Auto-Notify When Publishing Your Staff Schedule
The holidays are here and things in the world might be slowing down a little, but not at DigiQuatics! Our development team has been working harder than ever deploying improvements to the app based on our customers' feedback and bright ideas! One of those heavily-requested features from a DigiQuatics Think Tank session in Spring 2017 was automatically notifying employees when the staff schedule was published.
We're proud to announce that automatically notifying your employees when the staff schedule is published is finally here! In this post we'll briefly cover how it works and what future improvements / changes you can expect so you can dive right into using it ASAP.
How It Works
You can publish your staff schedule and automatically notify your employees using any view mode you'd like. You can currently publish by day or week (month coming soon) in either employee or shift mode.
You'll notice a new select box when you click the "Publish" button on your staff schedule builder where you can select to notify scheduled employees by email (Yes or No).
You might notice the date range for which you will be publishing or un-publishing automatically defaults to your current view time period and also the dates of the current view. For example if you are using day view and viewing November 30, 2017, the publish date range options will default to "11/30/2017" to "11/30/2017." If you use the "next" and "previous" arrows to switch weeks, or the handy "calendar picker" to end up viewing 12/5/2017 to /12/12/2017 and you are in week view, then the default dates will conveniently be as such. Of course, you can always adjust to any other time period you would like to publish or un-publish.
Remember, the only shifts that get published during this action are shifts that are either 1) assigned to an employee, or 2) a shift that is marked as an Open Shift. Shifts that are simply Unassigned in shift mode will not get published during this operation at this time. However, you can always click on that shift and mark it as an Open Shift for your employees to log in and sign up!
Once you publish or un-publish, the shifts in your current view will change to the custom color associated with their position to show that they are published. Or, if un-publishing, the shifts will return to their gray color with the "UNPUBLISHED" text appearing next the top of the shift to indicate it as such.
After this occurs, DigiQuatics will compile a summary report which emails to you, the currently logged in user, to give you the details of what was just done (see below). You can even tell if notifications were delivered to the employee (based on their preferences) as indicated in the "Notifications" column for each employee.
Another important note to consider is that with any notifications in DigiQuatics, any employee can opt-in or opt-out of the notifications by visiting their My Notifications page. To maximize usability of DigiQuatics, we set every employee's shift published / changed email notification to be "on" by default. Then, if they don't want to get them anymore, they can turn them "off."
Future Improvements
Mass publishing in month view will be coming soon as we continue to wrap up remaining to-dos while month view continues to be in beta.
Automatically notifying employees when an individual shift is published or un-published.
Text (SMS) notifications for both mass publishing / un-publishing.
Options to publish unassigned shifts (in shift mode) as Open Shifts in bulk.
Conclusion
Thank you for your patience as we worked through this complex update! If you have any thoughts on how we can continue to improve the Staff Scheduling module in DigiQuatics, your feedback is always welcome. Drop a line in the comments below letting us know which improvement you would like to see first with staff schedule publishing options!