Objective
The objective of this tutorial is to help you understand how you can use 'ShiftPlanning' module to create or manage the schedules for your employees.
Overview
Access from your: Computer
Applies to: Managers, Supervisors, Schedulers and Employees with Scheduler Permissions
The 'ShiftPlanning' tab is the central hub where you can easily create or manage your staff schedules Whether you have a single location or multiple, ShiftPlanning has the robust views making it easy to plan and visualize your staff schedules.
You can access the ShiftPlanning in Humanity web app at any time by clicking the 'ShiftPlanning' tab at the top of the page.
Things to know before you begin:
Managers/Admins have full access to the application to create and manage their staff schedules.
Supervisors can manage all locations/positions/staff+wages.
Scheduler manages specific locations/positions/staff which has been granted to your staff under Scheduler permissions tab.
Employees can be granted scheduler permission to specific positions.
The scenario outlined in this tutorial consists of the following building blocks:
Schedule Views
Basic Views
Timeline Views
Filter Panel
Advanced Filters
Creating Shifts
Editing Shifts
New Shift Creation Experience
Publish Schedule
Publish and Republish Schedules
Schedule Conflicts
Save a Reference to a Period
Schedule Actions
Schedule Search
Schedule Notes
Block Leave Requests for Specific Dates
ShiftPlanning Settings
Hot Keys
Schedule Views
ShiftPlanning tab will open up in "week" view as a default behaviour, however, from the top right side of the schedule, you can always change the views. Let's review this in detail.
Schedule Views help you better visualize the schedule by date range and view. Under the 'ShiftPlanning'tab at the upper right corner, schedule views can be changed based on the view type and the date range. You can navigate the schedule to different dates under any selected view by clicking the 'arrows' found at top mid of the page.
There are four types of "Basic View":
Employee view
Position view
Visual view
List view
These can further be seen in "Timeline View" depending on the "Basic View":
Day
Week
2 weeks
4 weeks
Month
Basic Views
Employee View
Employee view lists your staff names to the left with their corresponding shifts on the calendar.
Position View
Position view lists your staff positions to the left with their corresponding shifts on the calendar.
If the management has enabled the Position view for you as an employee, then you need to click"Schedule Overview" from the left menu of the app, to reveal the position view for yourself.
Note: 'Employee and Position view' can further be customized to be seen in Day, Week, 2 Week and 4 Week mode.
Visual View
Visual view enhances the way you can view all your shift details at a glance.
List View
List view represents your staff schedule in a top to bottom list with the shift position and time.
Note: The "Visual and List" view can further be customized to be seen in Day, Week and Month mode.
Timeline Views
You can view the schedule by Day, Week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks and Month by using the buttons at the top left side of the Scheduler.
Day Mode
Day mode is helpful when you want better visualize the coverage for a single day. Click "Day" tab at the top right or press the shortcut key 'D' to view the Schedule in Day mode.
Week Mode
Week mode view is the default view. Week Start Day is set to Monday by default. However, you may customise it according to your business requirements under ' ShiftPlanning Settings'. Week mode can further be expanded to 2 weeks or 4 weeks.
Month Mode
Month view shows the weeks of the month along with the 'Shift times', 'Staff name' and the 'Shift position' indicated by colour. You can see more details about the shift by clicking on the shift.
Filter Panel
On the left side of the ShiftPlanning tab, you will be able to view the filter panel with 'Mini Calendar', 'Filters' and the 'Advanced' tab. If you are not able to view the panel, click the 'arrow' option, next to'Schedule Search' box. The panel can easily be hidden by clicking the same arrow again.
After clicking on the 'Filters' tab, you will be able to view the following options:
Mini Calendar
My Schedule
Schedule Overview
Leave Schedule
Staff Availability
Primary location positions only
Additional location and positions
Manage Positions
Mini Calendar
From the left sidebar, you may click any date on the 'Mini-Calendar' for quick navigation to any week or a specific day.
My Schedule
'My Schedule' is the default view when employees go the ShiftPlanning tab to display their shifts only. Make sure you navigate to the appropriate dates to view your upcoming/past shifts.
Employees can click on their shifts to view more details of the shift along with additional options to Trade Shift, Release Shift, Drop Shift, Submit Work Unit, Set-up the availability, View notes, View On Call details and Shift Acknowledgement.
Managers also have access to this view from the left filters panel on the ShiftPlanning tab, showing them their shifts only, in read-mode.
Schedule Overview
By selecting 'Schedule Overview' from the left sidebar, it will show you the entire company schedule according to the selected 'basic' and 'timeline' view. You may also select Primary location's position and Additional Locations to filter down the schedule by an individual or multiple locations and positions.
Under 'Schedule Overview', you may also add employees by clicking 'Add Employees' icon, once you click on it, it will open up the pop-up window where you can add First, Last name/s and Positions.
Note: You may only be able to view the positions of the primary location, it is a default behaviour of the application.
Leave Schedule
By selecting 'Leave Schedule' from the left sidebar, you will be able to see who in your company is on vacation. Managers can click on an 'Approved' vacation and 'Unapproved' upcoming time off or remove any past time off.
