Blog

February 21, 2018

Product Update: A New and Improved Flow for Trading, Releasing and Dropping Shifts

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Our latest product update is a big one!

We’ve completely revamped the entire user experience for employees who are not able to work shifts they have been assigned and want to either trade, release or drop those shifts.

As a refresher, here’s what all three of those actions entail:

Trade – An employee can ask to exchange one of his or her shifts with a coworker. This means that they will agree to work a co-worker’s future shift if that coworker is willing to work the shift that he or she is requesting to trade.

Release – An employee can request to release a shift. The employee can select a number of coworkers who could potentially take over that shift, making it possible for other employees to pick up and work that shift.

Drop – An employee can request to simply drop the shift. The manager will then be able to reassign it to someone else.

Advanced Settings for Managers

The new flow is very customizable thanks to the vast number of settings that managers and schedulers have when it comes to setting up the flow and assigning permissions.

To see all the available options, go to Settings > ShiftPlanning > Advanced Settings: Shift Pickup, Trades and Approvals.

The main settings that you need to turn on if you want the new flow to work are the following:

-Employees can release shifts
-Employees can trade shifts
-Employees can drop shifts

Employees initiate the flow by clicking on the shift they want to trade, release or drop and then clicking the “Can’t Work” button. The options that are available to your employees who click on “Can’t Work” will depend on the way you have set up your advanced settings.

If employees are permitted to initiate all three possible flows, they will see all three options:

The rest of the advanced settings located under the “Shift Pickup, Trades and Approvals” section allow you to customize the process further depending on your company’s preferences.

What the New Flow Looks Like for Employees

To see what the new flow for dropping, releasing and trading shifts will look like from the employee perspective, check out this quick video:

Dashboard Notifications for Employees

There are three groups of Dashboard notifications that employees can see related to shift trade and release requests: My Requests, Shifts Available to Pick Up, Shifts Available to Trade.

If a trade or release request that involves a particular employee has been approved by the manager, that employee will be sent a notification via email as well.

If the status of the employee request is “Pending Approval,” he or she can click on the request to view its details. There’s also a “Remove Request” option if the employee no longer wants that shift to be traded or released.

shift trade

If the employee clicks on any of his or her pending “Trade” or “Pick Up” requests, they can see all of the details of the request and then decide whether they want to “Accept” or “Reject” it.

shift trade

Dashboard Notifications for Managers

To see all trade and release requests in your Dashboard, make sure that you have turned on the appropriate settings, these two in particular:

shift software

All trade and release requests will then be sent to you via email and will appear in your Dashboard as well.

online shift planner

When you click on any of your requests to view the details, you will not only see the employees and shifts involved in the request, you will also see our conflict checker in action, which will let you know if approving the request will result in any shift conflicts.

trading shifts

Once you have accepted a trade or release request, all employees involved in the request will be notified via email and your schedule will be changed accordingly to reflect these changes.

Note: If a manager has created a shift with open slots that employees picked up to work on their own, the slot will reopen whenever an employee that picked up that shift decides to drop it.

If you have any questions regarding these new features, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at any time: support@humanity.com.

Happy Scheduling!