Need a better way to prepare for busy periods? By streamlining the process of assigning and offering shifts, you can fill shifts faster and ensure your roster is covered.
If you manage a frontline workforce, you’ll know how important it is to always have the right number of employees rostered on. This ensures you can serve customers and clients, meet the operational challenges of the day, and capture demand.
However, at certain times of the year, you could be short-staffed or busy. When demand picks up, the last thing you need is a last-minute cancelled shift or a lack of candidates to tap into.
Since it does happen, let’s explore five fast ways you can fill shifts, whether it’s while you’re building a roster or to cover last-minute changes of plan.
Using a workforce management platform, you can build a database of approved and available employees. Every time you onboard a new employee, you can collect all of the important compliance information you need upfront. For example, tax details, qualifications, licenses, VEVO checks, and policy sign-offs can all be captured before they’re rostered on.
Once all of the compliance information you need is stored against each employee’s profile, you can mark it as approved. If you use foundU, you’ll only be charged for employees that are entitled to be paid in a given time period – so you can grow your talent pool as much as you need!
You can use tags to segment employee profiles according to their roles, qualifications, age, availability, and many other conditions. This makes it easy to search for an eligible group of candidates who meet your requirements when you need to fill a shift.
Creating tags for candidates that live in a certain area or have the highest attendance records will increase the likelihood that they’ll turn up for the shift.
Using shift offers, you can easily send open shifts to a group of employees. Rather than having to send messages to your team one by one, you can simply open an employee selector, create a shift, and send the offer.
Selected employees will receive a shift notification via email, SMS, or push notification and can accept it via the foundU employee app. Setting a time frame in which they need to accept or decline the shift before it is offered to other employees also encourages them to respond when you’re in a rush.
One of the most common ways to fill a shift is to assign it to an employee via your roster. If you want to create a roster quickly, you can add and assign shifts in bulk, duplicate shifts, or use a pre-built roster template.
From there, you can search for a candidate who meets your requirements for the day and assign them to a shift. You can also use their status to quickly identify if they have a conflicting shift, not enough hours between their last shift, are under 18, and more.
You can also use visual cues on the roster to quickly see shift status. For example, if you use foundU, you’ll be able to identify if shifts have been drafted, published, offered, declined, accepted, approved, published, or cancelled at a glance. From there, you can choose what actions you need to take to make sure that all shifts are covered.
Have you ever had an employee cancel their shift right after it started? By making it easier for employees to cancel ahead of time, you can reduce the chance of no-shows and give yourself more time to refill the shift quickly.
foundU has a cancel shifts setting that you can enable to facilitate this. Simply enable the cancel shift setting and specify the number of hours before a shift an employee is allowed to cancel. This provides a safeguard for your business and gives them the flexibility to cancel.
Employees also have the option of adding rostered shifts to their personal calendar via a quick link. This results in less schedule clashes for them and fewer last-minute shift cancellations for you.
By filling shifts quickly, you can make the most of peak seasons and grow your business. Start by building a large pool of candidates in your workforce management platform and use communication tools to inform the best candidates about available shifts quickly.
Want to learn more about how foundU makes filling shifts easy? Book a demo with one of our product experts.