Staff Availability
With this availability feature, managers can view the availability on ShiftPlanning calendar while creating shifts in 'Employee View' only if employees have set their availability. This feature enables automatically if you are creating the shifts in Day or Week view.
You may also select a specific employee to further filter out and view the availability details.
Manage Positions
By clicking 'Manage Positions', it will redirect you to the 'Staff Module' to create and manage staff positions if needed.
Advanced Filters
After selecting the 'Advanced' tab, it will allow you to further filter the view by 'Shift Type,' 'Remote Sites,' 'Skills,' or 'Employees.'
Creating Shifts
Creating shifts has never been easier. Simply, click the calendar cell corresponding to the employee/position, add date and the shift time.
Editing Shifts
Click on any shift, and it will open up the 'Shift Edit' window where you can do some of the most robust things.
Features of 'Shift Edit' pop-up window:
Change shift Positions by clicking on top of the position name
Add Shift Title from the top
Edit start/ end date and time
Set a shift to repeat by clicking the option Repeat.
Set shift to Open by clicking the option 'Set up Open Slots'
Assign remote sites to shifts
Add Additional notes for the shift
Add tasks
Filter by Skills
Assign Staff to shifts
Shift Acknowledgement
In-line Shift Approval
Assign Staff from other positions
Schedule Breaks
Assign Work Units
Filter by Seniority (Read about Seniority-Based Scheduling)
Auto - Fill Shift
Shift History
Deleting Shifts
New Shift Creation Experience
To enable the new shift creation experience, click on the 'Schedule Action' icon located next to the Publish button and click on 'Show New Shift Creation'. This has been redesigned, in hopes of making it easier and faster for you to create a work shift than ever before.
Publish Schedule
The idea of publishing schedules is that some managers want the ability to make changes to the schedule without their staff seeing these changes right away. Once the manager is ready, he can then click 'Publish',and the changes will go live.
'Publish' tab is located at the top right of the ShiftPlanning tab. Publishing shifts will also send out the email/text notifications to your employees.
Note: Managers can turn off the Publish tab under ShiftPlanning Settings. Disabling the Publish feature will give your staff visibility to their new shifts/shift changes instantly (not recommended).
Publish and Republish Schedules
Once you publish a schedule, any posterior changes made to those same shifts will show to staff immediately without republishing it. The Republish feature is only to notify staff via email of the changes.
Schedule Conflicts
The 'conflict' tab appears automatically at the top right of the ShiftPlanning's page. Scheduling conflicts can occur when the scheduled shifts fall in conflict with any configured scheduling rule. Also, the shift that has a conflict is highlighted with the red dotted shift border.
Clicking the note shows the details of the conflict as well as highlight the shift that has conflict. Managers can resolve or ignore the conflicts before publishing it.
Save a Reference to a Period
With this new feature, we wanted to give all our users an incredibly efficient and simple way to be able to'save' or 'bookmark' past work schedules so that they could easily reference and even reuse them at any time.
Schedule Actions
Click on the 'arrow down' icon next to the publish button on top of the ShiftPlanning tab, and a drop-down icon will show up with powerful action.
Features of 'Schedule Actions' drop-down menu:
Print and Save
Copy Schedule
Schedule Wizard
Import Schedule
Schedule Sync
Clear Schedule
Enable Ghost Shift
Show Budget Mode
Show Forecast/Hour graph
Show New Shift Creation
Schedule Search
At the top left of the ShiftPlanning tab, 'Schedule Search' is available to search the desired shifts quickly. Type the search parameter and press 'Enter' on the keyboard.
Search parameters are:
Search by Employee
Search by Position
Search by Shift Details
Schedule Notes
Post schedule notes to your Humanity schedule that you can use to give yourself reminders at work on daily basis. Now you can write notes to both yourself and your co-workers that will be visible every time you take a look at your work schedule. This is similar to 'Sticky Notes' on your desks or computer desktop.
Click on the 'Schedule' tab to open your work schedule. The 'Note' icon is right next to the dates on your schedule calendar.
After saving the note, you may further 'publish', 'edit' and 'delete' it as well if needed with the help of the icons shown below:
Block Leave Requests for Specific Dates
Now, being a manager, supervisor and scheduler, you may block leave requests for certain dates by creating a note on the particular date for which they want time off requests to be blocked.
Once the note window has opened, simply check the 'Don’t Allow Time Off' checkbox.
ShiftPlanning Settings
Users with 'Manager' permissions have control over what staff can take action on and view within ShiftPlanning accounts. To view additional details of the settings you may place your mouse cursor on top of a setting, and it will pop-up on the screen.
To customize the settings according to your business requirement you may go to the tab Settings > ShiftPlanning > Advanced Settings as shown below:
Hot-Keys
Hot-keys are keyboard shortcuts that allow the application to increase work speed in navigating the schedules and switching between various date ranges and views.
To quickly change the date Ranges of the ShiftPlanning page use the following hotkeys:
Ctrl+Up: go to previous date range
Ctrl+Left: go to previous date range
Ctrl+Right: go to next date range
Ctrl+Down: go to next date range
Easily Change Shiftplanning view modes use the following keys:
T: view today
W: view week
M: view month/4Weeks
D: view day
If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to reach us at support@humanity.com. Happy Scheduling!