Are you the manager or department leader in your company? If so, you should know that assigning and managing shifts for your staff is a challenging task, as you have to square all schedules in an efficient and orderly way.
Factorial, makes it easy for you to distribute shifts using the Shift Management feature. Setting up a shift management system in your company account will allow you to better coordinate and organize your employees, but on top of that, it will allow managers and department leaders to put their teams in order.
And you will wonder... How does installing the Shift Management feature in my company improve?
There are a lot of reasons why you should use a tool that makes it easier for you to assign shifts to your employees, here are the most interesting ones:
- Accessibility from your laptop or Smartphone. You can access Factorial and manage your shifts from any device as long as you have a Wi-Fi/4G connection.
- More transparency. On the employee and company side, you will always have available the shifts that the employee has worked, so there will be no problems such as compensation.
- You can evaluate which is the best staff assignment and thus improve efficiency and reduce costs. Do we have enough hands-on Thursday afternoon? Are there too many waiters on Saturday at noon?
- Forecast for possible eventualities. Is Manuel going on vacation in the third week of July? You will know you have to cover those shifts.
How do I install it?
Easy. Simply go to the Apps section > Shift Management. You will see a blue button "Install", click on it and you will be able to use the feature.
Permissions in shift management
By default, the Shift management will be:
- Visible to employees, managers, team leaders, and administrators.
- Editable for managers and administrators.
Nevertheless, using the permission system, we can customize the visibility and edition of the shifts in our company as we want.
Simply, as administrator we should go to Company > Permissions, from Permissions we can select any of the group of permissions that we have and customize the management of shifts as we want.
This view is the setting that Factorial will give you by default. The employees will have access to see the shifts of their colleagues in the company.
In case we do not want to share this information between employees, we should simply uncheck all the boxes except the Managers one.
Start organizing your staff's shifts
It's time to get the week organized.
To go to Shift Management, simply click on Shifts in the features menu on your left.
You will see that it shows up a calendar format, where it will appear:
- Filters - you can filter by offices and teams to get a more organized view of the staff
- Week selector - you can run the week forward and backward. By default you will be shown the current week
- Add shifts button - you can add shifts manually through the blue button
- The complete list of employees in your company
Adding shifts
There are different ways to add shifts. Below we show you how you can add shifts to your employees:
- Through the "add shift" button. Click on the "Add shift" button and a pop-up will appear allowing you to set that shift. You can add the date, time range, and employees who you want to assign that shift. This option is useful in case you want to assign the same shift to several employees at the same time on a specific day.
- Click on a day and "add shift". It will select the specific day and the employee that we have selected, and we will simply have to add the time range. This option is useful in the case that we want to address a specific employee and day, so we save ourselves from filling in the selected day and employee.
- Assign the same shift in bulk to your staff. To select a shift in bulk, you must put the mouse over a cell, and you will see that three points will appear that will allow you to: add shifts or select. You must click on Select.
Once you click on select, you will see that it will allow you to click on any cell in the entire calendar. Click all the check-boxes you want to add the same shift to and click the add shift button.
When you have done so, you will see a pop-up that will allow you to set the time range. Add it, and click assign.
Finally, when you have assigned it, you will see that all the days previously selected will be completed with the shift you have selected.
The advantage in this mode is that you can add the same shift on different days, compared to the first option, which would simply allow you to add the same shift to all employees for one particular day of the week.
Deleting shifts
You also have different ways to delete shifts, depending on whether you want to remove specific shifts or in bulk.
- Deleting a specific shift. Go to the specific day and delete the shift you want by selecting Delete.
- In the same way that we would add shifts massively, we will be able to delete them. We would position ourselves over a box, and click Select. We select all the shifts we want to delete and click the Delete shifts button.
Do we post this week's schedule?
Once we are ready, and we have added the shifts we want to publish for the current week or the next, we can share it with the rest of the employees.
Until we publish the schedules, all admins and managers with permissions will be able to see, edit, and publish, but not the employees.
How can we detect that the shifts are in draft?
It's easy. You will see, that the schedules will appear in blue color, it's a sign that the shifts are not published. Also, you'll see that a light blue banner will appear specifying that the shifts are in draft.
How do we publish the week's shifts?
When we have finished filling in our staff's shifts, and are determined to share them with the rest of the employees, it is time to publish them. Simply by clicking on the "Publish week's schedule" button at the top right, you will be able to publish the changes made.
As we can see in the pop-up, the changes made for that particular week will be published. If you want to publish the schedules for another specific week, you should change the week using the arrows and repeat the same process.
When the changes have been published, we will see that the banner will specify that the changes are Published.