It’s official, this summer has gone by way too fast.  A few short months ago I was writing about the beginning of festival season and now here we are, getting ready to wrap things up with the unofficial end of summer–Labor Day Weekend–only 2 weeks away.  Here at Shiftboard we’ve learned a lot over the past few months, who says learning doesn’t happen in the summer?  To summarize here are 3 points that have stood out to us the most:

1.  Done right-self service scheduling can fill an entire festival’s staffing needs in one weekend.  Create a buzz, let your volunteers know when you will be posting the shifts, provide a bit of info/incentive about each role, and voila! You’ll have volunteers waiting to sign up for their shifts of choice.

2.  Your scheduling “rules” are often unnecessary-we are constantly amazed by the level of complexity that some schedulers put themselves through, especially since nine times out of 10 they don’t need to.  In the case of online scheduling, keeping it simple and organized is often best.

3.  Clarity and transparency is the key to accurate communication.  If people-especially managers-only get a few pieces of the puzzle miscommunications are bound to occur, using a clear, always up to date, and accurate calendar is one giant leap in the right direction towards better overall communication and run around.

Hope these make sense to you all, we’ve seen them to be tried and true from the largest international events down to local small businesses and everything in between.

Nahid

Shiftboard was recently featured in a Federal Times article about the importance of streamlining and simplifying all the processes that need to happen from date of hire to the first day of work to the first major task/event for any new or seasoned employee.  Any new hire can tell you that the first hours spent in their new job are almost always dedicated to filling out dozens of different forms, specific availability, tax information, emergency contact stuff…the list goes on and on.

It’s never easy on the other end either, HR managers have to keep track of not only the new forms, but past resumes, notes, and references, to name a few key pieces.

Many Shiftboard users don’t realize that they can actually input and store all of this information in their Shiftboard site.  Yes, Shiftboard is useful for the obvious reasons-online scheduling-but there are many other workforce management benefits to using the software.  Users are able to upload their resume’s upon registration to your organization that can be stored and viewed in their user profile.  Emergency contact information as well as basic personal information is also stored within Shiftboard, and can be exported into an Excel report at the click of a button.

Shiftboard clients can customize information fields that need to be kept with each employee’s profile–from experience levels and certifications to T-shirt sizes and their favorite bar.  Probably the best part of all of this is that as long as you have an internet connection you will always have access to this information in a secure spot–you will be able to control who sees it, who can change, and it will always be password protected.

If you have any questions about how to access the features mentioned above give us a call at 1-800-746-7531 or shoot us an email by clicking Contact above.

–Nahid

One of the biggest headaches in trying to create financial labor forecasts is the constant cross referencing-adding up hours, typos, no shows, actual vs. scheduled, etc…

With Shiftboard’s financial forecasting tools you will be able to run a report of your employee’s scheduled hours and see just how close (or far) from your budget you fall.  Having this capacity to run this report directly from the data that you will be using will greatly reduce not only errors, but headaches and time spent creating a labor forecast as well.

Individuals can be assigned a pay code with an associated amount, or an overriding pay rate. When you run reports Shiftboard will calculate the overall labor cost based on hours and the associated wage.  For shifts that haven’t been filled yet, Shiftboard allows you to make a prediction on what your labor expenditures will be. By assigning default pay rates/codes to your teams, you can run reports to help determine how much you will be distributing to your workers – even if you don’t know which workers will be filling those shifts. Staffing companies can benefit from this as well—if you work with contractors whose wages vary site to site, leave your worker’s financials blank and Shiftboard will use the team’s default wage to come up with their forecasted labor.