead of getting off the beach and adjusting to the water temperature, they are busy planning how to swim to Milwaukee.

Shiftboard in 6 Minutes

As we observed our customers, especially during the first week or two of them having access to the system, we sat down internally here and said, “We have got to get our customers started quickly and cleanly.  They each need some quick wins to get confident with the system and online scheduling as a process in the first day or two.”  We thought hard about that, and the more we thought, the more we felt that we had to get to the core of the issue.

So we created an initiative called “Shiftboard in 6 minutes.”  There is a training video to kick off your Shiftboard experience, and you should be ready to go in 6 minutes.  You will be up and running and actually putting shifts on the calendar the first time you sit down and log into Shiftboard.  Whether your gig is event scheduling or nurse scheduling or volunteer scheduling, have your credit card ready when you call us, because we are going to be urging you to take the first few steps into the surf FAST.  And trust me, the water feels nice.  All you need to do is get your feet wet.

-Rob E.

The full lyrics to Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad.

With List View, users toggle various opportunities and with ONE additional click assign themselves to each of the selected shifts.  If enabled by managers, users can also unconfirm themselves from multiple shifts.

Among others, this feature is ideal for EMS scheduling, security scheduling and call center scheduling.  These workforces don’t generally pattern the typical 8 hour workday.  Shifts tend to be extra long or super short, ad hoc, unpredictable and ever changing.  In one sweep workers can schedule themselves for multiple shifts on different teams, at various times, across all locations. Users are only capable of double booking themselves if previously enabled by a manager.

According to one volunteer scheduling manager “list view saves workers valuable time, when it’s easier to pick up shifts, volunteers pick up MORE shifts.”  This is just another reminder that employee scheduling software doesn’t need to be complex or cumbersome.  Shiftboard’s ease of use and intuitive design keeps things simple.

Mine was Himraj from New Dehli, India.  I learned a lot from him about his country, about being an international student in the States, etc.  Generally he broadened my horizons.  We remained close through our four years of college and beyond.  When I rolled off of active duty in the Navy, I had India on my backpack itinerary in order to finally visit him at home. Needless to say, it was great to see where he was from, meet his family, and tour some of India first-hand with my close friend as a guide.  Among many other memories, I had an eventful day-trip to see the Taj Mahal, just myself and a taxi driver, that is worthy of a separate post just in itself.

Best movie of the year

That was 15 years ago, and my wife had been there since, but I had not.  So recently when we settled on the couch to watch “Slumdog Millionaire”, it brought me back.  It’s a wonderful movie, but also a hard movie.  It doesn’t hide from one of India’s and the globes biggest challenges with regards to the huge masses of humanity living in grinding poverty.  None of those images were a surprise after my previous visit, however.

Whatever the reason, the scene from that movie etched into my brain are the rows of callers and computers in a Space Odyssey unnatural blue hue – an Indian call center.  We can all relate to call centers, of course, in terms talking to tech support from a Fortune 500 company or questioning our credit card bill.  Call center scheduling is one of our many market segments here at Shiftboard.  I guess I had just never pictured a call center in the Henry Ford production line sense at that scale.

Our scheduling software is a good fit

We provide call center scheduling to many customers – survey research institutes, product support groups, insurance appointment setters, etc.  Our customers are US and UK based to date, but I am sure some Indian customers are only a matter of time.  We tend towards call centers where the quality and ease-of-use of our software, combined with no IT requirements, consistently beat the big, tired call center switch vendors with some bolted-on call center scheduling software.

Most importantly, many of our customers, ranging from Cornell and University of Wyoming Survey Research Institutes to more traditional sales or support call centers like VoiceCurve are using a self-scheduling paradigm for their workers and managing the exceptions with our real-time coverage reporting.  That paradigm couldn’t be more different from the Indian call center in the movie.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Himraj.  He had run into a 3rd classmate of ours, Brooks, over in Mumbai.  There was the usual 3-way banter and some sarcastic references to past events, Kingfisher Beer vs. the local Northwest microbrews, etc.  It brought a smile to my face in the midst of a busy day.  I haven’t forgotten.

-Rob E.